Jason Grace sat at his study, watching the sunrise.
He sighed. While he had anticipated this, the fact that he had managed to outlive the last of the Jackson line filled him with misery and grief.
He and Reyna hadn't aged at all over the past half-millennia, but then again most of them hadn't. They had managed to outlive Frank and Hazel, who, like their children, had aged visibly(They had chosen not to transform). Piper was still as beautiful as the day he had met her until she had
died due to unforeseen complications in childbirth. At least they had managed to save the baby. Leo had taken the loss far too personally and had just… wasted away.
Jason had discovered long back ago that being immortal wasn't all it was cracked up to be. After five hundred years of living, he had come to some profound realizations about the gods and immortals in general.
It was a sad, and tiring existence. Constantly existing day after day, month after month, and year after year over and over again had taken its toll. Most of the demigods of his generation that had transitioned had all faded on purpose, or were serving their parents.
He didn't love Reyna. It was an open secret that their marriage was one merely of convenience. He didn't regret marrying her, and he doubted she regretted marrying him. They'd had three beautiful, healthy children all who were smart, funny, and devoted to him and the gods. The lineage of Rome was in good hands, and if his bloodline died out, his dad could make more of him anytime.
It was a depressing thought, knowing you were eternally expendable but after so long he had grown used to it.
The truth was, he was tired. So goddamn tired, and he had been thinking about retiring for a while now.
His kids had no idea who he really was, no one did really except Reyna, the gods, and Chase. The man that Beryl, Travis, and Drew knew was not Jason Grace, they knew Augustus Jason Grace Africanus; Emperor of Rome, Breaker of the Black Throne, Homicida de Titanas et Gigantes, and Slayer of Ra.
He was held down by the ghosts of the past, flashes of bronze dragons, and a dark figure standing under a ceiling tiled with tombstones, made of jewel-and-bone. Memories of a golden ship sailing through a cerulean blue sky forced themselves into his head at every waking moment. Those were the more aggressive ones. Sometimes he would wake up lying down on a soft carpet of grass bathed in soft sunlight. Piper's head was in his lap. Then he would wake up bathed in sweat, his nose bleeding platinum and his nails biting into the skin of palm hard enough to draw ichor.
The world was moving on without him. Leo in his three hundred years on earth had not been idle, laying the base for a new renaissance in which interest in the arts and science had skyrocketed.
Thirty years before his death, they had managed to land a crew on the moon. Ten years later, they had sent probes towards Mars. It took nearly a year for that first expedition to reach the planet. A lot of experimentation with magic later, the time it took the next probe to land was shortened by half.
All that led to this moment now. Jason looked at the picture of the spaceship sitting on his desk. This would be the first manned mission to Mars. And The venerable Prince Travis Grace and his soon-to-be husband Lord Tristan Mclean (ironic that their kids would get together) would be on board.
The goal of this historic mission was to apply earth-like climate control on a grander, planetary scale.
In layman's terms, they were going to attempt terraforming Mars.
Five hundred years before, Jason Grace had authorized the use of a weapon codenamed "moon breaker" against Annabeth Chase's doomed rebellion. The weapon was essentially a high-powered fracking machine that launched shells of solid imperial gold deep underground until it reached a point where the detonation of the aforementioned shell would blow a hole into the side of the earth, ten miles wide and just as deep.
Leo Valdez had observed and noted the effects as a way to possibly build combat bases in the middle of future conquests, but modern scientists had realized that using the moon breaker weapons, they could create natural indentations in the surface of the moon and other extraterrestrial objects to build dome-bases.
Jason for his part wasn't sure how the whole space thing worked. He had thought that Ouranos made up the sky and space, but apparently, that wasn't true.
It was times like this that Jason was happy that he had engineered the creation of the Empire. True, many had died, and he had killed countless. He'd heard stories about how soldiers remembered the face of every man, woman, and creature they had killed. Even the monsters.
Jason couldn't relate. By himself, he'd probably killed millions in the Final War himself. He'd slaughtered Nubians, Sherdens, and Libyans by the dozens, incinerating Mayan holcans and noncams before reaching the blood-red-pyramid the Egyptians had called maeqil alaliha or "Bastion of the Gods". Hell' he'd lost count when he was fourteen.
He breathed in deeply. True, this was no utopia. Corruption, the bane of every government, and a necessary evil were there, as was unemployment, crime, and poverty. But those factors were markedly reduced compared to what was around in the Mortal Age. Besides, there was nothing that could be done about it.
The air was so much fresher, water bodies were free of contamination and the nighttime skies were clear, a far cry from the days of pollution that marked the era of Muggle rule. Many formerly endangered species were now thriving as the environment fully healed.
And now … now, they were going for the stars…
But Jason wasn't going with them. For the last few months, he'd been reinvigorated and the death of Estelle Jackson had only strengthened his resolve. He finally felt like himself again, Jason Grace not Lord Grace or Emperor. Jason.
He wasn't going to the underworld. One of the realizations that he had come to was that as a mortal, there was no real way to die. Just because your soul left your body, didn't mean you were dead. You just moved downstairs and lived all of eternity in paradise or pain depending on how well you did upstairs.
But for immortals…
No one knew what happened to them when they died, personally, Jason was of the belief that they just moved on. They'd no longer be conscious, or aware of what or who they were, they'd just go beyond...
So that's what he wanted to do.
He didn't have much left for him to do in the world. So before he set out he would dedicate himself to biographing his life. Not because he wanted to publish it or something, he- he didn't actually know why he was doing it, but once he was done.
He could finally, finally rest. No prophecies of impending doom, or ancient enemies. Just silence and sleep.
No one knew, but he was planning on going to Olympus next week and telling his dad what he was going to do. He didn't know what he was expecting Jupiter to say, but fuck it, he'd made up his mind.
He stretched his pure white wings, his phantasmal feathers, radiating light as small, near imperceptible crackles of electricity trailed. He folded them again, before disguising them with the mist. He walked towards a small cabinet underneath his marble dresser and drew a faded brown notebook emblazoned with the symbol of the twelfth legion in purple.
Inscribed on the bottom read "Fulminata"
He opened the notebook, savoring the crackling noise of the spine before pulling a familiar ballpoint pen out of the pocket.
He uncapped the pen and sat down, beginning to ponder on what to write.