Warning: Certain ancient Greek names matches words use of foul language but no foul language was intentionally used. Also if you haven't read them yet read 'The Tales of the Son of Poseidon & the Early Adventures' 'The Tales of the Son of Poseidon & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief' 'The Tales of the Son of Poseidon & the Olympians: The Sea of Monsters' 'The Tales of the Son of Poseidon & the Olympians: The Titan's Curse' and 'The Tales of the Son of Poseidon & the Olympians: The Magical Labyrinth' as well as the one shots 'The Tales of the Son of Poseidon & the Stolen Chariot' The Tales of the Son of Poseidon & the Sword of Hades', 'The Tales of the Son of Poseidon & the Bronze Dragon' 'The Tales of the Son of Poseidon & the Olympians: The Last Olympian' and 'The Tales of the Son of Poseidon & the Staff of Hermes' before reading this story as stuff that happened in them will be mentioned. Lastly, any one who wants to do a Demigods and Olympian reads story using 'The Tales of the Son of Poseidon' is allowed as long as you inform me about it.

A/N: I'm going to MAKE THIS CLEAR. Just like I mention on my bio page about every other fanfiction I done: I DON'T OWN THE PERCY JACKSON AND THE OLYMPIAN SERIES OR IT'S CHARACTERS as the rights goes to Rick Rioran. Also I suggest you guys start paying attention to the Author notes and my warnings that I left on EVERY chapter of EVERY story. Because I KNOW I warn all of you about the first chapter before it started.

Sorry if this chapter is too much like the book

Jason's POV Part IX

I had a dream that I was wrapped in chains, hanging upside down like a hunk of meat. Everything hurt—my arms, my chest, my head. Especially my head. It felt like an over inflated water balloon.

"If I'm dead," I murmured, "why does it hurt so much?"

"You're not dead, my hero," said a woman's voice. "It is not your time. Come, speak with me."

My thoughts floated away from my body. I heard monsters yelling, my friends screaming, fiery explosions, but it all seemed to be happening on another plane of existence—getting farther and farther away.

I found myself standing in an earthen cage. Tendrils of tree roots and stone whirled together, confining me. Outside the bars, I could see the floor of a dry reflecting pool, another earthen spire growing at the far end, and above us, the ruined red stones of a burned-out house.

Next to me in the cage, a woman sat cross-legged in black robes, her head covered by a shroud. She pushed aside her veil, revealing a face that was proud and beautiful—but also hardened with suffering.

"Hera," I said.

"Welcome to my prison," said the goddess. "You will not die today, Jason. Your friends will see you through—for now."

"For now?" I asked.

Hera gestured at the tendrils of her cage. "There are worse trials to come. The very earth stirs against us."

"You're a goddess," Jason said. "Why can't you just escape?"

Hera smiled sadly. Her form began to glow, until her brilliance filled the cage with painful light. The air hummed with power, molecules splitting apart like a nuclear explosion. I suspected if I were actually there in flesh, I would've been vaporized just by looking at it.

The cage should've been blasted to rubble. The ground should've split and the ruined house should've been leveled. But when the glow died, the cage hadn't budged. Nothing outside the bars had changed. Only Hera looked different—a little more stooped and tired.

"Some powers are even greater than the gods," she said. "I am not easily contained. I can be in many places at once. But when the greater part of my essence is caught, it is like a foot in a bear trap, you might way. I can't escape, and I am concealed from the eyes of the other gods. Only you can find me, and I grow weaker by the day."

"Then why did you come here?" I asked. "How were you caught?"

The goddess sighed. "I could not stay idle. Your father, Jupiter, believe he can withdraw from the world, and thus lull our enemies back to sleep. He believes we Olympians, have become too involved in affairs of mortals, in the fates of our demigod children, especially since we agreed to claim them all after the war. He believes this is what has caused our enemies to stir. That is why he closed Olympus."

"But you don't agree."

"No and I'm not the only one as you'll find out later on," she said. "Often I do not understand my husband's moods or his decisions, but even for Zeus, this seemed paranoid. I cannot fathom why he was so insistent and so convinced. It was… unlike him. As Hera, I might have been content to follow my lord's wishes. But I am also Juno." Her image flickered, and I saw armor under her simple black robes, a goatskin cloak—the symbol of a Roman warrior—across her bronze mantle. "Juno Moneta they once called me—Juno, the One Who Warns. I was the guardian of the state, patron of Eternal Rome. I could not sit by while the descendants of my people were attacked. I sensed danger at this sacred spot. A voice—" She hesitated. "A voice told me I should come here. Gods do not have what you might call a conscience, nor do we have dreams; but the voice was like that—soft and persistent, warning me to come here. And so the same day Zeus closed Olympus, I slipped away without telling him my plans, so he could not stop me. And I came here to investigate."

"It was a trap," I guessed.

The goddess nodded. "Only too late did I realized how quickly the earth was stirring. I was even more foolish than Jupiter—a slave to my own impulses. This is exactly how it happened the first time. I was taken captive by the giants, and my imprisonment started a war. Now our enemies rise again. The gods can only defeat them with the help of the greatest living heroes. And one whom the giants serve… she cannot be defeated at all—only kept asleep."

"I don't understand."

"You will soon," Hera said.

The cage began to constrict, the tendrils spiraling tighter. Hera's form shriveled like a candle flame in the breeze. Outside the cage, I could see gathering at the edge of the pool—lumbering humanoids with hunched backs and bald heads. Unless my eyes were tricking me, they had more than one set of arms. I also heard wolves too, but not the wolves I'd seen with Lupa. I could tell from their howls this was a different pack—hungrier, and more aggressive, out for blood.

"Hurry, Jason," Hera said. "My keepers approach, and you begin to wake. I will not be strong enough to appear to you again, even in dreams."

"Wait," I responded. "Boreas told us you'd made a dangerous gamble. What did he mean?"

Hera's eyes looked crazy, which made me wonder if she really had done something crazy.

"An exchange," she said. "The only way to bring peace. The enemy counts on our divisions, and if we are divided, we will be destroyed. You are my peace offering, Jason—a bridge to overcome millennia of hatred."

"What? I don't—"

"I cannot tell you more," Hera said. "You have lived this long because I have taken your memory. Find this place. Return to your starting point. Your sister will help."

"Thalia?" I asked.

The scene began to dissolved. "Good-bye, Jason. Beware Chicago. Your most dangerous mortal enemy waits there. If you die, it will be by her hand. If not, seek out the signs of daughter of Hades that will lead you to your sister."

For some reason I got a strange feeling that I should know a daughter of Hades, but for some reason it came to my mind as daughter of Pluto, yet at the I got the feeling Hera is not talking about it. "What are you talking about?" I asked.

But Hera's image faded, and I woke up.

…

My eyes snapped open. "Cyclops!"

"Whoa, sleepyhead." Piper sat behind me on the bronze dragon, holding my waist to keep me balanced. Leo sat in front, driving. We flew peacefully through the winter sky as if nothing had happened.

"D-Detroit," I stammered. "Didn't we crash-land? I thought—"

"It's okay," Leo said, "We got away, but you got a nasty concussion. How you feeling?"

My head throbbed. I remembered the factory, then walking down the catwalk, then a creature looming over me—a face with one eye, a massive fist—and everything went black.

"How did you—the Cyclops—"

"Leo ripped them apart," Piper said. "He was amazing. He can summon fire—"

"It was nothing," Leo said quickly.

Piper laughed. "Shut up, Valdez. I'm going to tell him. Get over it."

And she did—how Leo single-handedly defeated the Cyclopes family; how they freed Jason, they noticed the Cyclopes starting to re-form; how Leo had replaced the dragon's wiring and gotten them back in the air just as they'd started to hear the Cyclopes roaring for vengeance inside the factory.

I was impressed. Taking out three Cyclopes with nothing but a tool kit, and the fact Leo had fire power was impressive. Not to mention that Myrmekes gunk—or whatever it was called—it seemed resourceful, and it explained why Leo smelled like rotting carcasses. But I felt horrible of the fact that I stepped right into an ambush and spent the whole fight knocked out while my friends fend for themselves. What kind of quest leader was I?

When Piper told me about the other kid the Cyclopes claimed to have eaten, the one in the purple shirt who spoke Latin. I felt like my head was going to explode. A son of Mercury… I felt like I should know that kid, but the name was missing from my head.

"I'm not alone, then," I said. "There are others like me."

"Jason," Piper said, "you were never alone. You've got us."

"I—I know… but something Hera said. I was having a dream…"

I told them what I'd seen inside her cage.

"The daughter of Hades—that might be Bianca," Piper said, "Annabeth told me about her. She joined the Hunters along with your sister."

I frowned. Bianca—could that be the name of the person I was thinking about? It doesn't seem right, but how many children of Hades are there?

"So we find this Bianca chick and she leads us to your sister," Leo said, "Any idea where they are?"

I shook my head. "Hera only told me to look for the signs of Bianca. But that's not what bothers me. It's the fact Hera gamble in this exchange is me. Just by sending me to Camp Half-Blood, I have a feeling she broke some kind of rule, something that could blow up in a big way."

"Or save us," Piper said hopefully. "That bit about the sleeping enemy—that sounds like the lady Leo told us about."

Leo cleared his throat. "About that… she kind of appeared to me back in Detroit, in a pool of Porta-Potty sludge."

I wasn't sure if I heard that right. "Did you say… Porta-Party?"

Leo told us about the big face in the factory yard. "I don't know if she's completely unkillable," he said, "but she cannot be defeated by toilet seats. I can vouch for that. She wanted me to betray you guys, and I was like, 'Pffft, right, I'm gonna listen to a face in the potty sludge.'"

"She's trying to divide us." Piper slipped her arms from around my waist. I could sense her tension without even looking at her.

"What's wrong?"

"I just… Why are they toying with us? Who is this lady, and how is she connected to Enceladus?"

"Enceladus?"

"I mean…" Piper's voice quavered. "That's one of the giants. Just one of the names I could remember."

I got the feeling there was a lot more bothering her, but I decided not to press her. She had a rough morning.

Leo scratched his head. "Well, I dunno about Enchiladas—"

"Enceladus," Piper corrected.

"Whatever. But Old Potty Face mentioned another name. Porpoise Fear, or something?"

"Porphyrion?" Piper asked. "He was the giant king, I think."

I envisioned that dark spire in the old reflecting pool—growing larger as Hera got weaker. "I'm going to take a wild guess," I said. "In the old stories, Porphyrion kidnapped Hera. That was the first shot in the war between the giants and the gods."

"I think so," Piper agreed. "But those myths are really garbled and conflict. It was like nobody wanted that story to survive. I just remember there was a war, and the giants were almost impossible to kill."

"Heroes and gods had to work together," I said. "That's what Hera told me."

"Kind of hard to do," Leo grumbled. "if the gods won't even talk to us."

We flew west, and I became lost in my thoughts—all of them bad. I wasn't sure how much time passed before the dragon dove through a break in the clouds, and below us, glittering in the winter sun, was a city at the edge of a massive lake. A crescent of skyscrapers lined the shore. Behind us, stretching out to the western horizon, was a vast grid of snow-covered neighborhoods and roads.

"Chicago," I said.

I thought about what Hera had said in my dream. My worst mortal enemy would be waiting here. If I was going to die, it would be by her hand.

"One problem down," Leo said. "We got here alive. Now, how do we find the storm spirits?"

I saw a flash of movement below them. At first I thought it was a small plane, but it was too small, too dark and fast. The thing spiraled toward the skyscrapers, weaving and changing shape—and, just a moment it became a smoky figure of a horse.

"How about we follow that one," I suggested. "And see where it goes?"