I don't own this. Enjoy.
JASON DREAMED HE WAS WRAPPED in chains, hanging upside down like a hunk of meat. Everything hurt—his arms, his legs, his chest, his head. Especially his head. It felt like an over inflated water balloon.
Beryl looked relieved. He was okay. If he was in pain, he was alive.
"If I'm dead," he murmured, "why does it hurt so much?"
"You're not dead, my hero," said a woman's voice. "It is not your time. Come, speak with me."
Jason's thoughts floated away from his body. He heard monsters yelling, his friends screaming, fiery explosions, but it all seemed to be happening on another plane of existence —getting farther and farther away.
He found himself standing in an earthen cage. Tendrils of tree roots and stone whirled together, confining him. Outside the bars, he could see the floor of a dry reflecting pool, another earthen spire growing at the far end, and above them, the ruined red stones of a burned-out house.
Hera shivered. She hated that rock cage. I mean, come on. Who actually likes their cage?
Next to him in the cage, a woman sat cross-legged in black robes, her head covered by a shroud. She pushed aside her veil, revealing a face that was proud and beautiful—but also hardened with suffering.
"Hera," Jason said.
"Welcome to my prison," said the goddess. "You will not die today, Jason. Your friends will see you through—for now."
"For now? What's that supposed to mean?" asked Beryl.
"You'll see." Hera said.
Beryl groaned. She hated those words.
"For now?" he asked.
Hera gestured at the tendrils of her cage. "There are worse trials to come. The very earth stirs against us."
"You're a goddess," Jason said. "Why can't you just escape?"
Hera smiled sadly. Her form began to glow, until her brilliance filled the cage with painful light. The air hummed with power, molecules splitting apart like a nuclear explosion. Jason suspected if he were actually there in the flesh, he would've been vaporized.
The gods nodded. Tristan looked about to comment when Athena said,"When we are in our true form we cause destruction. Mortals and Demigods alike would be vaporized and same with other things."
Tristan closed his mouth and nodded.
The cage should've been blasted to rubble. The ground should've split and the ruined house should've been leveled. But when the glow died, the cage hadn't budged. Nothing outside the bars had changed. Only Hera looked different—a little more stooped and tired.
"Some powers are even greater than the gods," she said. "I am not easily contained. I can be in many places at once. But when the greater part of my essence is caught, it is like a foot in a bear trap, you might say. I can't escape, and I am concealed from the eyes of the other gods. Only you can find me, and I grow weaker by the day."
Hera was shaking as she remembered it. Zeus put his hand on her arm.
"Then why did you come here?" Jason asked. "How were you caught?"
The goddess sighed. "I could not stay idle. Your father Jupiter believes he can withdraw from the world, and thus lull our enemies back to sleep. He believes we Olympians have become too involved in the affairs of mortals, in the fates of our demigod children, especially since we agreed to claim them all after the war. He believes this is what has caused our enemies to stir. That is why he closed Olympus."
"Stupid if you asked me." Athena said quietly.
"But you don't agree."
"No," she said. "Often I do not understand my husband's moods or his decisions, but even for Zeus, this seemed paranoid. I cannot fathom why he was so insistent and so convinced. It was … unlike him. As Hera, I might have been content to follow my lord's wishes. But I am also Juno." Her image flickered, and Jason saw armor under her simple black robes, a goatskin cloak—the symbol of a Roman warrior—across her bronze mantle. "Juno Moneta
Hera switched to Juno then back.
they once called me—Juno, the One Who Warns. I was guardian of the state, patron of Eternal Rome. I could not sit by while the descendants of my people were attacked. I sensed danger at this sacred spot. A voice—" She hesitated. "A voice told me I should come here. Gods do not have what you might call a conscience, nor do we have dreams; but the voice was like that—soft and persistent, warning me to come here.
The gods were angry at the snow witch.
And so the same day Zeus closed Olympus, I slipped away without telling him my plans, so he could not stop me. And I came here to investigate."
"It was a trap," Jason guessed.
The goddess nodded. "Only too late did I realize how quickly the earth was stirring. I was even more foolish than Jupiter—
Zeus huffed.
a slave to my own impulses. This is exactly how it happened the first time. I was taken captive by the giants, and my imprisonment started a war. Now our enemies rise again. The gods can only defeat them with the help of the greatest living heroes. And the one whom the giants serve …she cannot be defeated at all—only kept asleep."
"How do they defeat her?" asked Queen Marie.
Athena opened her mouth but Frederick said, "Let me guess, you can't tell us."
Athena nodded.
The mortals sighed.
"Let's continue reading then." Frederick said.
Poseidon grabbed the book.
"I don't understand."
"You will soon," Hera said.
The cage began to constrict, the tendrils spiraling tighter. Hera's form shivered like a candle flame in the breeze. Outside the cage, Jason could see shapes gathering at the edge of the pool—lumbering humanoids with hunched backs and bald heads. Unless Jason's eyes were tricking him—they had more than one set of arms. He heard wolves too, but not the wolves he'd seen with Lupa. He could tell from their howls this was a different pack—hungrier, more aggressive, out for blood.
Artemis switched to Diana and hissed, "Lycaon." SHe hated that mutt. Artemis came back clutching her head.
"Hurry, Jason," Hera said. "My keepers approach, and you begin to wake. I will not be strong enough to appear to you again, even in dreams."
"Wait," he said. "Boreas told us you'd made a dangerous gamble. What did he mean?"
Hera's eyes looked wild, and Jason wondered if she really had done something crazy.
"Yes, She did something extremely mad." Dionysus said. "And I am the god of madness."
Hera looked mildly upset. "You know it was the only way to defeat her."
"Yes. We know that, Hera, I was just teasing." Dionysus said.
Hera looked sheepish. "Sorry."
"It's okay." Dionysus said.
"An exchange," she said. "The only way to bring peace. The enemy counts on our divisions, and if we are divided, we will be destroyed. You are my peace offering, Jason—a bridge to overcome millennia of hatred."
"What? I don't—"
"I cannot tell you more," Hera said. "You have only lived this long because I have taken your memory. Find this place. Return to your starting point. Your sister will help."
"Thalia?"
Beryl perked up. She was right. Thalia was in this book. Now to wait for her to show up.
The scene began to dissolve. "Good-bye, Jason. Beware Chicago. Your most dangerous mortal enemy waits there. If you are to die, it will be by her hand."
Frederick looked interested. His most dangerous mortal enemy. Who could it be?
"Who?" he demanded.
But Hera's image faded, and Jason awoke.
His eyes snapped open. "Cyclops!"
"Whoa, sleepyhead." Piper sat behind him on the bronze dragon, holding his waist to keep him balanced. Leo sat in front, driving. They flew peacefully through the winter sky as if nothing had happened.
"D-Detroit," Jason stammered. "Didn't we crash-land? I thought—"
"It's okay," Leo said. "We got away, but you got a nasty concussion.
"The first of many." Hermes said.
How you feeling?"
Jason's head throbbed. He remembered the factory, then walking down the catwalk, then a creature looming over him—a face with one eye, a massive fist—and everything went black.
Apollo winced. "Yeah, I have no doubt that that was a concussion." He said.
"How did you—the Cyclops—"
"Leo ripped them apart," Piper said. "He was amazing. He can summon fire—"
"It was nothing," Leo said quickly.
Piper laughed. "Shut up, Valdez. I'm going to tell him. Get over it."
And she did—how Leo single-handedly defeated the Cyclopes family; how they freed Jason, then noticed the Cyclopes starting to re-form; how Leo had replaced the dragon's wiring and gotten them back in the air just as they'd started to hear the Cyclopes roaring for vengeance inside the factory.
The mortals sighed with relief. They made it. Just in time.
Jason was impressed. Taking out three Cyclopes with nothing but a tool kit? Not bad. It didn't exactly scare him to hear how close he'd come to death, but it did make him feel horrible. He'd stepped right into an ambush and spent the whole fight knocked out while his friends fended for themselves. What kind of quest leader was he?
When Piper told him about the other kid the Cyclopes claimed to have eaten, the one in the purple shirt who spoke Latin, Jason felt like his head was going to explode. A son of Mercury
Hermes winced a bit, but was otherwise okay.
… Jason felt like he should know that kid, but the name was missing from his mind.
"I'm not alone, then," he said. "There are others like me."
"Jason," Piper said, "you were never alone. You've got us."
"I—I know … but something Hera said. I was having a dream…"
He told them what he'd seen, and what the goddess had said inside her cage.
"An exchange?" Piper asked. "What does that mean?"
Frederick gasped. "An exchange." He said. "That's where Percy is. An exchange of leaders. Jason must be the leader at the Roman camp, while Percy is the leader at the Greek camp. Hera took them both, wiped their memories, and placed them where the other camp could find them. All so they could reunite the camps and defeat the Earth. But something has to go wrong, that's too easy if it goes correctly."
The gods nodded. "Correct. Something did went wrong, though you won't find it out until the third book. So, Uncle, if you would." Athena said.
Jason shook his head. "But Hera's gamble is me. Just by sending me to Camp Half-Blood, I have a feeling she broke some kind of rule, something that could blow up in a big way—"
"Or save us," Piper said hopefully. "That bit about the sleeping enemy—that sounds like the lady Leo told us about."
Leo cleared his throat. "About that … she kind of appeared to me back in Detroit, in a pool of Porta-Potty sludge."
Hermes and Apollo laughed. This time Ares joined in.
Jason wasn't sure he'd heard that right. "Did you say … Porta-Potty?"
Leo told them about the big face in the factory yard. "I don't know if she's completely unkillable," he said, "but she cannot be defeated by toilet seats. I can vouch for that. She wanted me to betray you guys, and I was like, 'Pfft, right, I'm gonna listen to a face in the potty sludge.'"
The three kept laughing.
"Boys." Hera said. "Keep it together."
The boys stopped laughing.
"She's trying to divide us." Piper slipped her arms from around Jason's waist. He could sense her tension without even looking at her.
"What's wrong?" he asked.
"I just … Why are they toying with us? Who is this lady, and how is she connected to Enceladus?"
"She's his mother. Duh." Hermes said.
Poseidon sighed. Looks like Hermes was back to normal.
"Enceladus?" Jason didn't think he'd heard that name before.
"I mean …" Piper's voice quavered. "That's one of the giants. Just one of the names I could remember."
Jason got the feeling there was a lot more bothering her, but he decided he not to press her. She'd had a rough morning.
Leo scratched his head. "Well, I dunno about Enchiladas—"
Apollo, Hermes, and Ares laughed again.
"Enceladus," Piper corrected.
"Whatever. But Old Potty Face
Now all of the gods were laughing.
mentioned another name. Porpoise Fear, or something?"
"Porphyrion?" Piper asked. "He was the giant king, I think."
Jason envisioned that dark spire in the old reflecting pool—growing larger as Hera got weaker. "I'm going to take wild guess," he said. "In the old stories, Porphyrion kidnapped Hera. That was the first shot in the war between the giants and the gods."
The gods sobered. "Yes. It was." Athena said.
"I think so," Piper agreed. "But those myths are really garbled and conflicted. It's almost like nobody wanted that story to survive. I just remember there was a war, and the giants were almost impossible to kill."
"Heroes and gods had to work together," Jason said. "That's what Hera told me."
The mortals looked shocked. "You have to have both to kill the giants?" Sally asked for clarification.
Athena nodded. "That's the only way to kill them."
"Then how are they going to kill two giants if Lord Zeus closed Olympus?" Sally queried
Athena said, "We can't tell you."
Sally nodded, resigned.
"Kind of hard to do," Leo grumbled, "if the gods won't even talk to us."
They flew west, and Jason became lost in his thoughts—all of them bad. He wasn't sure how much time passed before the dragon dove through a break in the clouds, and below them, glittering in the winter sun, was a city at the edge of a massive lake. A crescent of skyscrapers lined the shore. Behind them, stretching out to the western horizon, was a vast grid of snow-covered neighborhoods and roads.
"Chicago," Jason said.
He thought about what Hera had said in his dream. His worst mortal enemy would be waiting here.
The gods and mortals tensed at the reminder.
If he was going to die, it would be by her hand.
"One problem down," Leo said. "We got here alive. Now, how do we find the storm spirits?"
Jason saw a flash of movement below them. At first he thought it was a small plane, but it was too small, too dark and fast. The thing spiraled toward the skyscrapers, weaving and changing shape—and, just for a moment it became the smoky figure of a horse.
"How about we follow that one," Jason suggested, "and see where it goes?"
"Done." Poseidon said. He gave the book to Artemis.
Artemis looked down. "Great I'm reading from a boy's point of view." She huffed. "Anyway. Chapter 26 Jason." At least it's not Leo. She thought.
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