Gods cannot die. This is immutable fact; immortal means not mortal. That is not to say that gods could not be injured. Could not suffer. Could not be cut into a million pieces and be thrown into an inescapable void.

They could also fade and disappear, which is not dying so much as un-existing. But the Greek gods, at least the Olympian Greek gods, were far from facing that fate. Even if most humans didn't believe in them, not really, they knew of them. Their own children safeguarded against fading; their children might rebel, or they might bemoan their existence, but they still knew them to be gods.

Of all the gods, Hermes had a surprisingly strong base of belief. His realm might not be as vast as the oceans, as epic as wars, nor as flashy as thunderbolts, but it was also very, very human. Humans will always pray for luck when standing at the precipice, at the moment before the dice rolls, before the lock clicks, before they step up to the debate stand. 'Please, whoever's out there, let this work.' Perhaps they didn't mean Hermes, specifically, those who prayed throughout the centuries, but they wanted some higher power to take notice, and they were usually standing in Hermes' realm. He, more than most of the gods, had never lacked followers, whether those followers understood it was him who they followed or not. He was in no danger of fading.

And yet.

Something had struck him down. And down he stayed.

It should not have been possible. Hermes was like and not like the mortals he served. Mortals, at least mortal humans, have a body and they have a soul. When the body is destroyed, the soul passes on. Gods do not have a soul; they are the raw energy of their realm compacted into a personhood that contains their personality and memories and power. Their body is a construct they use to contain this raw energy, like a dam holding in a river. They can change their construct to suit them at any moment. Hermes, if he wanted to, could appear as a falcon, as an old man, as a young woman, as a goat. This does not mean his body is nothing but a puppet avatar and harming it does not really harm him, the opposite in fact. Break a glass, and the water within goes spilling across the floor. Cut a god, and their power spills away in their ichor, bleeding their very realm of influence; they do not die and will heal with time but it is not pleasant.

But if you want to cut a god, you first need a weapon that can harm a god. Most mortal weapons will not do it. You also will need to be able to withstand the power of the god, because gods do not sit around and let people strike them. And if you have the power and ability to strike a god, then you may need a way to stop the god from fleeing from the mortal plane.

It should have been impossible to touch Hermes. He was fast, able to traverse multiple planes of existence with ease, powerful with a vast and widespread realm that contained possibly more followers than any other god, and, possibly most important, he was one of the smarter gods. Athena might be known for wisdom, but Hermes was street smart and crafty. He'd concocted a plan as a newborn baby to steal his brother's cows and, even more importantly, found a way to get away with it. Not because his plan was foolproof, clever though it was, but because he figured out what would appease his brother, once found out, and gave it to him. As a baby.

Apollo could not say he loved his little brother from the moment he was born because it was his cows that Hermes had stolen and what he first felt was more akin to indignant rage than brotherly love. And then the little rascal had given him the most impish smile he had ever seen and played a tune on an instrument Apollo had never before heard but instantly loved. And then offered this new and wonderful instrument to Apollo. The second thing Hermes ever stole from Apollo was his heart, speaking in a purely brotherly sense, and that Hermes never returned. Luckily, Hermes also loved easily, being a very human sort of deity and encompassing their most human urges and emotions, and he loved his brother in return. Especially after his brother gave him his caduceus.

The same caduceus that now sat broken and useless by Hermes' bedside. Where Hermes lay, unmoving, as if dead. Apollo is certain he is not dead because gods cannot die. But Hermes also was not getting better. They were able to heal his body and clean it, horrible though its wounds were. But the body did not awaken, did not stir, did not live. Asclepius, whose godly realm encompassed healing, could not explain it to Apollo.

"He is as healed as I can manage," he said. "But I cannot return that which is lost."

"What do you mean, that which is lost?"

"I have never seen anything like it," answered Asclepius. He sounded puzzled, which was not at all usual. Normally, he exuded an air of calm competence when applying himself to healing. "It's almost like…" He trailed off.

"Like?" prompted Apollo.

Asclepius hesitated still longer, not so much reluctant as baffled, and maybe a bit horrified. "Like…like he is empty. As if he were a glass filled with water, and the glass broke and was fixed, but in the meantime all the water has flowed out. I can only work with what is here, not what is missing."

Apollo appreciated the analogy, if only for its poetic bent, but did not like the implications. Nor did he fully understand what his son was trying to say.

"You mean…he lost too much ichor?" He had bled so much. It had taken Apollo ages to fully clean his chariot. His clothes. His hands.

"Ichor I can replace. This…this is his very essence. As if his soul was stolen."

"Gods don't have souls. They are immortal and so don't need them."

"What is a soul, if not the collection of our personality, our memories, our dream? We are not just the embodiment of our realms; we are also persons. If you don't like my saying his soul, then…then, his personhood is missing.

"But…it can be restored…right?"

"If I understood what happened to him, perhaps."

And wasn't that the question they all wanted answered. What could so injure a god, and a powerful god at that, so that his entire realm was in turmoil and his body lay as lifeless as a statue, and empty of everything that made him him?

"Maybe…maybe he spread himself too thin…" Apollo suggested next, with almost painful hope, "maybe he made multiple bodies and one of those bodies has all his…personhood?" It was not unreasonable, especially for Hermes, who was in the habit of being in multiple places at the same time. He had to, in order to fulfill his many functions.

Asclepius shook his head. "I have treated gods and goddesses who have stretched themselves to encompass multiple bodies. A wound to any part affects the whole. Each body is, in reality, the same body but in multiple places. All ruled by a single mind. If this was done to one body, it was done to all. And all must be equally empty."

A new enemy, that could lay low a god. And none of them knew anything about it.

They were to have a meeting, the remaining Olympian gods and goddesses. They were slow to gather, though. Having their usual messenger be the one struck down threw them all off center. There were other messengers, of course, but Hermes was their messenger and always had been. Their herald, their go-between. He didn't just deliver their mail; he kept everyone up to date on anything important. They were all so used to having instant access to news that no one realized for far too long that someone else needed to do that job, that everyone wouldn't instantly somehow know that a god had been attacked. So in the beginning, only two gods knew: the one who found him and the one who treated him.

Apollo saw his brother in the street from his chariot and he brought him to his son to be healed and it somehow didn't occur to him until later that no one else knew. It didn't seem possible for something so monumental to occur and for Zeus to not know immediately. And Zeus did know, sort of, if only because Hermes' realm was so widespread that its sudden disarray was startling and obvious. Far from worry over his son, Zeus's response was to send for Hermes so he could explain himself. Unspoken was 'and face punishment'.

"Hermes is in trouuuble," Artemis sang with far too much glee and sounding as if she truly were the same age as her appearance and not a millennia old goddess when she tracked down her twin brother. "You seen him?"

Apollo didn't know how to answer any of that. For one horrible moment, so sure was he that everyone must already somehow know what had happened, that he was shocked at how heartless his twin sounded. He knew that she did not particularly like Hermes, his realm clashed too thoroughly with her own for that, but he had always thought she at least held some kind of affection deep down for their brother. Or if not affection, at least tolerance for the sake of her twin, who did like Hermes. Anyway, all the bastard children of Zeus had an unstated alliance against the self-satisfied children of Zeus and Hera. So her callous excitement over Hermes being in trouble was shocking. Only for the second half of her statement to register and for him to coldly realize that she didn't know. That maybe even Zeus didn't know.

He showed her to Hermes' bedside, let his son explain.

"And you didn't think to bring this to our attention immediately?!" was her response, followed by a muttered 'men' that she may or may not have intended them to hear. She wasn't wrong. Well, not about his gender having anything to do with his stupidity, but that he really should have told someone. If he had, maybe the next gods attacked would have been forewarned.

Whoever or whatever it was that had attacked Hermes either had great speed to their advantage or there was more than one attacker, because Dionysus was brought down no more than an hour later, and it should have taken at least three hours to reach the camp by mortal means. No one saw what happened. It was just after the end of the summer when most campers returned home. Dionysus had been reportedly enjoying the peace and quiet that came with the end of summer. Then one of his sons went looking for him and found the remains of a battle. So many grapevines were entangling the Big House that it looked like it had been reclaimed by nature a century before and not like a current and in use administrative building. If Dionysus had managed to injure or subdue his attacker in any way, there was no real evidence.

There was only one body, covered in gold, and lying as still as a corpse.

Rather understandably, the camper who came upon the scene ran away screaming.

News was spreading, but slowly and sporadically. Chiron tried to contact the gods through the quickest and surest method he knew; through Hermes. No response. He Iris called Olympus next, trying to get anyone at all, and was connected to Ares.

"Oh, what now? I don't care who my kids killed or what they started, I've told you a hundred times that's your problem."

"Dionysus has been attacked."

That at least got his attention, since he had looked seconds away from ending the conversation.

"Ooookay…" he said, then, "My kids got balls, I'll give them that. What did D turn them into?"

"He wasn't attacked by a camper," Chiron tried to explain. "He's…if he weren't a god I'd say he looked dead."

"Another war on the gods?" Ares said, sounding equal parts excited, confused, and exasperated.

"We don't know what this is," Chiron said. "But we thought you would like to know. Someone has attacked an Olympic god and succeeded in harming him. Perhaps you could inform your father?"

"Do I look like Hermes? I'm no message-boy."

"Hermes did not answer my call."

There was a long moment of silence. Then, "Fine."

And the image disappeared.

The realm of Dionysus in disarray was not as overtly obvious as Hermes' realm going haywire. There were no downed message systems. No sudden confusion of traffic lights, or derailed trains. No hotels having computer glitches that lost thousands of reservations. No casinos alternatively having the house win every time, or spitting money out into the streets. No sudden increased clumsiness, both among athletes (particularly racers and wrestlers) and thieves. No lost souls wandering aimlessly awaiting their shepherd to guide them to the Underworld.

No, what happened when Dionysus fell was much more insidious. This would not be considered a good year for wine, for instance, but that was far from the worst of what was unravelling. Madness and sanity were bleeding into each other. Not quickly, and not for everyone, but enough that already there were people hurting. Those whose minds shielded them from trauma slowly losing that shield. Those who faced addiction finding their will power eroding. Those who had never experienced any form of mental illness finding themselves hallucinating. Some few even suddenly found themselves completely sober, no matter how much they drank. And some found themselves drunk without touching a drop.

Hermes was not the only god looking after messages, roads, dead souls, inns, thieves, or athletes. If he were, the utter chaos of his falling might well have meant the end of humanity, though he is but one god. Likewise, there are other gods of harvest, revelry, and madness. But Hermes and Dionysus were Olympic gods, and most of the 'other' gods who covered those realms were considered lesser gods who were under their rule. Now it fell entirely to the lesser gods, without warning.

The world was in disarray, but it was not falling. Not yet.

The next god attacked was Poseidon. Only, this time things did not go entirely to plan. Not for the attacker. Because Poseidon was not alone. He was visiting his son.

Had he fallen, the resulting turmoil of the oceans would have been catastrophic.

But that is not what happened.

And so it happened that Poseidon made his way to Olympus to hold a council of the gods while Percy Jackson made his own way to the small apartment on Fleet Way to hold a smaller council.

Percy Jackson was not the son of Hermes. He had been helped by the god, multiple times (mostly without Percy ever even knowing, because what is there to notice when you get a lucky break, when a monster fails to find you or when you fail to get lost?) but his journeys had never been smoothed into no-wait commutes or constant green lights. In the normal course of things, Percy would have taken a couple of hours to reach the apartment. With roads in disarray now that no one was having their journeys smoothed out by a god, it might well have been days. Percy Jackson did not take the normal route.

A winged horse can make up for a lot of traffic congestion.

Luck would have had Percy arrive at just the right time to turn a battle. Unfortunately, luck, or one aspect of it, was out of commission.