DISCLAIMER: I DO NOT OWN PERCY JACKSON AND THE OLYMPIANS OR ONE PIECE!
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|TRUE IMMORTALS|
Percy was standing in the throne room of Mount Olympus, a place that made Grand Central Station look like a broom closet. Massive columns rose to a domed ceiling, which was gilded with moving constellations.
Twelve thrones were arranged in an inverted U, just like the cabins at Camp Half-Blood, and an enormous fire crackled in the central hearth.
"PERCY JACKSON!"
His name echoed around the throne room.
All talking died down. The room was silent except for the crackle of the hearth. Everyone's eyes were on him—all the gods, demigods, the Cyclopes, the spirits. Hestia smiled at him reassuringly, seeming happy and content to be sitting by her fire again.
He bowed to Zeus, then he knelt at his father's feet.
"Rise, my son," Poseidon said.
Percy stood uneasily.
"A great hero must be rewarded," Poseidon said. "Is there anyone here who would deny that my son is deserving?"
Percy waited, half-expecting someone to pipe up. The gods never agreed on anything, and plenty of them still weren't exactly signing up to join his fan club, but not a single voice protested.
"The Council agrees," Zeus announced. "Percy Jackson, you will have one gift from the gods."
Percy hesitated. "Any gift?"
Zeus nodded, his expression grim. "I know what you will ask. The greatest gift of all. Yes, if you want it, it shall be yours. The gods have not bestowed this gift on a mortal hero in many centuries, but, Perseus Jackson—if you wish it—you shall be made a god. Immortal. Undying. You shall serve as your father's lieutenant for all time."
Percy stared at the king of the gods, his brain scrambling to keep up. "Um...a god?"
Zeus rolled his eyes. "A dimwitted god, apparently. But yes. With the consensus of the entire Council, I can make you immortal. Then I will have to put up with you forever."
"Hmm," Ares chimed in, a twisted grin on his face. "That means I can smash him to a pulp as often as I want, and he'll just keep coming back for more. I like this idea."
"I approve as well," Athena added, though her gaze drifted to Annabeth.
Percy glanced back at Annabeth. She was trying not to meet his eyes, her face pale. It reminded him of two years ago when he thought she was going to take the pledge to Artemis and become a Hunter. He had been on the edge of a panic attack then, thinking he was going to lose her. She looked pretty much the same way now.
Thinking about the Three Fates, he saw his life flash by. He could avoid all that—no aging, no death, no body in the grave. He could be a teenager forever, powerful, and immortal, serving beside his dad. Power and eternal life.
Who could refuse that?
Then he looked at Annabeth again. Percy thought about his friends from camp: Charles Beckendorf, Michael Yew, Silena Beauregard, and so many others who were now dead. He thought about Ethan Nakamura and Luke.
And he knew what to do.
"No," he said.
The Council was silent. The gods frowned at each other like they must have misheard.
"No?" Zeus echoed the word. "You are...turning down our generous gift?"
There was a dangerous edge to his voice, like a thunderstorm about to erupt.
"I'm honored and everything," Percy said. "Don't get me wrong. It's just...I've got a lot of life left to live. I'd hate to peak in my sophomore year."
The gods were glaring at him, but Annabeth had her hands over her mouth. Her eyes were shining. And that kind of made up for it.
"I do want a gift though," he said. "Do you promise to grant my wish?"
Zeus thought about this. "If it is within our power."
"It is," Percy said. "And it's not even difficult. But I need your promise on the River Styx."
"What?" Dionysus cried. "You don't trust us?"
"Someone once told me," he said, looking at Hades, "you should always get a solemn oath."
Hades shrugged. "Guilty."
"Very well!" Zeus growled. "In the name of the Council, we swear by the River Styx to grant your reasonable request so long as it is within our power."
The other gods muttered assent. Thunder boomed, shaking the throne room. The deal was made.
"From now on, I want you to properly recognize the children of the gods," Percy said. "All the children...of all the gods."
The Olympians shifted uncomfortably.
"Percy," his dad said, "what exactly do you mean?"
"Kronos couldn't have risen if it hadn't been for a lot of demigods who felt abandoned by their parents," Percy explained. "They felt angry, resentful, and unloved, and they had a good reason."
Zeus's royal nostrils flared. "You dare accuse—"
"No more undetermined children," Percy cut in. "I want you to promise to claim your children—all your demigod children—by the time they turn thirteen. They won't be left out in the world on their own at the mercy of monsters. I want them claimed and brought to camp so they can be trained right, and survive."
"Now, wait just a moment—" Apollo started to say, but Percy was on a roll.
"And the minor gods," he continued. "Nemesis, Hecate, Morpheus, Janus, Hebe—they all deserve a general amnesty and a place at Camp Half-Blood. Their children shouldn't be ignored. Calypso and the other peaceful Titan-kind should be pardoned too. And Hades—"
"Are you calling me a minor god?" Hades bellowed.
"No, my lord," Percy said quickly. "But your children should not be left out. They should have a cabin at camp. Nico has proven that. No unclaimed demigods will be crammed into Hermes' cabin anymore, wondering who their parents are. They'll have their own cabins, for all the gods. And no more pact of the Big Three. That didn't work anyway. You've got to stop trying to get rid of powerful demigods. We're going to train them and accept them instead. All children of gods will be welcome and treated with respect. That is my wish."
Zeus snorted. "Is that all?"
Percy looked around at the Council. "I will hold you to your oath," he said firmly. "All of you."
A lightning bolt appeared in Zeus's hand, a shaft of electricity that filled the whole room with the smell of ozone.
Percy was suddenly surrounded by an electric blue sphere, which was starting to float off the ground. He looked around at the Council and got a lot of steely looks.
Not even his father was on his side anymore.
"You ask too much, Percy," Poseidon said, shaking his head. He looked sad, but resolute. "You presume too much."
Percy was shocked when Zeus actually threw a bolt of lightning at him!
He didn't even have time to react before the lightning struck him, and he felt a searing pain in his chest. Then he was flying through the air, faster than he'd ever been before.
Percy was thrown from Mount Olympus and plummeted down. Did Zeus just kill me? he grabbed his gut, expecting to find a burning hole where his intestines used to be. No smoldering skin was there. He felt no pain. His clothes looked perfectly fine—not torn or burned.
Zeus hadn't cooked him with the Master Bolt, that was good.
But he still might kill me! Percy thought as he flew past the fifty-foot-wide bright blue flag hanging from the top of the Empire State Building.
The city was rising up at a blurring speed. He saw the diamond-squared skylights of glass buildings rushing at him from below. A shout caught in his throat as he squeezed his eyes shut, bracing for impact.
But the shards of glass didn't slice him apart.
His body punched straight through the roof of some high-rise office, through another floor, and another. He ricocheted through layer after layer of concrete, steel, office cubicles, and furniture.
Still falling.
He crashed through the bottom of the skyscraper, into an underground parking garage. The asphalt shattered around him as his body smashed into the earth below. Chunks of rock and debris sprayed into the air.
Deeper he went, subways and sewer pipes whipping past in a blur of steel and brick.
He felt no pain. The ground seemed to swallow him whole, parting around his form as he plunged into darkness. Soil and mud and ancient bedrock streamed upward in his periphery. He glimpsed fossils—the skeletal remains of creatures long extinct—flashing by in streaks of grey and brown.
Percy fell…and fell…and kept falling.
His ears popped as the immense pressure grew. The air became sweltering, like the inside of a blast furnace. His shirt clung to his skin, soaked in sweat and his stomach churned as he tumbled end over end.
As he continued to fall, he thought about the old Greek poet Wise Girl had told him about once. The one who had thought it would take nine days to fall from Earth to Tartarus. He hoped that poet was wrong, but it was starting to look like the old guy got it right.
He had lost track of how long he had been falling—hours? A day? It felt like an eternity. The wind whistled in his ears and the air was growing hotter and damper.
Suddenly, the chute he'd been falling down opened into a vast cavern. Maybe half a mile below him, he could finally see the bottom. For a moment, he was too stunned to think properly. The entire island of Manhattan could have fit inside this cavern—and he couldn't even see its full extent. Red clouds hung in the air like vaporized blood. The landscape—at least what he could see of it—was rocky black plains, covered by jagged mountains and fiery chasms. To his left, the ground dropped off in a series of cliffs, like colossal steps leading deeper into the abyss.
The stench of sulfur made it hard to concentrate, but he focused on the ground directly below him and saw a ribbon of glittering black liquid—a river.
He could control water—assuming that was water below him. He might be able to cushion his fall somehow. Of course, he had heard horrible stories about the rivers of the Underworld. They could take away your memories, or burn your body and soul to ashes. But he decided not to think about that. This was his only chance.
The river hurtled toward him. At the last second, he threw his arms out, calling to the water. The water didn't answer and he crashed into the river.
The impact didn't kill him, but the cold nearly did.
Freezing water shocked the air right out of his lungs and his limbs turned rigid. He began to sink. Strange wailing filled his ears—millions of heartbroken voices, as if the river were made of distilled sadness. The voices were worse than the cold. They weighed him down and made him numb.
What's the point of struggling? they told him. You're dead anyway. You'll never leave this place.
He could sink to the bottom and drown, let the river carry his body away. That would be easier. He could just close his eyes...
"Percy!" He heard a voice in his head. "Do not give in!"
Percy was still angry at the gods for not stopping Zeus from banishing him to Tartarus, but suddenly he didn't want to die. He kicked upward and broke the surface.
He gasped, grateful for the air, no matter how sulfurous. The water swirled around him, and he realized he was creating a whirlpool to buoy him up. He was near dead with exhaustion. Usually, water reinvigorated him, but not this water. Controlling it was taking every bit of his strength. The whirlpool began to dissipate. He struggled across the current. The river worked against him: thousands of weeping voices whispering in his ears, getting inside his brain.
Life is despair, they said. Everything is pointless, and then you die.
"Pointless," he murmured. His teeth chattered from the cold. He stopped swimming and began to sink.
"Percy!" the voice was back. "The river is messing with your mind. It's the Cocytus—the River of Lamentation. It's made of pure misery!"
"Misery," Percy agreed.
"Fight it!"
Percy kicked and struggled, trying to keep himself afloat. He wouldn't become another cosmic joke for Zeus to laugh at: the son of Poseidon dies from drowning.
Not going to happen, you asshole, Percy thought. He started making progress against the current. His limbs felt like bags of wet sand, but he could see the dark line of the shore about a stone's throw away.
He used the last of his strength to reach the riverbank. His feet dug into the sandy bottom and he hauled himself ashore, shivering and gasping as he collapsed on the dark sand. He wanted to curl up and fall asleep. He wanted to shut his eyes, hope all of this was just a bad dream, and wake up to find himself back in Camp Half-Blood, safe with his friends (well...as safe as a demigod can ever be).
But, no. He was really in Tartarus. At his feet, the River Cocytus roared past, a flood of liquid wretchedness. The sulfurous air stung his lungs. He tried to sit up and gasped in pain.
The beach wasn't sand. He was sitting on a field of jagged black-glass chips, some of which were now embedded in his palms. He wasn't worried about that. Despite the pain, he knew he wouldn't die. Not unless he took one of the shards and stabbed himself in the back.
Percy took a breath and forced himself to take stock. His backpack was gone—lost during the fall or maybe washed away in the river. Which meant no food, no water...basically no supplies at all, but he had worse problems. His celestial bronze sword, Riptide was missing—the weapon he'd carried since he was twelve years old.
So the air was acid. The water was misery. The ground was broken glass. Everything here was designed to hurt and kill and he didn't have a weapon. He took a rattling breath and wondered if the voices in the Cocytus were right. Maybe fighting for was pointless. Even if he did escape, Zeus would just banish him right back to Tartarus.
The realization almost broke him, but he couldn't let himself dwell on it.
He scanned his surroundings. Above, he saw no sign of the tunnel he'd fallen down. He couldn't even see the cavern roof—just blood-colored clouds floating in the hazy gray air. It was like staring through a thin mix of tomato soup and cement.
The black-glass beach stretched inland about fifty yards, then dropped off the edge of a cliff. From where he stood, he couldn't see what was below, but the edge flickered with red light as if illuminated by huge fires.
A distant memory tugged at him—something Wise Girl said about Tartarus and fire.
He was so distracted he didn't notice a huge black form swooping down from the sky until four hooves landed on the glass in front of him with a CRUNCH-CRUNCH-CRUNCH!
"Hey, boss!" a familiar voice said in his head. "I finally found you!"
Blackjack the Pegasus was an old friend of his, so Percy immediately panicked seeing the black stallion in Tartarus.
"Blackjack!" he gasped, wincing as the pegasus' hooves dug into the black-glass beach. "What are you doing here?"
"Looking for you, boss," Blackjack said. "I've been flying around for a week!"
A week? Did that mean the poet was right? Percy wondered. Had he really been falling for nine days and just didn't know it?
Before he could think too much about it, a roar shook the ground.
It sounded very close.
A hundred feet away the ground bubbled up like a blister. The bubble swelled and burst, disgorging a drakon like a larva from an egg.
Percy cursed and reached for Riptide. Drakons were some of the worst monsters. They were several millennia older than dragons, and much larger. They look like giant serpents. Most don't have wings. Most don't breathe fire (though some do). All are poisonous. All are immensely strong, with scales harder than titanium. Their eyes can paralyze you; not the turn-you-to-stone Medusa-type paralysis, but the oh-my-gods-that-big-snake-is-going-to-eat-me type of paralysis.
They had drakon-fighting classes at camp, but there was no way to prepare yourself for a two-hundred-foot-long serpent as thick as a school bus slithering towards you, its yellow eyes like searchlights, and its mouth full of razor-sharp teeth big enough to chew elephants.
"We should go, boss!" Blackjack said, using his head to scoop him onto his back, and took off into the air.
Percy's last view of the drakon was it spewing poison everywhere, melting the black-glass beach to dust around it.
"What are you doing in Tartarus?" he asked Blackjack as they flew.
The landscape below them was a bleak, ash-gray plain bristling with black trees, like insect hair. The ground was pocketed with blisters. Every once in a while, another bubble would swell and burst, disgorging more monsters.
He couldn't see far in the hazy air, but the longer they flew, the more certain he became that the entire landscape was a downward curve. He'd heard conflicting descriptions of Tartarus. It was a bottomless pit. It was a fortress surrounded by brass walls. It was nothing but an endless void.
One story described it as the inverse of the sky—a huge, hollow, upside-down dome of rock. That seemed the most accurate, though if Tartarus was a dome, he guessed it was like the sky—with no real bottom but made of multiple layers, each one darker and less hospitable than the last.
Monsters were zits on the skin of Tartarus, Percy thought, then he shuddered. Sometimes he wished he didn't have such a good imagination because now he was certain they were flying over a living thing. This whole twisted landscape—the dome, pit, whatever you called it—was the body of the primordial god Tartarus—the most ancient incarnation of evil.
If that god noticed them on its body, like fleas on a dog… He shook his head. Enough. No more thinking.
"Here we are, boss," Blackjack said.
Blackjack folded his wings and plummeted toward a sheltered depression like a moon crater. In the center of the crater stood a ring of broken black marble columns surrounding a dark stone altar.
"What is this place?" Percy asked as Blackjack spread his wings, lightly coming to a landing next to the altar.
He climbed off, feeling dizzy, and practically collapsed on a broken slab of marble, too exhausted to take another step. The crater's rim blocked their view of the wasteland behind. They would be well hidden here, but if monsters did stumble across them, they would have no warning.
"Hermes's shrine," Blackjack explained, walking around the base of the altar, occasionally pawing the ground as if looking for something.
Percy frowned. "A Hermes shrine in Tartarus?"
"That's right, boss. Your father told me to bring you here," Blackjack said. "The shrine—"
"My father sent you here? To Tartarus?" Percy cut the stallion off. "Why would he do that?"
"They are looking for you, boss," Blackjack said. "They know you are here. Giants and Titans. The defeated ones. They know."
The defeated ones…
Percy tried to control his fear. How many Titans and giants and monsters had he fought over the years? Each one had seemed like an impossible challenge. If all of them were down here in Tartarus, and if they were actively hunting him…
"Why are we stopping, then?" he asked. "We should keep moving."
With Blackjack and him together, they were practically ringing the dinner bell for every monster in this place.
"Sorry, boss. Can't leave until you've eaten." Blackjack said. "This is the only place we're gonna find food in Tartarus."
Percy's stomach made a horrible, hungry gurgling noise at the mention of food. He didn't see how Blackjack could summon food in the midst of Tartarus. Maybe he brought some with him?
He suddenly yawned, feeling more tired than he ever had. Blackjack said he'd been looking for him for a week. That meant he'd been falling for at least seven days, probably more considering Blackjack would have needed to fly to California to enter the Underworld to get to Tartarus.
At least seven days without food, water, or sleep. It was all hitting him at once now and he was struggling to keep his eyes open. Being banished to Tartarus was bad enough. Going to sleep in Tartarus with monsters hunting him… He didn't need Wise Girl around to tell him that was one hundred percent unwise.
"Here it is boss! Dinner time!" Blackjack said.
The food appeared on the altar in a cloud of smoke: grapes, apples, strawberries, cheese, fresh bread, and even barbecue. Percy loaded his plate and started wolfing food down. The brisket was still hot, with exactly the same spicy sweet glaze as the barbecue at Camp Half-Blood.
"Hey, this is good, boss!" Blackjack nudged his shoulder. "Actual food from home."
Maybe it was from Camp Half-Blood. The idea made Percy giddy with homesickness. At every meal, the campers would burn a portion of their food to honor their godly parents. The smoke supposedly pleased gods, but he never thought about where the food went when it was burned. Maybe the offerings reappeared on the gods' altars in Olympus…or even here, in the middle of Tartarus.
Percy thought about sitting in the dining pavilion with Annabeth and Grover, watching the sunset over Long Island Sound. He never expected his life to be easy. Most demigods died young at the hands of terrible monsters. That was the way it had been since ancient times. The Greeks invented tragedy. They knew the greatest heroes didn't get happy endings.
Still, this wasn't fair. He had gone through so much to stop Kronus and just when he'd succeeded, when things had been looking up, he had overstepped.
In hindsight, Percy probably should have known some of the gods wouldn't take kindly to his wish. But he had been on a roll. He'd just saved the fucking world!
Demanding all the gods properly recognize their children had seemed reasonable to him. But even though he was a demigod, he was still human. He still lived and died. The gods were inherently different.
True immortals, with a history of being petty, vengeful, and cruel.