A/N: fafhsldfhasdkjfhakjdshfadsjkb fqpib qwibvppqisb√qz

I honestly don't know how I managed to get a square root in that, that's flipping incredible. I'm going to leave it there.

—Boots

ζ

Percy
Lvl. 18 Raider

The next leg of the voyage following their departure from Ithaka proved no less challenging than the days before, but rather than facing some horror out of myth every few podes their obstacles were more commonplace. West of Kephalonia was entirely empty. The hundred-league journey across the Ionios that awaited them after rounding the island's southern-most tip had to be taken in a single stretch as it was barren of any land.

Percy's patience had disappeared by mid-morning, this was the farthest he had ever been from Montauk and the longest he's ever sailed. His years with Ermis hadn't prepared him for extended trips on the open ocean so without Trimming and Knots it would have been impossible. He was able to sail the ship as an entire crew and directly respond and adapt as Kleo moved. The learning curve was harsh and there was no room for error, but they had no other choice than to push forward as quickly as possible. The longer they delayed, the longer his mother remained captive in Hades.

Grover had stayed close to him after Ithaka, the encounter with the Erinyes spooking the excitable man. The Farmer drew his land-locked companions to his side, huddling with them near the stern of the ship, just a short distance away from where Percy stood vigil. He murmured softly to them and visibly took solace in their physical proximity. Obelisk was very much the same, still reeling from Asterix's absence and entirely unsatisfied with their recent trend of death-defiance. Goliath seemed the calmest of the three, resting his large head softly in the Farmer's lap. The sheepdog was more docile than Percy had ever seen him, trading his boundless energy for quiet support. It was an intuitive intelligence—one he had never seen before in any of Grover's flock—but Percy was glad for it. The loyal hound seemed to know exactly what his companion needed.

Percy would catch bits of their conversation occasionally whenever Grover became excited enough that the sound travelled across the deck. Most of it made little sense to him; the topic straying wildly from minute to minute, jumping from recipes for succulent pork roast to tales of fiction he had read back in Montauk. Unsurprisingly, several were entirely unfamiliar to Percy. His intake of literature was limited to whatever featured in his mother's story nights, and those cosy hours were mainly devoted to the classics.

Annabeth claimed he didn't read enough. After all, they were quite popular stories. By her standards, there was no reason not to be aware of them.

Percy felt a spark of indignation stir in his chest. It wasn't fair to compare him and Grover. He and his mother struggled constantly to make ends meet so he rarely had the time to sit around and read books. Or even the books themselves to read. Not that he blamed his studious friend; even if he had the opportunity he doubted he would have made much of it, given how pitifully he struggled to learn in the first place.

Where Grover had picked up his letters and numbers almost immediately—before then proceeding to gorge himself on every text he could reach—Percy had taken months to make even the most trivial progress. Every attempt would see the letters drift across the page, artfully twirling around the edge of his focus. And even if they finally chose to settle down, the characters would shift and bend, flickering through half the alphabet before shifting back just as rapidly. All told, the maddening dance would always whip the meaning away at the last second. He had gotten it eventually—his mom refused to leave her son illiterate—but the memories burned in and back of his mind and soured books in general for him.

He waved away his fouling mood and busied himself with straightening their course.

Eventually, Percy decided to kill the boredom by holding impromptu sailing lessons. Annabeth would wander over from her bale of hay every few hours and start asking him questions as he directed the lines on the ship. Curiosity looked to be a big part of her personality, and after years of Grover's aversion, he was happy to have someone else to talk to about sailing. His friend joined them eventually when Goliath's newfound patience wore out and he retreated below decks. While the Saboteur aimed her investigation at a variety of general topics, she put particular focus on the method of his training, asking dozens of questions about where he was from, who trained him, any other strangeness he had noticed. She was burning with questions about his… uniqueness and had expressed more frustration than he ever felt when he couldn't give any concrete answers as to what made him so special.

"This ship is our life now. The success or failure of this quest depends on Kleo more than any one of us," the blonde answered when he eventually got around to asking if there was any specific reason for her sudden interest in sailing techniques and ship repair. "Besides, it can't hurt to learn new things. One can never be too prepared."

By the second day, Percy was fighting valiantly against the boredom, every second requiring a tremendous amount of willpower to push through. Kleo was doing fine—by this point, he had grown comfortable enough with her operation—and the route was as basic as it could be: straight west. Actually sailing the vessel required little concerted effort on his part. Annabeth's hunger for information was temporarily abated and Grover had followed Goliath out of the sun and into the shaded holds below the main deck, ostensibly to 'sort through the cargo'. Percy had just enough to do so that he couldn't leave to entertain himself, but not enough to keep him interested. It was endlessly infuriating.

The short trips with Ermis back in Montauk seemed action-packed in comparison. At least there was always someone to talk to—talk at, Ermis was not the best conversationalist—but it was enough. Percy needed to be engaged. He needed some modicum of excitement.

In this matter, he had always been different from Grover. His friend was most relaxed in the Underwood, curled up in the roots of an oak and surrounded by his herd. Less than five minutes of that nearly drove Percy mad. His eyes wouldn't stop wandering and his head buzzed, growing hot like it wanted to move but was held in place. He hadn't voluntarily stepped into the cursed thicket since.

Fortunately—before the boredom set his brain on fire—Grover came back up hauling a filled sack of cloth over his shoulder. He dropped it onto the deck, the heavy bag clinking as its weight shifted and settled like an animal. Both Percy and Annabeth walked over to investigate.

"There's not much room down there," Grover answered the unspoken question. "But even as little as there was Lydia took a large part of it, she walled it off with some sheets and stuff. Typical," he scoffed. "There's barely any room for the lion and the deer-thing but she gets almost a third of the room to herself."

Grover began to pull various items out of the bag as he continued to ramble, "Anyways, I realized that we never really looked at her stuff. She ran a semi-successful smuggling operation; there could be something valuable back there. Skolopendra's carapace came in handy, so I didn't think we should ignore potentially helpful items." The Farmer eventually dumped out the sack, and a cascade of tinkling rang out as the Smuggler's—most likely ill-gotten—treasures cascaded out across the planks.

Lydia seemed to have an appreciation for collecting trinkets, hoarding a small wealth of old coins, carved animal bones and other similar objects. Most of it looked worthless, but Annabeth still nodded at Grover in understanding and deftly separated the metal for later sorting. Grover nodded back tentatively before turning his attention to the pile of assorted bits and bobs the Saboteur had left behind. They seemed a little... different... after Ithaka. Like they'd reached an understanding.

Whatever it was, Percy wasn't complaining, Grover's typical nervousness around new people and Annabeth's apparent antipathy to his friend was making everything a bit tense. He was glad to see the back of it.

Despite his hopes otherwise, their search of the remaining contents of the bag didn't yield anything worthwhile. Most of the objects were exactly as they appeared. Like the carved animal bones—they weren't able to identify what creature exactly but they made Grover uneasy so Percy decided to toss them back in rather than linger. The rest varied wildly, from glass beads to small colourfully knit strips of cloth. Annabeth returned eventually with several golden drachmae and shoved the rest of the metal oddities back into the pile.

"Mostly worthless, thought there might have been weapons or even some navigational tools but they're just… knick-knacks," she declared. She handed the coins to Grover and asked him to keep them with the others before clambering back up the mast. His friend tucked the coins away before nudging through the former captain's small collection with his toe.

A small collection that Percy took great joy in throwing overboard over the next few hours. Slinging random trinkets out into the ocean like stones. Competing to see who could reach the furthest distance with the oddest-shaped bones. Annabeth put off a sort of disappointed energy like his mother used to get; after snide comments and pointed glares about wasting time and resources hadn't deterred him or Grover she resolved herself to frosty silence.

Percy was not all that surprised at the fact that the Saboteur seemed capable of wielding silence as a weapon just as effectively as speech, he was just glad she seemed to forget she was mad at them by the end of the day.

On the second dawn, Annabeth spotted land in the distance—the long journey across the Ionios bringing them to the southern tip of Italia. Within hours, Percy had swung Kleo around the point of the peninsula and turned back north. The route beyond this point was a little hazy, Annabeth having taken over when she saw him and Grover studying the map.

"Percy," she called from belowdecks where she had been holed up since dawn. "Can you hold the ship's course steady and come down here? Bring Gover as well." As Percy brought the Farmer to the step ladder they wondered what the Saboteur wanted.

Annabeth stood with her back to them, she was hunched over a barrel in what had been Lydia's 'quarters' and turned around to wave them over when Grover jumped the last step off the ladder. She had spread their map across the surface, holding the edges taught with the few of Lydia's possessions he and Grover hadn't thrown overboard.

"We are here," she pointed her finger a short distance south of Zankle's Strait. "And we have a problem—"

"A problem? What problem?" Annabeth shot him an unimpressed look for interrupting. She took a breath and continued.

"My original plan to get to Hades was to sail south, around Sicilia, then north around the western edge of Ikhnusa and Corse straight into the Styx." As she spoke she traced her finger along the route, but it was immediately obvious to him that it was a long way around. He opened his mouth to point out the observation but Annabeth shot him a dirty look and he felt it would be wise to keep quiet for now.

"But, since we are under an overwhelming amount of pressure… the other route," she traced a different path, "takes us right by the Sea of Monsters." Annabeth's finger drew a shaky line close to the western coast of Italia, crossing between the shore and the edge of the large fog bank taking up almost all of the space between Italia, Sicilia and Ikhnusa. The flowy script on the map marked the region as the mythical Sea of Monsters.

"Little about the sea is known, as you can probably tell from this map," she gestured at the inscrutable cloud, broken up only by the long scaled body of a sea-serpent peeking through the mist, "but I know that we can skirt this edge, we just need to take care not to stray too close to the boundary but also not to run Kleo aground in the shallow waters off the coast." Annabeth looked up at them and finally seemed to acknowledge his impatience, "Yes… Percy?"

"But that still means we need to get through Zankle?" Annabeth sighed, the exhaustion etched into her face, her shoulders slumped even farther.

"Yes, yes we do. And now you see the problem I have been wrestling with for the last day."

Percy sighed, it was obvious in hindsight the decision Annabeth had been struggling to make, but really… there was only one option. A rough approximation with some mental calculations showed that sailing around Sicilia and Ikhnusa would add more than two full days to the trip, time they could not afford to spend especially with the delays on Ithaka. Percy's shoulders slumped as well and he fell forward, leaning most of his weight on the barrel.

"Uhh…," Grover coughed lightly, "I uh— I don't get it. What's the problem? Why can't we just go the shorter way?" Percy looked at the Farmer in confusion but realized that unlike himself Grover would have no reason to know what made the Strait of Zankle so significant.

"The strait is home to two monsters Grover, Kharybdis and Scylla. You know—from the Odyssey."

"Oh? Well… we can just avoid them right, or fight them, I mean we've fought some pretty tough monsters over the past few days." Annabeth scoffed before walking away from the map entirely, she slumped down on the pile of furs that had been Lydia's bed. Her flaxen curls flayed out behind her head as she stretched her legs out with a groan and made herself comfortable.

"There are monsters and then there are Monsters Grover." Percy could hear the capitalization on the second one. "And the Ceaseless Hunger? Absolutely falls into the second category."

"I remember the story," Grover defended. He sounded almost upset, Percy supposed his indignation made sense, even if as a sailor he had known more than most about the sea creatures everyone knew about the pair. Odysseus's journey was one of the earliest stories children learnt, and the perpetual whirlpool/giant six-headed demon combo was pretty memorable. "But we could still handle it, right? Ma Dia, you two killed Skolopendra."

"Please, we got off easy," she cut him down sharply. "Skolopendra is a divine monster, its parents are gods, We were lucky, incredibly lucky, it was weakened somehow. The only way I know how that can happen is if it had just been killed, but that doesn't make sense either, it wouldn't have made it out of Tartarus in that state. Maybe if—"

"'Easy'? 'EASY'!?" Grover was almost hysterical at this point. His chest heaved with every breath and his face started to redden like it did when he got particularly wound up. "It took everything we had to fight it! It wrecked the ship; Percy was out for the whole of the next day." The Raider was inclined to agree, 'fighting' the Leviathan had been brutal, and physically restraining the creature had only resulted in horrible Skill Fatigue; the palms of his hands and his fingers were still raw from it.

Annabeth pinched the bridge of her nose as if to ward off a headache. "Look that's not important right now, just… let's focus on the problem in front of us." Grover reluctantly took a step back but must have agreed because a moment later he was dropping himself onto Lydia's furs alongside the Saboteur. Percy swiped the map up and deposited it into her hands before flopping face down onto the bed next to Grover.

"I got it! Grover bolted upright and shot his fist into the air, "Wait, no… no that doesn't make any sense, never mind." The Farmer sighed again and fell back down, it was a sound he had gotten familiar with over the past few hours. Hours that they had spent thinking out roughly forty-three different ways not to get past Scylla and Kharybdis, forty-four now. Annabeth had mostly been quiet, muttering to herself but not loud enough that they could hear. Whenever he or Grover had an idea she would rip it apart and within minutes they'd be back where they started, with no plan.

"Percy, how are your hands now?" The blonde asked suddenly.

"They're better, it's been a few days and sailing normally doesn't put much strain on me. Why?" She nodded slowly before she pushed off the wall she had been leaning against and began to pace back and forth.

"The main issue is the choice… we have to pick between the two," she began "That's the whole point. To risk ourselves by choosing Scylla the Hunger or to risk Kleo by choosing Kharybdis the Ceaseless" Percy nodded, the concept was familiar to him, the very definition of being caught between a rock and a hard place. Annabeth continued, "So I was thinking, the witch Circe advised Odysseus to pick the Hunger, she told him that it was better to lose the lives of six of his crewmates sating the monster's heads than to potentially lose the whole vessel running afoul of the whirlpool."

"Yes… but we don't have crewmates to just sacrifice. Tch—Should've kept those sailors we captured." Percy posited, still lying on the furs but had rolled face up so his voice wouldn't be muffled by the soft furs. Grover squawked at his words, compassionate enough that he baulked the thought of sacrificing humans—despicable as they may be.

"Can't we just not feed Scylla, just hideout below decks while Percy sails from down here," Grover answered, trying not so subtly to move on from the idea of feeding living beings to an ancient sea monster. Percy considered the idea… it was certainly possible, he'd need to be able to see the lines as he directed them but that could be done even while peeking out of something small.

"I could do it… I couldn't do it from here though, I'd need to be able to watch what I was doing, maybe from inside a barrel near the stern, I could look out a hole or something." Annabeth nodded in agreement before continuing.

"Alright, but that still leaves the main problem. People have tried this before, or at least something like it. And every documented case I can recall of a 'crewless' ship," she made air quotes with her fingers, "ends the same way." Grover gulped at the ominous words.

"By the look on your face… not a good way?" Annabeth nodded grimly. She seemed trapped in her mind at this point, engaging the conversation in a perfunctory manner.

"A very bad way. It boils down to a simple fact: if Scylla's heads don't have suitable targets they'll go after the ship. At that point, we might as well try our luck with Kharybdis. Either way, we're all dead." Annabeth continued to mutter furiously as she paced, tugging on a few strands of her hair as she thought.

"Percy," she called after several minutes of this, jolting him from his wandering daydreams. No, he could not leash the monster and have it drag them across the ocean. "How much rope can you control at once."

"You mean in addition to sailing Kleo right?" at her nod he gave the question some consideration, "My skills care more about work than complexity, to a certain extent I can deal with a lot of moving parts. It becomes instinctive in a way… that's assuming that you're talking about a lot of little things because anything that requires some actual effort behind it is going to take up all of my attention." Percy scratched an itch he had been trying to reach on his back, his mind still on Annabeth's inquiry, "So… it depends really, on what the ropes are doing I mean."

"So, provided you're not pulling a lot of weight, you can handle manipulating a lot of rope at once?" Annabeth smiled for the first time in hours at his confirmation before plopping down in front of them. She pulled a piece of parchment out of… somewhere… and just as quickly had a small length of charcoal in her other hand. "Alright, here's the plan."

Percy found Grover by the stern about an hour later, his thoughts of intricate webs of ropes and lines interrupted by the sight of his friend wrestling with Obelix.

"C'mon, I know neither of us like doing this, but this is important!" Grover finally pinned the squirming ewe between his legs and clacked his blade-shears with his free hand. It would almost be a threatening sight if the Farmer having to wrestle Obelix into submission every time the sheep needed to be sheared wasn't commonplace. Looking at the two side-by-side now it was obvious the ewe had grown leaps and bounds once Grover started to level rapidly, he hadn't really spent much time looking at her in detail before but he was sure that she didn't come up to the Farmer's hips a few weeks ago.

As he watched, Grover grit his teeth and soldiered on with the task given to him by the Saboteur, fighting every inch of the way against a squealing Obelix.

"Oh, quit it! I know you're faking, that's not going to work on me any more." In response, the ewe fell limp, determined to make the job as unpleasant for Grover as it was for her. As Percy watched Grover's eyes glow lit with a flame from within, as the Farmer activated Harvest. There was no verbal sign but it was clear that he was using that particular skill, the amount of shorn wool falling off the sheep was very clearly more than it should be.

By the end, Grover released his companion, who shot off like an arrow, and started to gather the enormous pile of wool left behind, roughly thrice as much as one would expect. He spoke up, no longer wary of distracting his friend.

"I got Pyla onboard by the way, managed to hoist her up with some rope then lowered her into the hold, she should be fine until we can let her out again… You're getting better at that, by the way." Percy pointed at the pile with his chin, Grover hummed in response. "Used to be you could only push Harvest to double gains." Grover nodded before frowning. He opened his mouth but didn't say anything. Percy waited, long since used to giving his friend some time to gather himself before he spoke.

"I'm glad there's some indication, I've levelled five times since we left Montauk and I have nothing to show for it." He gestured up at his title. "My skills are stronger for sure, but what would my dad say? Twenty levels, seventeen years and no class to show for it." He sighed despondently. Percy thumped him on the shoulder.

"Don't worry about it. It'll happen when it happens man. Besides it's not all bad, I'm still dreading the conversation my mom's going to have with me when she sees my class." Grover smiled softly at the idea of his mom imperiously questioning exactly what her baby was doing to class as a raider. Grover patted the hand on his shoulder, nodding to him.

"It'll happen when it happens." He finished gathering the shorn material into a single sack and threw it over his shoulder, "I'm just glad my skills are being put to use now, not all of us can fight terrifying sea creatures with magic ropes." He smiled wryly and left in Annabeth's direction. Percy winced at the self-deprecation but put it aside for now, they still had to prepare.

Percy stood at the helm of Kleo, his hands clutched at the railing as he watched Grover and Annabeth move the last of the puppets into position. The blonde raised a hand to the sky with her thumb up to signal that everything was in order, Percy cupped his hand around his mouth and yelled out across the ship.

"Okay! We're all set, get to your places guys." Grover dashed off below decks, his responsibility was to watch the animals so they didn't make too much of a fuss while crossing over, their silence was key to the plan. Annabeth rolled her eyes at his instruction and kicked her feet into attention, she brought her hand in a fist to slam over her chest in a salute.

"Aye-aye, Captain." Percy's ears burnt at the sarcasm but he shooed her off behind Grover, with everything ready all that was left was for him to thread the lines and set their course towards the strait. They'd drifted closer but he'd taken care to make sure they wouldn't get to the twinned creatures before they were ready.

Percy lifted the heavy lid off of a barrel and vaulted into it, he brought the lid back over his head and lowered it into place. As he adjusted himself to make sure it was comfortable— as comfortable as he could be hunched over and stuffed in a box— he made sure that he could still see out of the rough hole Annabeth had cut into the wooden side. Peering through the jagged-edged puncture Percy reached for Trimming and Knots. Lines across Kleo flexed and danced into place. The ropes for sailing adjusted their course northward toward the barely visible gap in the land, and the newly added ropes tied to the railing through small holes until he pulled them taut.

Across the deck of the ship, a crew of puppets rose in the same instant. Their puffy straw and wool-filled bodies began to move about, pulled by the ropes this way and that in an approximation of movement. Percy looped the motions, leaving them repeating every so often, from a distance it would look to all the world that an industrious group of men was sailing the vessel.

He forced a grin on his face to fight off some of his worries, a lot of this was dependent on him and his ability to make the dummies look like they were alive. Percy refocused his attention on the sailing lines, the faster they put Scylla and Kharybdis behind them the better.

Percy heard them first. During their approach through the Strait, the monsters themselves were obscured by land formations and mist, but the sounds they made boomed across the water in waves of force that rattled his teeth.

As Kleo drew closer to the end of the channel, closer to the legends on the far side, their guttural cries became more distinct. Within a half-hour, he saw them in all their… un-glory.

On the western side, he could make out rows and rows of fins ringing around a geyser, like a shiver of sharks circling thrashing prey. Suddenly the water receded, and as the fins rose above the surface Percy saw them for what they were, teeth. Just as suddenly as the ocean drained it was back, jetting from the centre of the whirlpool with unbridled energy. A wall of sound followed it, seeming to his ears like a thousand waterfalls pouring into his head. In the distance, above the spraying mist, he could make out a label in purple.

Kharybdis, Ceaseless.

Discomforted by the sheer presence of the force of nature he shifted inside the barrel to face the eastern shore, but any hope of finding solace was dashed at the inhuman sight waiting there. On a pillar of stone jutting out of the tides rested what Percy could only describe as a canvas of agony. It was a woman's face, though twisted by pain and rage to the point where it was barely recognizable as human. The terror's head was lodged in a body that stretched painfully across its resting place like someone had come along and winched it taut to dry in the sun. Its face's green tinge only made the bleeding, cracked skin around its lipless mouth more grotesque. Topping the torso of nightmares was… hair… writhing in the form of six enormous serpentine heads. They thrashed back and forth, the toxic green-scaled lengths of flesh crashing into each other without care. Every few seconds, a serpent would deposit something in the face's torn maw, plucking detritus from the waters around the pillar and even from the air whenever Kharybdis spewed debris into the sky. It was half-obscured by the twisting draconian necks, but Percy could still make out her label.

Scylla, Hunger.

Percy directed Kleo slightly starboard, by bordering Kharybdis' range they would pass within Scylla's but the plan hinged on staying within that range for as short a time as possible. As they neared the monsters the racket grew worse, violently shaking the entire ship in irregular intervals. Percy was able to make out the fanged hydra heads of Scylla dripping with slime and decided it was best to start gaining speed now.

Closing in on the pair was the most nerve-wracking thing he had ever done in his life. Percy was relying mostly on feel to guide Kleo around the edge of the Ceaseless' reach, the hole in the side of the barrel proving ineffective in revealing anything beyond the sliding lines of the ship. He knew when she started to list they'd strayed too close to the perpetual whirlpool and so he forced the sails into position to catch the wind and force them east.

The wind in the Strait was already rough, funnelled through a narrow gap between two landmasses, but the shifting waters underneath threw it into chaos. As the ship moved forward the sky began to twist and darken, thunder joining the ramping cacophony. Percy plugged his fingers in his ears, desperately trying to focus on keeping Kleo within their narrow breadth of relative safety while maintaining the puppets' movement. Scylla screamed, human keening layered over typical draconic roars. Percy watched out of the corner of his eye as the hydra hair cocked back.

It was over in an instant, five heads—each large enough to swallow a canoe—had snapped shut around a fourth of the dummies. As they retracted the one lagging behind slammed into the ship. Percy wasn't sure exactly what caused it, it may have been a sudden motion of the puppet or a miscalculation on the part of the serpent, but the bony snout collided with the deck and his entire world flipped.

Percy groped blindly with some rope, struggling to get his barrel back upright and facing the right way. The Kleo was in bad shape… again. The impact had rocked the vessel, violent waves flooding it with seawater. The point of contact had cratered, the wood simply unable to stand against the force of the behemoth's attack. Percy watched through the newly made hole as Annabeth and Grover scrambled away, his friend trying to calm the animals while Annabeth herded them out of sight.

He reasserted control over the puppets quickly, making sure that the illusion persisted. Thankfully Kleo's speed was unaffected, and they would be out of range before Scylla could make a second pass. Percy got to work on bailing water, extra ropes—already broken up by knots— coiled at the sides of the deck sprung into action. They wound around spare buckets, heaving the contents overboard, making use of every available tool in the effort.

Percy breathed with relief as Kleo exited the strait. He knocked the top off the bucket and clawed his way out to a rapidly clearing sky, even as the warmth of levelling climbed up his body.

PERSEUS

Lvl. 20 Raider

Aspects

Mnd: 32

Bdy: 61

Brh: 45

Sol: 52

Rkn: 69

Passive: Shorelegs

The ground feels unsteady; instantly adjust for full movement.

Skills

Knots: It's said that a practised hand can tie a proper knot in an instant. A true sailor doesn't stop honing his technique until he surpasses this legendary expertise.

Trimming: A masterful sailor can control his ship as if it was a muscle. Rather than shaping the sail one line at a time, he can adjust them all without ever leaving the helm.

Gather Dread: The horns of battle forewarned hapless victims of their inescapable doom.

Drain: Either in barrels, bowls or their tightly cupped hands, every seafarer gets used to moving water.

Glossary

Circe — Enchantress, the immortal witch dwells on the island of Corse and has a habit of transforming visitors into pigs.

Corse — An island to the west of Italia; It lies to the north of Ikhnusa and the west of the Ionios and it is home to the legendary witch Circe.

Golden Drachmae — Plural form of Drachma: Large golden coins; Currency of the divine.

Ikhnusa — An island to the west of Italia. It lies to the south of Corse and the west of the Ionios. It is sometimes called Sardegna.

Ionios — The body of water that lies between Italia and Hellas, it is also known as the Ionian Sea.

Italia — A large peninsula west of Hellas (Greece).

Ithaka — The island birthplace of Odysseus located in the Bay of Korinth; This once-thriving nation now lies abandoned.

Kephalonia — An island in the Bay of Korinth; It lies to the west of Ithaka.

Kharybdis — Ceaseless; Daughter of Pontus and Gaia: appears as a Whirlpool north of Sicilia; One half of the Ceaseless Hunger.

Odysseus — Adventurer; Legendary hero of the Trojan war, Odysseus gained fame not only for his actions on the battlefield but the epic journey he took afterwards to return to his wife.

Podes — The pluralised form of Pous, 'Foot': Ancient Greek unit of measurement; Equivalent to the foot.

Sea of Monsters — The sea bordered by Italia to the east, Sicilia to the south and Ikhnusa to the west; Ringed with impenetrable walls of fog—access can only be gained at certain places like

Scylla — Hunger; Naiad daughter of Keto, cursed and trapped on the southern tip of Italia: Six-headed sea monster; One half of the Ceaseless Hunger.

Sicilia — An island to the southwest of Italia. It lies to the south of the Ionios. It is sometimes called Sardegna.

Skolopendra — Leviathan; The Largest of the Sea-Monsters; Child of Keto and Phorkys.

Zankle Strait — The narrow body of water bordered on either side by Italia and Sicilia; It is an entrance to the Sea of Monsters and hosts the Ceaseless Hunger.

A/N: Hello hello! Once more this chapter was down to the wire. The habit one I'd like to avoid for as long as possible given how big this project is planned to be. In fact, I'm going to go get started on my next chapter right now.

That's a lie… could you tell it was a lie?

Let's be real, we're gonna be right back here next time around.

Chapter-wise, there was some cool stuff, but I'm still chasing that perfect blend of action, plot and world-building. I'll get it eventually.

Happy reading :)

—Boots