This is my first fanfic so please dont be so hard on me. Please leave reviews so i can improve this story.
Disclaimer: I don't own pjo or any of the characters
Annabeth Chase, the troubled child. Thats what the neighbours knew her as but they didnt know the truth behind her insanity. They didnt know about the nightmares. Her father and stepmother knew very well about the problem but used it as another reason to push her away. Most of the time the nightmares were simple, with a vision of... something chasing her through a thick forest in the dead of night. It was still scary enough to almost always made her wake up screaming. Her stepmother was the least caring though, as her father at least tried to talk to her about it. Her stepmother would tell her to stop crying and apologise to her stepbrothers for scaring them. She would tell her that her whining is pointless and that she was giving the neighbours bad, not wrong, but bad views of the family.
It got to the point where Annabeth's stepmother would threaten her that if she didnt stop screaming, she would make her sleep on the street and only come in for meals and to use the bathroom and shower and her father didnt or couldnt do anything about it. Another thing that added to her fear was the spiders: every night they would enter her room and, somehow, whisper menacing things in her mind which sometimes inspired her nightmares. And in the mornings, she'd sometimes find herself covered in cobwebs or bite marks.
The thing that sent her over the edge was the night before she ran away. The spiders came, yet again. But this time, they seemed fiercer but more organised and with a shared objective. They swarmed her and she was about to scream when she was silenced by spiders crawling into her mouth and into her skull. She was then pulled into the world of nightmares.
Her nightmare began normally, by being chased by some creature. Looking back, she could see the monster more clearly now: it was big, very big, with one big blue eye just above its nose. She remembered something she learnt from school, about greek mythology, about a creature with one eye: a cyclops. she ran, ran as fast as a 7 year old could, adrenaline punping through her body. The weird gate saying Camp Halfblood was now in her sight. She was almost there when the ground suddenly opened up beneath her and swallowed her whole.
She found herself in a small underground cavern, suspended upside down in a cobweb. Then, a giant, slightly humanoid spider appeared out of nowhere.
Well my dear, it said, slightly moving its mandibles, your first of many choices is here at last. What will you choose? Let me just give you a taster of whats to come. With that, she was plunged into another vision.
She was still underground, but in a network of tunnels and chambers. She sneaked through tunnels, running past traps and coming to a grand chamber. In the centre was a golden coffin enscribed with an unknown language. As she approached, it let out a harsh laugh and exploded, filling the room with evil light. She then was on a flying ship, with monsters attacking from every direction until she was dive bombed by a bird looking thing and dropped back into the cobweb, with the spider in front of her. Oh, yes. I haven't introduced myself yet, have I? How rude of me. I am Arachne, your possible doom. Let me show you what you will suffer if you defeat me, Arachne spoke, before the spiders came and swarmed her, plunging her into a red, barren landscape, facing two immense, black doors, surrounded by a sea of monsters. Then came the worst one. She was in the same forest as all her other nightmares. In front of her was a human shape, with bull horns on its head: a minotaur. And in its meaty hands was her father, slowly being strangled to death. She sobbed and begged, begged for it to stop but it paid her no attention and continued. A great pang of guilt built in her chest: she had caused this, the monster attacks, everything, it was all her fault. This finalized her decision.
The next morning, she would run away from home.