Chapter 17
"I see you're leading another group of demigods to their deaths," Phoebe said coldly.
Percy scowled.
"And yet again, the Fates bring us together," Zoë sighed. She glanced at the Trio, and then at the building around them. "I'm surprised you never burned your home to the ground? Isn't that typically how your recruits go insane?"
He glanced at the dead body lying on the ground. There was no doubt it was Ionna. He could sense Thanas' grief. "There's a girl I know. Her father lived nearby. He once came here after becoming a father of a demigod. It ruined his life. This place... holds everything I left behind. Memories of an old time I can never have back. A haunted graveyard for anyone who dares enter."
Xanthe looked horrified as she looked up from the corner of the room. "You... you..."
"You shouldn't have watched it," he said. Shooting a glare at Phoebe, he snarled, "But I guess an annoying know-it-all had to show you these horrible things."
"Why... why would you keep them?" Thanas asked. He tried his best to hide it, but he looked and sounded disturbed. "Why would you store them in these spheres for people to see?"
Percy could tell the three were wary of him now. He sighed. "Listen, Thanas. If that memory wasn't in there—" He pointed at the sphere. "—it would all be in here." He pointed at his head. "I'm not skilled enough at magic to wipe my own memory. I suffered for hundreds of years with a tortured mind. I accepted Aphrodite's apology, but other than that I was like an animal. I slaughtered and killed like you saw in that memory. I was there at Thermopylae before it was overrun by Persians. I fought in the Battle of Allia and helped sack Rome until the Senones were bought off. It wasn't until I met Archimedes that I found a way to remove some of the outright pain of these memories."
"Then why not break the spheres?" Thanas asked. "Why keep them?"
"Like I said, I'm not skilled enough at magic. If I break the spheres, the memories return to my mind. Ever since Archimedes helped me store these away, I've been more patient and more methodical in how I exact my revenge."
"It doesn't matter how you do it," Phoebe snarled. "Either way, you're a murderer and a coward."
"Then did you think I would roll over and die when Apollo and Aphrodite conspired to get me in trouble with Zeus?" He snapped at Phoebe, frustrated by her antagonistic behaviour. "I was exiled because I served my duty as a soldier of Olympus. Or did you already forget that I turned my back on the Greeks for the crimes they committed at Troy?"
"It hardly matters when the result of your revenge takes thousands of innocent lives!"
"I was left with nothing!" Percy felt like he was on the brink of exploding. "I was reduced to little more than dirt. You may have a family, but I lost mine the day I became immortal."
"This is why men are sickening," Phoebe growled, turning to Zoë. "I don't understand why you would—"
"Oh, so you're pulling the 'men are sickening' card, are you?" Percy laughed. "She might be generations younger than you, but at least Irene is mature enough to realize what lunacy is."
Phoebe drew her knife. "Why you—!"
"Stop!" Zoë barked, her eyes flashing angrily. "Enough, you two!"
Percy gritted his teeth. He turned to Zoë. "Get her out of here. You said you didn't want to see me in a bad situation? This is going to turn ugly so long as she's here."
Zoë pursed her lips. She looked at Phoebe and gestured toward the door.
Phoebe didn't look happy about it. She turned to the Trio. "You better watch out. Percy is not sane. He will destroy and kill anyone who deals with the Romans. He assassinated Julius Caesar after pretending to befriend him. He goaded Nero into setting fire to Rome and killed innocent civilians."
"Let's go, Phoebe," Zoë snapped irritably.
Phoebe curled her lip in distaste, but she finally turned and walked out the door.
"Don't succumb to hatred, Percy," Zoë said calmly. Her eyes flashed him a warning. "If you do, you'll destroy yourself and the world with it. Your time there was designed to break you. You have to keep fighting to beat it."
Percy couldn't look at her. "Sure."
Zoë remained, as if she was going to say more, but she decided against it and exited the room.
The Trio gave him apprehensive looks.
He let out a sigh and approached the table. He looked at each of the spheres. He could recall the exact memory stored in each sphere. He touched them one by one, his fingers trembling as the memories threatened to escape and return to his mind.
"I wish I could destroy these memories," he said. He held up the first sphere he'd made, the memory of the night his mother died. "I've contemplated diving into the Lethe. Let it sweep me into nothingness. But, if I did that, I might as well have died. Why not just kill myself instead?"
Leon and Thanas shared a look. They looked torn, as if unsure what to do next.
Percy stared at Xanthe. She couldn't meet his eyes. He thought about his contingency plan. If it came down to it, he would have to become the evilest villain in history. He figured Irene had found out by now, and he wondered how much Zoë knew, considering the look she gave him.
"Let's give Ionna a proper burial," he decided, slipping the sphere into the Infinity Pouch. He met each of their eyes. "Then we'll start training. We'll find the other Greeks and begin our last defense. Okay?"
Leon nodded numbly.
Xanthe looked down at her own hands. Her sorrowful gaze turned steely. She clenched her fists tightly, staring at them like they were stained with blood.
Thanas eyes lingered on Ionna's body. Conflict swirled in his eyes, mixing hatred and regret. He closed his eyes and nodded silently.
Percy did all the preparation. He carefully prepared the ritual, heading out to the town to purchase the necessary supplies. He set up the pyre outside on the field, careful to raise it above the flammable plants.
He placed Ionna gently on the wooden plank, keeping her wrapped in the beautiful shroud. The three were silent as they watched him work. He tried not to imagine what they were thinking. He didn't want to watch the pain in their eyes. Even if he'd turned cold-hearted, it didn't mean he couldn't feel any emotions.
As he put the finishing touches on the pyre, he saw the Trio approach the shroud.
Thanas gently lifted the cloth up, exposing Ionna's face. She didn't look tormented. In fact, she looked sad, as if she died knowing she would never see Thanas again. Her expression was peaceful, as if she'd gone to sleep after a long day of work. Her pale face was cold to the touch, her stiff muscles held into place.
Xanthe shut her eyes, holding back tears. Leon put an arm around her shoulders and let her rest her head on his own shoulder. He sighed sadly, his free arm clenched tightly by his side.
Thanas gave Ionna a sad look, kissing her forehead, before placing the drachmas onto her eyes. Percy gave him the honor of lighting the pyre.
The four of them watched, late into the night, as the fire burned through the shroud. The flame provided a sense of warmth in the cool night atmosphere, illuminating each of their faces with its flickering light. As the shroud burned, there was a soft sigh, as if Ionna had been freed from her body at last.
Thanas broke down again, sobbing on his knees as he watched the love of his life formally pass onto the Underworld.
Percy figured they needed some time on their own. He told them quietly that he would await them inside the home before heading off. Percy stood in the cooking area, staring at the spot where his mother had died.
If they must endure Ionna's death, you can endure your mother's, a part of his mind said.
He stuck his hand into the Infinity Pouch and summoned the sphere. He held it up in front of him, unable to contain his fear. He'd never tried breaking a sphere before. He didn't know what would happen when he did. Would that memory overpower him? Would that memory linger in the forefront of his mind? Would he go crazy again?
He swallowed so loudly, he could hear and feel the saliva from his mouth pass down toward his stomach. His heart was racing so fast that he could feel his neck throb.
It's now or never!
Percy closed his hand into a fist and crushed the sphere. The Mist spewed out from the contraption and dissipated into the air. Magic swirled in the air around him as the physical placeholder of his memory was destroyed. His head felt funny, as if something was filling it up with water. A rush of emotions overcame him, and he stumbled back, clutching his head in dazed pain.
He could feel blood trickle down from his nose as he fell to a knee.
"Go, Percy!" his mother's voice shouted. "Go!"
The sound wasn't coming from anywhere around him, but he could hear it loud and clear. It was just a figment of his imagination, as the details of the memory came to the forefront of his mind. The grief, the fear, the anger.
His breath became laboured as the image of his mother and the hellhound flashed in his vision. For a moment, he thought he was re-living the memory through a dream. It looked so real. But when he blinked, there was nothing there. Just the distant scream of his mother as the hellhound killed her.
He felt like a little kid again. Hopeless, frail and tired.
He opened his fist, and the metal pieces of the broken sphere fell to the ground.
The visions stopped. The sound died off. The memory jammed itself back into place, throbbing like a freshly-opened wound. But it was nothing more than that. Just another memory in his head, like another book on the bookshelf of Alexandria's library.
Don't get too sentimental, he thought. Or you'll never complete what you started.
But it was precisely that. Every family he'd ever had disintegrated. That's all he wanted. He wanted Apollo to give him his life back. He wanted Apollo to apologize for ruining his life. He wanted Apollo to suffer some sort of consequence. Most of all, he wanted to love and be loved.
If he couldn't have that, he would make sure no one else had it. Even if it meant tearing his soul to pieces. Even if it meant destroying everything.
They spent a few days in Percy's home.
Xanthe thought it was a pretty cozy place. If she was a normal mortal, she could see herself living here. There was enough to do, whether it was out on the field or inside the building itself.
She sat on the ground, leaning back against the wall and watching as Leon and Thanas duelled.
The two of them parried back and forth, using wooden swords to practice, careful not to severely injure each other. Leon was, evidently, the better swordsman. She hadn't seen Leon train before, and it was interesting to watch him fight. He was fleet of foot and strong. If there were any weaknesses in his fighting stance, she couldn't tell. Thanas was already better than most campers, but Leon was even better.
She thought it was good that Thanas was fighting someone better than him. It would help him focus. He'd been a little unstable after Ionna's death. He looked colder, if that was possible. Out of the three of them, he had been the least disturbed by what Percy saw out east.
Percy was over by the back entrance, packing up the final batch of supplies for their journey to Constantinople.
Watching him do mundane tasks like cleaning and cooking made him seem a lot more human. She couldn't imagine the trauma of living through something as terrible as what they saw in that misty image. She figured she'd probably go insane and lose all sense of herself.
A part of her felt angry for him. If he really was cast away by the gods for something as simple as fighting at Troy, she could see why he'd become so angry. It helped that she also didn't like Phoebe. Even though Phoebe must have known more about Percy than they did, she came across as confrontational.
She thought about Florian. What would he have thought? Would he have struck her down if he had the chance? She would never know. Because his soul was swept into the Underworld when she drowned the camp.
But despite that guilt, she didn't regret striking down the Eleventh Legion. Marcus had to have been in there somewhere. She could rest more easily now that he was dead.
And that all led back to Phoebe. She must have thought that they would find Percy revolting after seeing what he did to the others. But she wasn't a mortal Greek demigod. She knew nothing about the politics or the nature of the Greco-Roman relationship. She knew nothing about how they had grown up hating the Romans for everything they'd done, and were continuing to do, to helpless Greek demigods. She was a member of the Hunters, far away from society, far away from the truth of their lives.
In the big picture, perhaps peace was a better option. But, as she and Thanas had learned the hard way, laying down their weapons and hoping the Romans wouldn't strike them down was nothing but a stupid dream. Even if the hesitant among both factions stayed far from the front lines of battle, there would always be those that put themselves in a position to destroy the enemy. And executing an act of hatred would always be much easier than executing an act of forgiveness.
Regardless, she found Percy's old memory haunting and still felt like retching whenever she thought about it.
"Yield!" Leon shouted, holding the point of the wooden sword to Thanas' neck.
Thanas, for the seventh time in ten tries, dropped his weapon. "I yield."
Leon dropped his arm and let out an exhausted sigh. He jabbed the practice sword into the ground and leaned on it, catching his breath. "You're getting better. You're reading my moves a lot better now."
"You're insanely good with a sword," Thanas complimented. The son of Hades eyed him up and down. "Where did you train?"
"Thessalonica," Leon replied. "Military academy."
"I thought you lived in a village upriver?" Xanthe asked.
The son of Zeus turned to her and smiled. "We're close enough to Thessalonica that I could go down several times a week to train. I trained odd-hours. Always with mortal weapons. Never got to keep any, unfortunately. That's why I only ever had that bronze dagger to protect myself around my village."
"Well, now you've got a proper sword," Thanas said, gesturing to the ring on his finger.
Leon stared at his hand. He extended his arm and summoned the beautiful weapon, Koptos. It had such a deadly name for such an antique-style blade. But slashing swords were deadly in the right hands. She'd learned from many of the Apollo kids that slashing styles could be deadlier than the more common stabbing technique when fighting unorthodox battles.
A stab is generally aimed toward the fatal or debilitating regions of the target's body. That could be the neck, the chest, the abdomen, or even the thighs. A stab is made with the intent to puncture, open up a wound and kill.
In unorthodox battle, the Apollo kids said slashing was more to weaken an opponent before delivering the final strike. Cut the legs, the arms, anything that was exposed. The more wounds that opened up, the more vulnerable the target. If the joints were successfully targeted, some could bleed out and some could lose feeling in their extremities. It was a brutal style of combat. Not very effective at killing with a single strike, but very cruel.
Xanthe knew how to use a sword, and always kept one on her, but she was much better with a spear. It had a longer reach so that no slashing swordsman could get close enough to use that combat style on her.
"You're better than Xanthe," Thanas said. "And she's one of the best at camp."
"I mostly used a spathion at the academy," Leon said. "Straight-edged. More geared toward the military. Everything was about form and technique. Add that with training in the wilderness, and you've essentially got my style. You're pretty good yourself, Thanas."
Thanas nodded, glancing over toward the burned pyre. "Ionna always pushed me. Got me to train against elite undead warriors."
An uncomfortable silence settled over them at the mention of the late daughter of Athena. They would overcome her loss eventually. But it would take time.
"The cart is ready," Percy called from the back entrance. "We're set to leave by sundown!"
Xanthe exhaled. It was time. They would be going back to Chiron and the other campers. She wasn't sure what they would think of the three of them, abandoning the group right after they had been attacked. She knew Chiron would be less than pleased at them for leaving.
"It'll be almost a month since we last saw them when we arrive," Thanas said.
"At least they're all safe," Leon pointed out. "You know, given that we effectively cleared the region of Romans."
"That's the grim truth, isn't it?" Xanthe chuckled.
Leon stared at the two of them. She couldn't see a single wrinkle of worry on his face. He looked determined, in a way. She wanted some of his optimism. It sure as Hades beat the numbing depression of living in this shitty world.
He put his arms around their shoulders. "We're going home, in a sense. Cheer up. Be happy to see all your friends again."
"That's easy to say," Thanas said. "How do you think they'll react to news of Ionna's death?"
"Not as hard as you," Leon reasoned. "And it might inspire them to fight harder. That muscular guy and his girlfriend... I'm sure they would know all about Ionna and her quest."
Xanthe almost smiled. "That muscular guy is called Alexandros. And his partner is Viviana. But they don't know everything about Ionna's quest. Only I knew."
"It was that secret, huh?"
"Yeah. Mostly because of Thanas."
"Are you blaming me?" Thanas asked.
She shook her head. "Of course not. I'm just saying..."
"Regardless," Leon said, interrupting them before they could fight, "we're family now. Don't let Ionna's death be in vain. We have to recuperate. The Thirteenth and Fourteenth and Twelfth Legions won't be as beat up as the Eleventh. They won't be so easy to kill."
Xanthe probably should've felt wary of someone she'd known for only two weeks, but she couldn't help but feel comforted by his words. Maybe her blood relatives were dead. But this was her new family, and she wouldn't let them die. Not like Ionna.
Thanas nodded and grunted. "Agreed. If they want to storm Constantinople and kill the others, we'll make it more difficult than anything they've ever faced. If they want to come to our homeland, we'll welcome them with spears and swords."
Leon smiled. "That's the spirit."
"You're way too cheerful."
"It's called optimism. Sorry if you've never heard of it as a son of Hades."
Thanas shot him a glare. "You're as crazy as crazy gets."
"Percy's the crazy one. I'm just a touch delusional."
Xanthe laughed. Not a quiet, fake, short laugh. A loud, hearty laugh. She couldn't remember the last time she'd truly laughed. Thanas must've thought so too because he stared at her like she'd turned into a mania. Leon grinned at her, his eyes sparkling in the sunlight, as if he was admiring his success at lightening the mood.
Out of the corner of her eyes, she saw Percy staring at them. While his mouth was set in a straight line, as neutral as an expression could be, his eyes were smiling. He looked like he was back in Babylonia, telling stories to Nabu, enjoying life as it came toward him. The demon that appeared in the Far East, fighting those Donghu nomads, was nowhere to be found.
So he's human after all, she thought.
Physically, he really looked like what she expected her full brother would look like. But she hadn't felt like he acted as her brother. He acted more like their leader than anything else.
Maybe Phoebe was right. Maybe Percy's ultimate goal was to destroy as many Romans as he could. It didn't matter to Xanthe. He could teach her a thing or two about the world, about fighting the Romans, about surviving. And, judging from how he'd handled Ionna's funeral, she could tell he cared. Whatever Phoebe feared wasn't true. The couple weeks of the Percy she'd seen, plus the dreams, made her feel confident that he cared about the ones he loved, even if the motivations for some of his actions may have been misguided.
"You're both insane," Thanas grumbled.
She locked eyes with Leon. Maybe insane was a good thing.
Hope you're all staying safe through these tough times!
