Hey guys! Whasssup?

The strangest thing happened the other day. We had a coyote warning in my school. I didn't even know we had such thing as a coyote warning. So apparently there was one wandering around outside. I guess we have things like that in Canada.

So I'm going to stop telling you about my fucked up life and get on with the story.

We las left off when Thalia and the gang have just set up camp and went to sleep. It is now morning.

Hope you like it!

Thalia POV

A sliver of light met my eyes. It was blinding. I scrunched my eyes shut and slowly opened them again to get used to the blinding sun. it was morning now. Thankfully, I actually had a dreamless sleep for once, which was kind of surprising. Not that I was complaining though.

I slowly pushed myself off of the cold sand and out from underneath my blanket. I saw that Clarrise was awake and rummaging through her things, which were of course were really little.

Clarrise being up early wasn't the only strange thing though. I looked around and realized that I couldn't see Nico anywhere. At first I was a little worried about where he had gone, but I came to the conclusion that Nico could more than likely take care of himself if something happened to him.

As I was rustling around with my blanket, Clarrise had noticed that I woke.

"Morning." She said curtly. I nodded toward her and she then went back to whatever she was doing.

Grover and Rachel were both still asleep. Grover and Rachel were both still asleep. Grover seemed to be sleeping soundly under his blanket. Though, Rachel didn't seem to appear that way. When I turned to see how she was doing, I saw that she was tossing and turning, tangling the blankets all around her. I went over to her and tried to wake her up.

"Rachel. Hey Rachel." I tried to shake her gently, but it didn't seem like she wanted to wake up. It looked like she was having a nightmare.

I called Clarrise over to help me. She walked over and knelt down beside me.

"Rachel. Rachel!" She said as she roughly shook her shoulder.

She looked at me and shrugged when it didn't work.

"What's going on?" I heard someone say groggily behind me. It was Grover. It seemed that us trying to wake Rachel up had woken him.

I heard him shuffle around as he came out from under his blanket.

"Grover, get over here and help us wake up Rachel."
"All right, all right. Just let me wake up…" Grover said, sounding a bit annoyed.

I turned back to Rachel and saw that she was thrashing around even more.

"N-no!" She muttered.

Just as Grover was about to join us, Rachel shot up from the ground.

"NO!" She shouted.

Grover, Clarrise and I backed up a few spaces to give her some space. She was breathing in shot gasps, as if breathing was a labour. We didn't say anything for a few minutes, waiting for her to calm down.

Once she did calm down, she looked up at us in surprise as if she had just realized that we were right in front of her.

"What happened?" I asked her.

"It was the oracle," She mumbled quietly.

"The oracle?" Grover asked, nervously.

I scrunched my eyebrows. "What prophecy did she spew this time?"

"There was no prophecy." Rachel looked up at us with an expression of bewilderment on her face.

"What?" Clarrsse asked in shock.

"In fact, she wasn't even there. I only heard her voice."

"What did she say?" I asked curtly

"Nothing except for one line: Go to the forest. There was no riddle or anything."

"Forest? I don't see how there can be a forest in the middle of a desert. That seems like enough of a riddle to me." Clarrise said, accusingly.

"No, I mean like prophecy type riddles." Rachel countered.

"That's true…" I said thoughtfully. "Maybe the Oracle is directing us to go to a forest here. Its not like we would've known that there was one here in the first place.

"Exactly." Rachel agreed.

"Okay…if you guys say so." Grover said hesitantly.

"But how do we get there?" I contemplated.

"I-I don't know. The Oracle didn't tell me anything else." Rachel replied.

Just as Rachel said that, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a dark shadow forming in the middle of the bright dessert. I knew what that meant. Nico.

Rachel, Grover and Clarrise noticed as well and we walked over to where the shadow was forming. Not soon after, the dark shadow materialized into Nico.

As Nico fully formed into a solid person, he almost collapsed from exhaustion, but I held him steady.

"Hey guys." He said tiredly.

"Where have you been?" I asked.

Nico ignored my question and instead said, "You're not going to believe this, but I found something, guys. Something big."

"What…?" Grover asked hesitantly.

"A forest."

"What?!" We all asked, very surprised.

"Yep, you heard me. A forest."

There was silence after that. We all couldn't believe it. Was this going to be the solution to our problems?
Finally, Rachel broke the silence. "Well, that was a lot easier than I thought it would be."

"What was?" Nico asked, confused.

I stepped in. "Well, Rachel had a dream where the oracle told her to go to a forest. There was no prophecy or anything."

"That's strange…" Nico said thoughtfully. "It can't just be that simple. There has to be a catch somewhere. Why would the oracle just tell us to go somewhere?"

"I don't know, but I think we're going to have to leave that question for another time. For now we have to get to this forest. I'm running out of options here. It's either go to this forest or die of starvation and dehydration here. And I like the part where we don't die, better." I commanded.

"Yeah, well where is this forest of yours, Nico?" Clarisse demanded.

"It's actually not far from here. I did have to shadow travel a bit to find it, but it shouldn't be that far away." He paused. "Or maybe it is…"

"Well, can't you just shadow travel us there?" I asked.

"There are too many people. I would pass out from exhaustion."

"Okay, so we walk." Grover said.

"Yeah, let's get our stuff." Rachel said as she picked up the blanket she was under from the ground.

We then all scattered and grabbed all of our things from around our makeshift campsite. The little food and water we had left went in the little satchel that Rachel had gotten. We even managed to fit both of our blankets in there. After all, there wasn't much in there to begin with.

As soon as we got everything winded up, we fixed our campsite so that it looked like no one had ever been there. We had to be as careful as we could in this place. We didn't want to take any unwanted chances.

"Which was is the forest?" I asked Nico.

"Umm…I think it's that way." Nico pointed straight in front of him.

"You think"

"yep."

"Well that's reassuring." I muttered, but followed him nonetheless. After all, it wasn't like we had much of a choice

…

When Nico had said "close", I had thought that maybe we would have to walk an hour at the most to find the forest. But I guess Nico has a very different definition of "close", as we had ended up walking for a full four hours.

"Nico, I thought you said this thing was close!" I exclaimed.

"I did! I don't know why…" He trailed off.

At first, I didn't know why he had stopped talking, but then I realized that he was looking at something. In fact he was looking at a very big, very green forest. I stopped in my tracks, staring at the place in amazement. So Nico was right. I only just realized that I hadn't really believed Nico when he first told us.

"See, I told you…" I heard Nico mutter.

"This is amazing!" I exclaimed.

It took us a few minutes to shake out of our amazement. But once we did, we started walking toward the forest as fast as we could.

In the back of my mind, I knew that this forest could be teeming with all kinds of monsters. Some could be even worse than the ones I had already fought. But then again, this could be the only place we could ever find water and food. If it were a choice between dying because of dehydration and dying from an epic battle with a monster, I would choose the monster. If I had to die, I would rather go down fighting.

So we walked on, toward the forest, toward finding Percy and Annabeth, or maybe toward our doom.

….

After another hour of trudging through the sand, we finally go to the edge of the forest. We looked for a clearing to go in thorugh.

Finally, we found one. The plants and bushes were parted to show a path through the forest. It almost seemed like someone had already gone into the forest this way. The rest of the group went in, parting the trees to make an even bigger path.

Rachel quietly went into the trees and finally it was me. I was the last person to go in.

I sighed. "Well, here goes…basically everything." I stepped in and was finally swallowed by the thick plants.

Well there you go.

Everything got a little more exiting now, eh? Everyone is now in the forest. Here is the where the real fun starts. I know I've been saying that for a couple of chapters now, but this time it's for real.

Stay tuned for the next chapter which is Percy!
Keep reading and reviewing guys! They're awesome!
-Detective DG