Chapter Title: I Observe A Morning Full Of Dread

I had more dreams that night, and each of them were every bit as weird to me as the dreams that had come prior to them. Believe me when I say, you couldn't possibly come up with the shit I was seeing after passing out after getting drunk from twelve straight beers or some shit.. I don't know at all.

You want to hear it, well.. you're in the right place to hear this, so I'll just explain it away.

There was another moment in.. I think the same cave the spiderweb one was from.. a brief snippet of what happened maybe after that.. I'm not sure the time of this moment in the dream.. there was a statue of Athena, and these cobwebs from a large central hole in the floor threatened to pull it over. Everyone else from that dream was there when Annabeth shouted, "Secure It!".

There was a rumbling sound after those words had came out of her mouth.. and then I felt the floor beneath me give way. The cobwebs from whatever had been tugging on the cobweb had caused the floor to cave in, and I fell a long drop. I just managed to make out someone preventing Annabeth from falling over the edge, before she and multiple other people fell to their knees at the edge of the now massively expanded hole, tears in their eyes, screaming.. I couldn't make out what they were saying as I fell. The dream changed not too long after that.

The next image was of Manhattan, or to be specific, 5th Avenue looking from the block of the Empire State Building up the long slope in the distance towards Central Park. The thing was, 5th Avenue was a war zone. Dead demigods and monsters, piled up on top of each other up to 6 deep in some places, littered the street and the sidewalks on both sides of it. At the top of the slope by Central Park, howling at the top of its lungs, I could just about make out the same creature I had seen at the end of the spider web dream, only this time it was wielding a giant version of what looked like the sword Typhon had given me, and the sword was also coated in blood. And a lot of it. It also looked a whole lot shorter - roughly around 20 feet tall, and that wasn't because of distance either now. He may have been that far away, but there wasn't any doubt about this from what I could see here.

And yeah.. I could definitely tell that this.. thing.. whatever it was.. it definitely was a guy.

But still, it was a gruesome sight.. with blood, body parts, and guts all over the place. The figure then swung my sword and instantly decapitated the head of one of the Titans - how else would I classify a being that's ten feet tall - cleanly off, before howling even louder than before.

The scene changed again.. and this time, I was confronted with the scene of the traitor Luke, wielding two swords this time around, battling it out with two bulky dudes in armor and a third guy.. who seemingly reeked of being able to draw hatred out of me. The third guy was tall, skinny, about eighteen years old.. with black hair like Luke's, crazed blue eyes, and skin as pale as that on the body of one Nico Di Angelo. He had what appeared to be a toga on over a baggy purple shirt with some sort of logo on it - I couldn't tell what it was - and jeans or cargo pants on his lower half. Even so, even with Annabeth, Katie, Thalia, Kayla, Miranda, a lot of other girls that I knew, and some I didn't know behind him, despite being outnumbered 3 to 1, Luke was holding his own in the fight.

The scene changed yet again now, this time to what appeared to be some sort of dimension in between Earth (Underworld in this case) and Tartarus. There was a woman there, standing at an altar who was wearing a cloak made of black dirt that churned and shifted, as well as a veil made of dust. Even so, you could tell she had curly black hair, and eyes that swirled in green and black as deep as the crust of the earth and gave this woman the impression of herself being all-seeing. There was a dreamy smile on her lips that made her seem "cold and distant", which was creepy to say the least.

This woman, however, paled in comparison in every conceivable way to the absolute brute of - I'm not even sure if you call this guy a Titan or a Giant - a dude standing nearby with her at the altar.

This guy stood at immense height, probably at least 100 feet tall and easily dwarfing the woman that stood next to him, with purple glistening flesh that rippled with muscle. His fingers were tipped with razor-sharp black talons, which looked as if they could slice you to pieces with just one touch. His face was the stuff of nightmares, like my gods - in place of a normal face for this dude was a swirling whirlpool and inward spiral of darkness. His black Stygian iron boots were each the size of a coffin, maybe even larger - I couldn't tell, and his hands were as large as crane scoops. His breastplate had the faces of gorgons, monsters, cyclopes and drakons all pressing against his armor as if trying to escape. All in all, this dude was three things at once: humongous, very dangerous, and terrifying.

Then he spoke, and I swear to you, how this guy's voice did not give me chills, I don't know. His voice sounded like it was being drawn back inward rather than projecting outward. "Porphyrion, Periboia, and Enceladus were fools for abandoning you and their purpose in life.. to destroy those that they were born to oppose.." he said to the woman. "No matter.. with our new children, the Giants will be even stronger than previously envisaged!"

It hit me then and there as to the identity of these two. The woman was Gaea, and the freakish dude in armor with her.. was Tartarus.

"Yes.. my dear.." Gaea said sweetly. "Kronis will make a perfect replacement as King Of The Giants.. with Areti as his advisor and Valena to replace Periboia. Plus, they have no idea about our new kids.. born to oppose Hera, Demeter, and Hestia."

What the fuck? I thought to myself as this scene played out in my dreams. They had more kids now?

So not only had three of the giants split off to form basically a third faction in the war that probably occur after the final battle that would start today most likely - as far as I knew - but Gaea and Tartarus recently had six more kids.. three of them born to replace the Giants that had left, and three new ones that weren't even at all involved in the original war. Things were getting very, very serious now that much is for sure.

Yet again, the scene changed again, this time to show six kids on a school bus in what looked like Arizona. A sign that read off 'Welcome to the Grand Canyon!' passed by in the window as the view turned to give me a good look at the seven kids. Three of them were boys, and three of them were girls.

Out of the three guys, one of them definitely stood out more than the other two, and not because of skin tone. The white guy had the regal features of a statue that definitely was not in any way Greek, electric blue eyes, and close cropped blonde hair. He also had a small scar on the corner of his lip, and was about as tall as Percy if not a little bit more. That being said, the other two were no less distinctive from each other.

One of them looked to be Latino, like a Latino version of an elf working for Santa Claus, except without all the Christmas elf clothes. He had curly black hair, dark brown eyes, pointy ears, a cheerful, elf-like face, and looked to be fairly short with a diminutive stature with a slim and relatively scrawny build. The other guy was black, looking to be in between the blonde and the Latino in terms of height, and he had close cropped black hair, a good bit of muscle, and brown eyes. Generally, he could possibly be mistaken for a younger version of Tartarus to some degree.

As for the girls, one of them had short black hair, brown eyes, and looked to be more Asian in terms of how their face looked - not stereotyping people or anything here, but that's kinda how it looked - and like the blonde and black dudes, had what seemed to be a tattoo of some kind with the letters "SPQR" on it. The same tattoo was also on the blonde haired girl next to her, who was a little bit shorter than the black haired girl. Aside from her also short blonde hair, she had blue eyes and a fiery aura that felt similar to those emitted by my siblings, yet somewhat different at the same time.

I don't know why that was, but believe me, as beautiful as those two girls were, they could not possibly compare to the looker that was the last girl that this particular dream of mine focused in on.

Believe me, Kayla has the beauty of a goddess, no question about it.. but this girl, she comes pretty doggone closing to matching it. She looked to be of Native American descent - that much I could tell, though I couldn't get much more specific than that - with chocolate-brown hair that was cut choppy and unevenly, and had thin strands braided down on the sides. Her eyes seemed to change color at will like a kaleidoscope, going from brown to blue to green every so often that you could possibly be hypnotized from looking at her eyes and how they changed color too long. Despite not wearing any makeup like the other two girls for the most part, and having facial imperfections, she was still so beautiful that she could probably draw attention to herself without even trying to at all. Like, she could do it with zero effort and people's heads could be turning at her, which to me, made it highly likely that I could be looking at a daughter of Aphrodite that had yet to be claimed or brought here, since I did not recognize her.

One more dream came after this one.

This time, it was back to the tower that Porphyrion and Periboia had been standing in front of the other time, though this time the rain had stopped.. and it was just Periboia standing in front of it, with a bunch of monsters patrolling around the building. "Mother Earth has done my father a favor.." she said wickedly, giving me the feeling that she knew something that I didn't know about. "Thanks to her, bringing the Greeks, Romans, those.. Egyptians, that girl from Ogygia for interacting with that son of Hephaestus, and the Monster King here will be easier than we imagined once she meets her fate. The poor fools have no idea of the fate that is about to befall them."

She then launched into a creepy, spine-tingling bout of malevolent cackling that was absolutely fear-inducing to even listen to. I didn't hear much more of that for long, though.. because soon after a few moments of hearing that kind of evil laughter.. I woke up.

- — - — - — - — -
August 15th, 2009

There was a sense of dread that hung over the entire camp that morning, that to be honest, not even I could escape from feeling affected by it honestly. Everyone couldn't help but seemingly have that look in their eyes that things were about to get even more desperate. It made all the more certain of that the fight of our lives was about to begin today. It was just a matter of time, and we all knew it.

The fact that apparently Percy was missing from camp this morning did not fucking help matters at all to be honest with you.

Then again, he had been absent from dinner and campfires last night, but we all thought that he was out doing something with Grover to be completely honest here.. since goat-boy had been absent from camp for a few days now. So I guess we were all wrong about that part it seemed now.

Annabeth had noticed, unfortunately, since she was walking around asking people if anyone had seen Percy. None of us had, since Beckendorf's funeral last night - me and Kayla skipped that though, since I couldn't really bear to be at it.. even though I probably should have to support my sister.

Either way, none of that even mattered anymore after breakfast. It was time to prepare, for the final fight before us. Even if it was just me from the Ares Cabin contributing to the defense of Olympus, believe me when I say that we were going to fight to the end.

Looking back on the whole of what would happen next from where we stood now in the future, I personally do not think that any of us at all could have even been prepared in a million years for the collective amount of stuff that went down in Manhattan over the next three days. I don't think anyone could have been prepared at all for any part of it.