Chapter 3: I untangle a puzzle

POV: Annabeth

I couldn't believe that Seaweed Brain. It was like I didn't just tell him not even fifteen minutes earlier that he should try to not royally piss of Dionysus. But does he ever listen?

His fatal flaw is supposed to be personal loyalty? I should give my mother a piece of my mind next time we meet. Personal loyalty and self-sacrifice were more like a job description for heroes. Percy had a problem that was much worse than being too loyal.

If I had to name it, I would say his flaw is not liking to be restrained.

Percy was like a body of water and everyone else were stones. Depending on their power they would be bigger or smaller stones, like mortals being nothing more than pebbles, and gods being these mountain-sized boulders. Percy had started out as a small puddle before he entered camp, but afterward, it rapidly grew, and now he was powerful enough to be considered as a small sea. Throwing stones into this water would make ripples. Depending on the size of the stone and the strength of the throw, they would be bigger or smaller. In the beginning, every stone thrown would create a strong reaction from him. Now? Only god-sized boulders could normally get a rise out of him.

And get a rise out of him they did. How often had he almost died, had made things more difficult for saying his mind to one of the gods? Percy hated bullies and I knew he would always stand up to them. Unfortunately for us, the biggest bullies just happen to be all-powerful immortal beings.

Not that I could fault him, really. It wasn't as if anything he said wasn't true. The heroes of old sounded a lot like the gods of today acted. And after all that stuff we had gone through because some of the gods just couldn't be bothered to care for anyone but themselves? Somebody had to be the one pointing the obvious problems out. I just wished it didn't need to be Percy.

Next to me, Chiron sighed. He dropped his cards, revealing a winning hand he didn't get to play.

"That was not wise, child," he said.

I snorted. "You don't have to be a child of Athena to realize that. Maybe you should explain to him about the gods again, Chiron. He doesn't seem to have gotten what not to do yet," I said, giving Percy a pointed look, resulting in him giving me a guilty smile. It made it pretty hard to pretend I was angry with him.

"Sorry?" he offered.

"This is serious," Chiron said. "Please be more careful about what you say, and try to control your temper. Mr. D didn't seem really mad, more like you annoyed him, but most other gods would not let you get away with something like this. The rules we have here aren't to make your lives more difficult, but to minimize the risks of accidentally offending one of the gods. At the moment they are quite – ahh… temperamental, is the best word I believe. Please promise me you will follow the rules while here."

Yeah, temperamental was quite an interesting way to describe the gods being close to one of the worst godly wars in centuries. Percy did promise Chiron he would be careful, but I knew it was not a promise he would be able to hold onto for long. It just wasn't in his nature.

"So, the gods," Chiron said. "I hope you do at least know who they are, I would really hate to think you did not learn anything in my course. What do you not understand yet, Percy?"

"How about you start why they are so temperamental?" I tried to sound as innocent as possible.

Chiron only gave me a look, cleared his throat, and tried to steer the subject in a different direction. Which was fine with me, we already knew the reason, we had lived through it after all. And what he began to talk about was exactly what I was interested in.

"Ahem, how about I explain to you how the gods move with the heart of the West?"

Percy seemed to have gotten what I was trying to do, because he pretended to have no idea what that meant. I listened closely what exactly it was that Chiron would say.

"The what?"

"Come now, Percy. What you call 'Western civilization'. Do you think it's just an abstract concept? No, it's a living force. A collective consciousness that has burned bright for thousands of years. The gods are part of it. You might even say they are the source of it, or at least, they are tied so tightly to it that they couldn't possibly fade, not unless all of Western civilization were obliterated. The fire started in Greece. Then, the heart of the fire moved to Rome, and so did the gods. Oh, different names, perhaps—Jupiter for Zeus, Venus for Aphrodite, and so on—but the same forces, the same gods."

"And then they died."

"Died? No. Did the West die? The gods simply moved, to Germany, to France, to Spain, for a while. Wherever the flame was brightest, the gods were there. They spent several centuries in England. All you need to do is look at the architecture. People do not forget the gods. Every place they've ruled, for the last three thousand years, you can see them in paintings, in statues, on the most important buildings. And yes, Percy, of course, they are now in your United States. Look at your symbol, the eagle of Zeus. Look at the statue of Prometheus in Rockefeller Center, the Greek facades of your government buildings in Washington. I defy you to find any American city where the Olympians are not prominently displayed in multiple places. Like it or not—and believe me, plenty of people weren't very fond of Rome, either—America is now the heart of the flame. It is the great power of the West. And so Olympus is here. And we are here."

"I have a question," I jumped in. "How does that work? I mean, how exactly does the heart move? From what you said – and it wouldn't really make any sense the other way around – it sounded as if it is the gods who move, and the heart follows. But how do they decide to move somewhere? Does the council vote? But then, I can't really believe they would be able to come to an agreement. Fighting it out sounds more likely, and there was the fight between the Big Three in World War 2. When did the heart move to America?"

I mean, I had always assumed it moved to America relatively early on, because I knew some of the important people in our history were demigods. But Nico and Bianca were born in Italy, so either way, there didn't seem to be any problems with them having children outside of the nation the heart was in. And well, the United States are a lot bigger than the area of ancient Greece and the other nations Chiron named had been, so the sphere they can influence shouldn't be too small.

I could see Chiron's discomfort at the question. Good. That meant there was most likely something I asked he couldn't tell us.

"I wouldn't know the procedure of a decision of such importance, my dear," Chiron evaded. "But you are right in that the decision came after the war. Now enough of this subject. Come, let's meet the other campers."

I can't remember what exactly happened afterward. I followed as Chiron was showing Percy around camp, but I was hardly listening to anything they said. My mind was working in overdrive.

Chiron might not have outright said it, but it was practically a given that the gods did decide after a major conflict. The battle of Troy had to be one of them. But it couldn't be that easy, there was that dream after all.

The man in golden armor surely was Ares. It wasn't hard to figure out what it was that he had done. The stories clearly describe how the Greeks had lost themselves, had defiled temples, and had shown hubris before the gods and insulted them. Almost none of them survived the gods' anger on their way home.

But that can't be all there is to it. If the conflict had been between moving to Troy or staying with the Greek, what was Zeus planning? He knew that there was a prophecy that already foretold Troy's Fall beforehand. Troy fell and their people fled to Italy, being the ones who would later found Rome. The Greeks won but lost the favor of the gods.

So, does that meant the gods had gone to Rome after that? True, there was godly interference to make sure that the ancestor of the Romans, Aeneas, survived. But that couldn't be right, because the Romans did not gain in power for quite some time afterward. That would mean that neither side had won?

But what had been Zeus' plan, if he knew all this beforehand? His repayment to Ares was clearly Mars taking over as the most important war deity, leaving my mother only Wisdom. And Hera became extremely important to the Romans as well. Since he knew, I can assume Zeus wanted neither side to win, but then what? The conflict between Greeks and Romans can't be important enough to still have influence today, there must be something else, something important that I'm missing.

What all had been said? A split in two. Titans falling asleep and awakening again. The Great Stirring. The gods would suffer. Some acting erratic, some calm. Another side to the gods. The history of western civilization. The aftermath still visible today. Troy. Greeks and Romans. Where is the connection between all this? It was like a bunch of strings entangled in each other, all I had to do was find a way to disentangle them.

I was throwing ideas around my head, still not getting the solution. Did I still miss something?

My mind came to an abrupt halt when the clearing of the cabins came into few and Chiron said something about the Greek buildings. Greek? Why Greek? Why are we not American demigods, but Greek ones? The gods changed themselves and their names when they went to Rome, so why not now? And why did they return to their beginning?

Wait.

Where it started, where it ended, and where it went in between, she had said. Was Greece really their beginning? There is not a lot known from the time before, because only few sources survived till now, but…. Yes, but. I remembered reading about something. In Anatolia, just to the east of Greece and Troy, there was the Hittite Empire. I found it interesting, because of the little we know about their religion, there are similarities between their religion and their neighboring nations.

Similarities with Greek mythology.

This can't be the truth, right? That's too crazy.

The puzzle disentangled before my eyes.

But it did make too much sense. The Empire was founded around the time the first demigods supposedly appeared, and they collapsed right around the time the Fall of Troy happened? How much of a coincidence would that be? They were the first, or rather one of the first ones. History showed that there existed several civilizations before them after all. The "cradle of civilization", where the first western civilizations emerged is close to this area too. It wouldn't be a stretch to assume that the "cradle of civilization" and the "heart of the west" were the same thing. The connection between the gods and mortals, which was responsible for creating our civilization. Connected to each other, both would fall when one of them did. And we demigods were acting as the bridge between the two. It was the principle that Chiron had explained, what we had experienced during the battle of Manhattan.

The battle of Troy was the battle that would decide where to move to between Greece and Troy, but the gods didn't decide on either of the two options. They tried to do both, only, it didn't work out as intended.

They split in two, Roman and Greek.

I didn't know exactly how strong this split was, how it worked for the gods and the world. But I could assume that the reason the titans, and the other old monsters from the time before humanity fell asleep, was because of this.

The Great Stirring is happening right now. If they are waking up, does that mean that the split was healed? Or maybe they are trying to fix it? Was that the reason for the gods' erratic behavior? Then what about those who are acting calm? What had Zeus' goal been? Why had he acted in secret and what was he hiding? If we are Greek, does that mean there are demigods that are Roman too? If yes, where were they all this time?

There were still too many questions left unanswered. And I knew I couldn't get the answers with the information I had. Neither did I think one of the gods or Chiron would voluntarily give the information I sought.

I had to be patient for now. If they would not give us the information we were seeking voluntarily, we just had to trick or force them into giving it. Luckily, I knew exactly from which god we could get the information. A god that had helped Zeus in orchestrating the entire situation in secret. A god that would be a major hurdle on the quest I knew we would find ourselves soon on. A god we would soon meet in person.

Ares, the God of War.