A/N: I had a new story idea and I had to get it down immediately. Will be updated every week. I hope you enjoy the first chapter! It starts at the end of HoH and I promise it'll leave you with more questions than answers.
Chapter 1: The First Greater Prophecy
The Eclipse of Olympus looms ever near,
A dark culmination of godly fear.
A glaive ascends, first trapped in hell,
The vengeant spirit a hollowed shell.
A pawn will come for seats of power,
As Olympus falls to its darkest hour.
A seraph descends as heavenly aid,
to quell the monster's ravaging raid.
War will storm through lover's name,
Deserving shoulders bear the blame.
The Eclipse ends only through kingly whim,
But should the mantle have fallen to him?
The deafening roar of thousands of charging monsters wasn't enough to drown out Percy's heart drumming in his skull. He kept barreling forward, flanked on either side by a drakon-riding Giant and a Titan, with Annabeth immediately behind him. An unending sea of monsters drew closer, unfurling in waves from the thick mass huddled before the chained Doors of Death.
The grey, desolate landscape of Tartarus stretched out endlessly in every direction, shrouded in an acidic haze the same blood red as the clouds above. The malevolent sky leered down at the group of four as they collided with the first wave of monsters, and a crackle of thunder ripped across the battlefield.
Bob crossed his spear against Hyperion's sword as Percy rolled under a slash of Krios' massive blade. Both Titans had left their positions at the Doors to head the army of monsters. Damasen jumped past them on the back of his tamed Maeonian drakon, allowing the beast and its rider to shear through the massive horde of monsters by the dozens.
Annabeth slashed her drakon-bone sword against the back of Krios' knee as he reared for another strike against Percy. The ram-headed Titan hissed through his teeth, wheeling around to face her. Percy jumped forward when Krios turned his back, burying Riptide into the same wound Annabeth had cut.
The Titan roared as his left leg crumpled underneath him. He used the other to lunge forward with a closed fist aimed at Annabeth. She reacted instantly, jumping to the side, but the edge of his rocketing knuckles still caught her shoulder. The glancing blow lifted her off of her feet and shot her sprawling into a rocky mound behind her. When she crumpled, unmoving, Percy's thrumming heartbeat reached a crescendo.
Hyperion howled as Bob pierced his glowing armor and speared him through the shoulder. Breathing heavily, Bob leaned into the weapon still buried in his brother. Ichor continued gushing from the wound Hyperion had slashed across his chest seconds before. The Titan of Light gritted his teeth while he stared down his treacherous brother.
"You will die for the enemies that stole your mind, Iapetus?"
"I will die for my friends," Bob growled in reply, wincing at the mention of his former name.
He twisted the spear in Hyperion's shoulder, but the glowing Titan only grunted. Using his free arm, Hyperion swung his blade and snapped Bob's spear at where it protruded from his shoulder. He left the spearhead buried in his body, rendering Bob unarmed besides the now-tipless broom handle from his janitorial duties. The golden Titan's bum arm lay limp at his side, but he raised his blade high with the other against his bracing opponent.
Choking through her breaths, Annabeth slowly hobbled to her feet while clutching her badly dislocated shoulder. She watched as Percy continued to trade blows with the Titan of Stars. Krios' armor, decorated with constellations, had received several deep gashes from Riptide's wild arcs. Percy slid underneath the Titan's guard, dodging another fatal strike, before he roughly slashed his bronze blade through the monster's crippled knee. The appendage had born enough, and cleanly cleaved off of the Titan's body.
Krios' deafening roar shook the landscape, freezing enemies and allies alike to glance in the Titan's direction. Damasen nodded in approval as he dismounted his drakon, beast and rider rampaging through hundreds of monsters in opposite directions. They held the brunt of the enemy back on their own, and Percy could hear the screaming empousai and whelping hellhounds get trampled under the duo's carnage.
"Brother!" Hyperion shouted, facing towards Krios.
Bob knelt in front of the Titan of Light, fresh wounds across his body and his spear handle in pieces. He saw Hyperion's momentary distraction and mustered his strength for another attack. Lowering his shoulder, Bob plowed into the golden Titan's back and pinned him to the ground with his knee. Hyperion had thrown his sword aside just in time to not be impaled on it. Bob reached for the weapon.
Krios clawed towards Percy, the Titan's hands tearing into the terrain's grey earth as they dragged the hulking creature forward. The demigod was exhausted, his arms vibrating after parrying so many strikes from such a powerful opponent. Adrenaline kept him upright, though, both to stay alive and to make sure Annabeth was okay. He felt a flush of relief when his bleary eyes focused on the other side of the crawling behemoth, finding her standing, albeit shakily. She held her shoulder and sent him a weak smile, but her expression morphed to panic when Krios moved quicker than should've been possible for him.
The Titan had made a bound forward using all three limbs, shedding his sword, and had caught Percy's foot in his vice grip. When the monster tensed his fist, Percy shouted in agony as every bone in his foot shattered.
"You… die," Krios wheezed, eyes delirious from the pooling ichor at his severed knee.
He dragged Percy towards his face, and the demigod groaned through his teeth while swinging Riptide at the thick fingers wrapping his foot. If Krios even felt the bronze blade slicing into his skin, he didn't show it; the dying Titan continued to tighten his grip. Riptide slipped out of reach when Percy started to lose consciousness, and the demigod's struggle became fruitless. But just before his world faded to black, he felt the grasp around his foot loosen by a fraction. It was enough solace for Percy to open his eyes and find Annabeth standing on Krios' back, her drakon-bone sword buried to the hilt in his spine.
Half-dead, Krios still didn't let go as he brought the demigod mere inches from his face and gnashed his teeth. Disgusted, Percy realized the Titan meant to bite him, and he reared his fist back with any strength he had left. The demigod shouted as he twisted his entire body and unleashed an earthshaking punch against Krios' jaw.
Literally earthshaking.
A light tremor shuddered underneath the Titan's form. Annabeth stumbled off of his body and caught a rock formation to stay upright, groaning as the soft vibration exacerbated her injured shoulder. But in comparison, her injury did not seem so physically gruesome. Krios' mangled face looked as if his skull had been the epicenter of an earthquake, which was only a short skip from the truth. The Titan of Stars dissolved into golden dust while the pair limped their way to each other.
"Gods, Annabeth, your shoulder," Percy whispered, shifting all of his weight to his good leg.
They lowered themselves against an earthen mound while the battle continued to rage around them. Percy's foot was destroyed; he'd be no help to either immortal still fighting, and his priority was right in front of him.
"You know what to do right?" she asked through gritted teeth, turning her body to face him.
Percy's eyes widened.
"What?! No! I've never reset a bone before," he panicked.
Annabeth cupped his face with the hand she could still move.
"We're not out of this yet. I trust you," she said, and Percy couldn't argue with the determination in her stormy eyes.
He swallowed and nodded, asking what he needed to do. She adjusted her dislocated shoulder, pushing it softly against his rigid one, and moved his hands to hold her injured arm firmly.
"Whatever you do, don't let my arm move. No matter what sound I make. Promise me."
"I promise," Percy affirmed, tightening his grip.
Annabeth closed her eyes tightly and shoved her shoulder against Percy's. And she screamed.
Hyperion flailed underneath Bob, groaning in pain as the Titan above twisted his shredded shoulder into the earth. The Titan of Light heard the grim scraping of his own blade against the terrain and shook with renewed vigor.
"Iapetus! I swear I'll kill you!" he shouted, muffled.
Bob didn't respond, lifting the weapon high. And Hyperion fell limp, waiting. Bob closed his eyes and struck down roughly, only to be thrown forward by his own momentum. His brother had kicked back and away, using the strength behind Bob's swing to dislodge the knee pinned against his back. Somersaulting forward, Bob whirled around immediately, Hyperion's sword still in hand.
The Titan of Light straightened his back, his expression locked in a malevolent grimace. The monster dug into his own shoulder, tearing out the long spearhead and brandishing it like a knife.
"Come, brother. I believe I just made you a promise."
Bob stumbled forward, clearly exhausted, and swung the blade. Hyperion caught it on the edge of his makeshift dagger, moving much quicker than the other Titan. He shoved the weapon away and lunged forward, not giving Bob the chance to recover before he stabbed the speartip into his sternum. With a swift kick to the chest, Bob fell onto his back and Hyperion's blade clattered to the ground.
The victorious Titan grinned as he reclaimed his weapon, massaging his shoulder with the hilt. He stood above Bob as an executioner, the murderous glint burning from his eyes. Bob's breathing shallowed, and Hyperion knew the Titan would dissolve soon enough on his own. He shot a glance towards the remaining army of monsters.
Damasen's drakon had been destroyed, and the Giant was pouring sludge from a hundred wounds across his hulking body. The Bane of Ares met Hyperion's eyes and immediately charged the Titan. Damasen understood the battle was already lost, but he refused to fall just yet. Hyperion's grin only grew when he turned towards a new sound.
"Get away from him!" Annabeth shouted, tearing towards the Titan at breakneck speed while wielding her drakon bone sword.
Her shoulder was set like it had never been dislodged, but the streaks of pain in her face showed the injury still needed attention.
"Too slow, hero," Hyperion murmured.
Percy trailed her at a labored pace, fighting through the jolts of pain that threatened to rip consciousness out from underneath his disfigured foot.
"And far too slow, Jackson," Hyperion sneered at his past life's killer, bringing down the blade.
Annabeth, Percy, and Damasen froze in their tracks. It wasn't due to the extinguished hope of saving their friend; every monster also stood still as stone. In a split second, the entire battlefield had fallen into frightened silence. Their paralysis came from a sudden presence of energy so purely malevolent that it threatened to shred their souls through their bodies.
A shadow cast from far behind Hyperion, who stood impossibly still with his sword frozen against Bob's throat. The Titan of Light had no chance to lay eyes on the source of the glaring silhouette. A sharp whistle cut through the silent landscape and the tip of a blood red spear exited the front of his chestplate. The weapon, dripping with his ichor, twisted before it retracted and left him a dissolved puddle of golden dust.
The standing trio found the strength to turn their gaze towards the owner of the thrown spear. Damasen steeled his nerves, meeting the eyes of his warden. But eyes were not an apt description. Percy and Annabeth felt their mortal minds try and fail to comprehend the chilling vortex that stood where a face should. The whirlpool pulled at hope how a black hole entraps light, and that head was only the beginning of the repulsive creature. The entire monstrosity was a forty foot humanoid that no being would ever mistake as human. Its fleshy skin was a sickening purple packed to the seams with dense muscle. Scraping its spear against the earth, the towering monster turned its swirling face towards the demigods, whose veins turned to ice before they were forced to look away.
Averting their eyes reduced the shivering fear by a hair, but it did nothing to stop the despair in their chests when it spoke.
"I would never have believed two mortals made it to my heart if I had not come and seen it for myself."
Annabeth had assumed as much, but the confirmation that this was the Pit itself sent new waves of hopelessness through her. His rupturing voice carried the weight of a hundred skies; Percy and Annabeth had expert insight on the comparison. Tartarus let out a laugh, and Percy had to look down to make sure it only sounded like the earth was shearing apart.
"Can a Greater Prophecy be silenced before it occurs?" his voice grated.
The primordial seemed to pose the question to himself, mixing abject confusion into the stricken emotions of all of the terrified creatures before him. Annabeth mustered the courage to speak, piqued by the mention of a prophecy, but never got the chance. Tartarus hurled his spear at the daughter of Athena before she could blink.
Only Damasen reacted in time, diving between her and the projectile, but it meant nothing. The spear ripped through him like he was formless, impaling him on it as it continued its unwavering course towards a stunned Annabeth. The moment it met her, a blinding light exploded across the endless landscape, incinerating the red haze that enveloped the region. Percy crossed his forearms in front of his eyes while shutting them tightly, and still saw nothing but white. Blind, he couldn't notice that Tartarus, too, had to raise a sickening clawed hand to shield his own "face."
The light vanished as quickly as it'd appeared, and Percy's head snapped to where Annabeth had stood. In her place, Damasen lay on his back coughing up sludge, nailed into the ground by the spear. Percy knew what had to have been underneath the Giant.
"And so it begins," Tartarus mused.
Even with the monster's mountain-splitting voice, Percy couldn't hear him. Nor could he feel the pain of his shattered foot as he keeled forward onto his hands and knees. He couldn't see or feel the cracks forming in the rumbling earth under him. And he couldn't hear the guttural scream that ripped from his throat with no intention of ever silencing. All the demigod could see, or hear, or feel, was the mute husking of his own body as the world reaped a part of his soul from him.
But the world saw and heard and felt his pain much less silently. A mile in every direction, the ground erupted. It shook with an intensity that made it impossible for any creature to remain standing on their own. A thousand monsters unfroze at once, filling the air with terrified shrieks as they watched the earth open up to swallow them. Some of them weren't so lucky.
The vibrations increased exponentially, amplified as Percy's scream became primal. Huge chunks of solid rock crumbled to dust before the monsters' very eyes, and they realized too late that the seismic shaking didn't limit itself to the earth. A lone cyclops noticed first, finding his hands vibrating just as the ground beneath his feet. Before he could speak, an agonizing groan escaped him as his body came undone, ripped to pieces and returned to dust.
The same fate fell upon hundreds of monsters, shredded inside out by the earthquake's frequency as if their bodies were the epicenter. But they weren't. The epicenter was the demigod on his hands and knees, still screaming. Tartarus recalled his spear, burying its handle into the earth and standing as the only creature upright against the raging onslaught.
The world continued to fall apart as death danced among every being on the battlefield. Damasen and Bob had long become dust, their fates sealed no matter Percy's disaster. The thousand monsters watered the broken earth as golden powder, every last one killed by the crushing crevices they fell into, the deadly vibrations of the quake within them, or the trampling feet of their own comrades.
The final victims of Percy's violent grief weren't living things; they were the Doors of Death themselves. His savage earthshaking hadn't left them unscathed. Under the reverberating pressure of his attack, the chains binding the Doors had lost their integrity. The metal snapped, freeing the battered black and silver elevator to vanish from the heart of Tartarus. As the magical Stygian gateway melted into nothing, Percy's voice finally failed him.
The scream fell out raw, beyond hoarse, and the demigod lost the last of his willpower to stay conscious. As Percy's face thudded into the earth, the former flatland settled into a dotted hilly terrain. Dust fell, and the red haze returned to its place as a blanket over the region. Tartarus dislodged his spear from the ground and held clawed fingers over his heart.
"A mortal… to make my being feel even palpitations… I have chosen well."
Tartarus looked at the demigod's sleeping form before both vanished from his heart in a silent burst of the red fog.
Epirus, Greece
Nico fell to his knees when the metal button vanished from underneath his thumb. Clytius and Pasiphae had been destroyed just minutes ago with Hecate's brief help, and he'd immediately run to hold down the Up button.
Just 12 minutes up. They're inside, they've got to be, the son of Hades had convinced himself.
For the entire twelve minutes, Nico had felt the five anxious pairs of eyes of the rest of the Seven behind him. And when the elevator arrived, he'd felt a tense edge in them that didn't belong when praying for your friends' safety.
Finally, the Doors of Death had opened, empty of the only two demigods he'd trusted to make it through literal hell. Nico's heart had sunk, and he hadn't noticed Jason and Frank's easing as they loosened their grips on their weapons.
"Okay, I'm sending it back down. They're still fighting down there," he'd bargained, pressing his thumb to Down.
Slowly, the Doors had creaked closed. Nico's quiet dwindle of hope had persevered as he tightly pressed the elevated metal of the button. It was only moments later that his thumb felt cold, suddenly only pressing the smooth stone that made up the walls of the Necromanteion. The spark extinguished; the Doors of Death were gone.
Nico slumped to the floor and understood it meant his friends had cut the chains from the other side. But even overwhelmed by his emotions, he couldn't help but notice that the atmosphere of tension had instantly vanished. His teary eyes traced the other five demigods in the cavern.
Piper's hollow gaze held a thousand yard stare, her expression one of grief and… regret? Leo sat completely still, an impossible sight, and his eyes didn't leave the ground. Frank strapped his bow to his back before brushing his nose with his hand as he turned away. Jason unclenched his jaw and took a deep breath, allowing his sword hand to fall to his side. Hazel sat down on a rock before she buried her head in her hands and cried.
"How could we have let this happen?" she sniffed.
Nico knelt next to her.
"Hazel, this is no one's fault but Gaea's. Percy and Annabeth would hate that you blame yourself at all," he consoled.
To his confusion, she shook her head violently and became hysterical. Jason walked up behind Nico, tapping his shoulder.
"Can you shadow travel her out of here, Nico? The air down here probably isn't making this any better; we'll be right behind you," the son of Jupiter said, straining his voice.
Nico nodded before disappearing into a shadow with his half-sister. Silence fell over the four remaining demigods in the Necromanteion's lowest level. Minutes passed before Leo finally lifted his head and broke it.
"Hazel's right. They were our friends."
His heavy voice sounded nothing like the cheery one that frequently blared across the Argo II's loudspeakers. Piper's gaze didn't move, but she nodded almost imperceptibly. Frank stood stoic, his expression unreadable as he looked to the son of Jupiter.
"The Gods gave us a job to do, and we did it," Jason said, steeling his voice as best he could, "You all remember the prophecy they told us would begin if they got out of here alive."
"But if they had come through those doors, no doubt badly injured, would you really have done what Jupiter said to do?" Piper whispered, finding her voice.
Jason didn't answer her question, and he couldn't meet her eyes.
"We need to report back to him now. Hopefully he can maintain one of his splitting forms long enough to hear the news," Jason breathed shakily, "that Percy and Annabeth died in Tartarus."
A/N: Man, we're already in a lot of trouble. Tartarus taking an interest in Percy, the Gods assigning a hit on two of the greatest heroes ever, their friends devastated (some more than others) after somehow playing a hand in it? Was Poseidon on board? Athena? We'll have to figure all of this out soon enough. Please review and let me know what you think!