A quick choice


Annabeth had been right: Bianca didn't like the plan, she didn't like it at all. Or at least that will be what she'd say when asked about it.

Her hands ached, her arms occasionally trembled, and her feet were murdering her: following the indications of the daughter of Athena, the last demigod to join the Adamas had climbed up one of the irregular walls of Polyphemus' abode, crack after nook after cranny, Bianca had managed to bring herself just under the ceiling, and she was now in the odd position of needing to transition from the more or less secure hold she had on the stone, to the still unknown roots that had irregularly pierced the top of the cave following Charles' tune.

And of course, she had to do it all while keeping her torchlight from flashing upon the head of the sleeping cyclops, least the sudden beam of light woke the creature before it was time, costing their chances to achieve what only Jason had accomplished.

Slowly and carefully, tucking away her torchlight after memorizing the next steps, Bianca stretched herself above the vertiginous fall in the dark until her right hand met a rough wooden surface, and already feeling the strain accumulate in her left arm, she pushed off the wall.

For a fraction of a second, she was suspended in the dark, with only a hand and the direction of her own jump to prevent her from falling to her death.

In that moment, she found herself thinking furiously at the raw dose of adventure that she had gotten since choosing to follow Icarus, and with her heart beating loudly in her chest, her breath heavy but not yet ragged, she found herself smiling in the dark: she had never felt so alive.

For every step of her ascension, she held her life in her own two hands, and every mistake could signify the end. It was thrilling in a way that completely outclassed the fear inherent in her every choice: never before had it been so clear that she could die at any moment, and she loved every second of it.

Then her push achieved what she had planned for, and the rest of her body crashed against the wood, her feet landing where she had planned and her free hand already pushing forward to the next step. After a couple of seconds, she managed to slip around the root that had punctured almost vertically the ceiling of Polyphemus' cave, and she climbed up to a more or less horizontal section of the wood, her arms trembling lightly while she took deep gulps of air.

While she rested, she looked on the floor in order to take in the situation from the safety of her position, and surely enough, she spotted the occasional appearance of Annabeth's flashlight, which she used just as sparingly while she sneaked her way up to Polyphemus' head, where they had spotted the presence of the fabled Golden Fleece.

She carefully made a knot around the root and unrolled a length of rope that led to the floor, as she'd need a quick escape route once she was done with her part of the plan, and climbing twenty meters downward in the darkness of the cave wasn't the wise way to do so.

Up there, she could only hear the constant, rumbling mess that was the cyclops' snoring, and her own breath, which passed by her lips slower and slower, until she recovered fully from the effort of the climbing. But not all of the time between Annabeth's uses of her torchlight was spent in the dark: once she decided that she had rested enough, Bianca lit her own torch and started to map out the roots that were hanging just above Polyphemus' lower half.

This part was slightly less thrilling than the climb itself, but Bianca enjoyed it too: she had to figure out a way to accomplish what Annabeth had envisioned, and a mistake here could cost more than her own life, since once the two got started with the actual theft of the Golden Fleece, there would be no time to think, and no second chances.

With the same care that she had exercised to reach the top of the wall, she moved from root to root, a couple of daggers becoming handy as she occasionally used them to stab the bark where no grips existed, so that she could move without contortions worthy of a circus, and she finally reached the roots that were placed directly above the feet of the cyclops.

Once in position, she was quick to cut deep grooves into the roots, angling them in a way that could accommodate the vials that Hailey had left them, basically turning them from random explosives into shaped charges that would, hopefully at least, make the wood fall loudly on the feet of the cyclops.

She had barely finished her work when Annabeth flashed her torchlight in the agreed manner, signaling that she was ready to act: by now, she had managed to tie a rope to the part of the Fleece that was visible beneath the coarse hair of Polyphemus, and she had likely used a combination of knots and weights to make sure that in the instant the cyclops woke, startled by the mess that Bianca would unleash, the daughter of Athena would get their prize in a manner of fractions of a second.

With a deep breath, Bianca removed herself from the explosive mess that she had readied, dragging behind a single thread that linked her to one of the vials' stopper: once she felt she was far enough from the trap, she'd spring it, and then she simply had to run back to the beginning of the cave to regroup with Annabeth and disappear before the enormous creature splattered them on the walls.


A few meters from the head of Polyphemus, Annabeth waited with her heart hammering in her chest: her left hand was hovering just over the strained rope that she had managed to tie at the Golden Fleece and an unstable rock nearby, while her right held the dagger that Luke had gifted her years before.

She had given the signal, now she only had to wait, and her hyperactive mind was determined to go over each step she'd need to return to the beginning of the cave as quickly and stealthily as she could once the Golden Fleece reached her hands.

She stood perfectly still, the forced patience of a hunter waiting to spring a trap was the only thing that kept her from fidgeting: she was thrilled beyond measure, excited beyond reason, and if there was the faintest light in the cave, she knew that her grey eyes would sparkle with joy. She was about to accomplish something that only Jason and Odysseus had achieved, she was about to become a legend.

This would be enough to overwrite the mess with Prometheus, and nobody on the Adamas would ever look down on her or Bianca because of their age: Odysseus of manifold wit had tricked the cyclops once, avenging the deaths of his men, who had been eaten raw by the creature. As a son of Poseidon, like all the other monsters of his ilk, Annabeth also hoped that the enormous roots would be enough to break at least one of Polyphemus' ankles, and once Icarus recovered enough of his health, it wouldn't be too hard to ask him to actually mount a war against the cyclops. We did it for the Laestrygonians after all.

It happened in an instant: a crackling rumble exploded above the legs of Polyphemus, and in the dark, Annabeth felt the ground tremble, both because the cyclops had jerked awake and was already lifting his head from the Golden Fleece, which darted towards the daughter of Athena with the same speed that the rock it was tied to was falling at.

And a second later, the startled groan of the just awoken cyclops turned into a pained roar.

But Annabeth was already retreating: a single slash of her dagger had been enough to cut free her prize from the rope she had readied, and with the insane precision that the mind of a daughter of Athena was capable of, she was retracing the precise sequence of steps that would lead her to the crack in the wall, and to the freedom beyond it.

She couldn't run, even with her extraordinary memory she couldn't risk falling in the dark: the uneven ground was challenge enough, but the roar of the cyclops didn't help, and neither did his frustrated punches at everything that surrounded him.

"WHO DARES?!" the cyclops thundered in the enclosed space of the cave, and his powerful voice echoed a thousand times across the walls and the uneven floor, striking almost like a physical blow against Annabeth's balance: she stumbled and fell, scraping the uncovered skin of her right palm on the rock before rising once more and forcing herself to maintain the calm.

Already, she could feel the Fleece's influence: her skin was healing, and she didn't feel tired: her muscles were rejuvenated, and she fancied that even in the dark, the faint golden presence of her prize was enough to show her the way.

Soon enough, she was at the crack in the wall that led to the exit, and she stopped, her eyes darting around in the dark and her ears trying to pierce that cacophony caused by the raging cyclops, she was hoping that Bianca would arrive soon, hopefully before...

"WHAT IS THIS SMELL? A HUMAN? NO, A DEMIGOD!" with a great movement of the air that answered to the standing of the cyclops, Annabeth understood that he was going to check the entirety of his cave.

Before that. she grimaced and adjusted the Golden Fleece around her shoulders, the soft weight of the warm vellum making her sigh as her body thrummed with energy: she could run without stopping for the rest of her life with that, she knew it. C'mon Bianca, where are you? In the chaos that Polyphemus was making, she wouldn't have heard a cry for help, or her approach. The only thing she could do...

"Well, you should run!" a hopeful voice whispered quickly.

"But what about Bianca?" a fearful tone surrounded that question, and the voice differed from the first only in the way that the image in a mirror differed from reality. She could point out that one wasn't real, but for the life of her she couldn't tell which was the true one.

Annabeth whirled on herself, giving her back to the raging cyclops and spotting immediately the one who had scared her: sitting cross-legged next to the crack in the wall that led outside, there was a boy.

He was maybe her age, dressed with tattered blue jeans and a small beige trenchcoat that reached his thighs, and with a frown, the daughter of Athena realized that she could see him clearly despite the lack of light to show his form. Only then, almost as the punchline of a joke, she did notice that the kid had two faces.

"You are lucky that he decided to not swap his sheep for the carnivorous ones of Gerion, you know." The face on the left smirked thoughtfully while the other kept looking around in fright.

"Who are you?" but even as she asked, she knew the answer, after all, despite his strange choice of looking like a kid with dark hair, there weren't that many myths about a two-faced being.

"You have a choice ahead of you." the face on the right, the fearful one, spoke quickly, his eyes darting around as if he was expecting an ambush at any moment: "To venture back in the cave and try to find and help Bianca, who should already have been here, or to run away with your prize."

"THIEVES!" the cyclops realized that the Fleece had disappeared, and the crashing of wood being slammed against unyielding rock intensified.

"Well?" Janus left face forward with a wide smile on one face and a pleading expression on the other, "Polyphemus awoke and already seeks both you and your companion. Will you run away in time to save Icarus, or will you risk it all to brave the darkness?"

The gargantuan being at the deep end of the cave roared his rage, and Annabeth shook with indecision: she had no news on Bianca, but using her torch would bring onto her the attention of the cyclops, and so she'd have to seek her out by actually searching the cave, all the while avoiding the sheep that would give away her position and the random hammering of Polyphemus, who, by the sound of things, was punching everything around him with a mad rage.

She'd be more useful to Bianca by forcing the cyclops to open the cave, and by delivering the Fleece to Icarus, who could then mount a rescue mission, after all she couldn't doubt him, not after all that he had accomplished.

"Polyphemus!" she shouted as she started to slip in the crack in the wall, "I am Annabeth, daughter of Athena, and I've stolen the Golden Fleece!"

Her voice rang across the cave and was drowned by the enraged shout of the cyclops, but the youngest member of the Adamas kept shouting as she snuck away: "I'm already leaving your cave, if you want to find me, you'll have to search the hills!"

After that she ran, ignoring the twin, distorted laughter of Janus.


AN

A bit more character development of both Bianca and Annabeth, as well as the return of our old friend Janus, which I decided to keep popping around for the rest of this part of the fic, only to massively underline when a moment is so important it will have far-reaching consequences.

As you see there is a bit of incongruence between how I showed him to Annabeth's eyes, and how he looked like to Icarus back in chapter 16, that is still part of the solution I'm building to differentiate how each demigod, or mortal, for that matter, perceives the divine, which is something that annoyed me back when I read Percy Jackson, given that the target for that novels just pre-teen or early-teen kids.

Besides a few moments, I wanted more Gravitas in Riordan's books, something that it's hard to achieve when the Valhalla is reduced to a hotel and Atlas to a dumb-brute.

So, how did the chapter go? I know you're all more interested in Icarus, but I cannot hope to manage a story of this magnitude without some screen-time dedicated to other characters, and I wanted to give something to Annabeth and Bianca to make them more than landscape for the MC. I may be too late for that, but I'll eventually do the same with Thalia and... others. You'll see.

This is what the previous chapter had been building up for, I hope I didn't disappoint.

The rhythm of the events in the previous current and following chapter is the true experiment I wanted to play with, and better to place it now at the end of the Odissey Arc than in the next ones, in which there is a fuckton of stuff going on with a very strict timeline.

So, as always, Opinions? Hopes?

(also, I've got a few Marvel fics going on, and my approach to the Norse pantheon is a bit more Mythical than the one of the movies, so if you like how I deal with divinity and whatnot, you're likely to enjoy those works too)


I'm reminding everyone that I've got my personal website where you can drop off a donation if you have the means and will to do so, and where you can download most of my fanfiction in a pdf format: cloud9stories dot net.