I woke up with a throbbing headache. I hadn't had any dreams.

You're already living your worst nightmare

Charlie. I jumped up, wincing slightly at the pain in my back. I spun around wildly. There was nothing but jagged rocks.

"No, no, no, no. Charlie? Charlie!" There was no answer. My voice echoed. "CHARLIE!" I didn't care if I was attracting monsters by yelling. There was no trace of Charlie.

He's already dead

My breathing got short and frantic and I found it hard to breathe. It felt like the world was spinning. My vision became blurry. I heard myself mutter incoherently but I didn't recognize saying anything. I knew I was having a panic attack, but I didn't think about doing anything to stop it. I was alone. In Tartarus.

You will never leave.

Not without Charlie I wouldn't. I focused on something else. I knew it doesn't sound like it would help, but I focused on my physical pain instead of thinking about Charlie. I needed to break out of this before I could do anything. So I began taking deep breaths and did math in my head. I counted the number of places I was feeling pain and multiplied that by the level of how painful it was, then divided that by how many monsters had attacked us, then I used that to find the percentage of time we'd spent in tartarus being attacked by monsters.

72%. The rest of the time we spent at Damasen's cabin and walking and sleeping. After my sad math breakthrough, I stood up. My mom taught me the technique to use math to cope with anxiety. When I found myself getting uncontrollably nervous to the point of a panic attack, I would find a math problem and work on it. By the time I was done, my mind had gotten too focused on the math to freak out about the reason I was panicking.

I started jogging in the direction Charlie had been taken. In my panic, I hadn't noticed that Charlie had left a trail. Not the kind of trail I would have preferred him to leave.

It was blood. Charlie had been viciously bitten in the shoulder and the beast's hooked talons and become stuck in his body so it could drag him away. I hoped he still had Damasen's herbs.

I jogged until I was too exhausted, then slowed a walk. I was not going to sleep until I found him.

Then you're never sleeping again.

I imagined myself walking endlessly, never finding what I was searching for. I'd become just another soul stuck here forever. I'd never stop looking.

Then, the trail ended.

He's dead

There we no more blood, which I hoped was a good thing. But that also meant I had no trail to follow.

A few feet away I noticed a strange looking rock and went to investigate. As I got closer I noticed it wasn't a rock at all. It was a homemade Drakon pelt loafer. I picked up Charlie's shoe and kept going.

I walked for hours. I didn't have any plan of stopping. My thoughts became worse and worse until I had nearly lost hope. There was nothing to make me believe that Charlie was alive. I saw how those monsters tore apart the empousa, what hope did Charlie have?

He probably died in the same way

There is no reason for them to keep him alive.

You know he is dead

Just give up

I kept walking. There was no proof he was dead. He couldn't have left a trail if he was dead, so I knew he was alive when they took off with him. And when they first saw us, they treated him like a child, not like a meal. Maybe there was a reason they took him.

Yeah, to eat him.

They probably killed him when they arrived to their destination

Which was where? Where would these monsters possibly be going with Charlie?

The question is not where they went 'with Charlie,' he was just food for the journey.

If that was true, then the monsters were heading to the crack. So if I lost their trail, I could just find another monster to follow until I found them.

You won't find him alive.

But I wasn't going to stop. I promised I was never going to leave him and I wasn't going to break that promise. It was an oath to keep with the final breath, and I don't care how many breaths away that was if it meant finding him alive.