Summary: Kronos had blundered. The issue with mortals, he mused, was their very nature. Immortals, well they were unchanging, steadfast…eternal. That made them predictable. Mortals, however, with their fleeting lives were much more entropic .To grasp their nature, to predict their fate was to predict chaos itself.
Manipulating them was akin to taming a snake. They could be guided to dance to your desire, would twist and turn as you pleased until the moment they snapped and lashed out with such venom as to strike you dead immediately. Mortals, as simple as they may have been, were unpredictable. Wild. They did not like to be restrained….and that went doubly so for those with the very Sea running through their essence.
He was certain he had deciphered the prophecy, certain of who the prophecy centered around. His other grandchild was no longer needed, a mere obstacle to his rise. To his victory. And while unable to kill the demigod himself, he was certainly able to break them, ensure that they would be so shattered as to no longer be even a speck in the grand tapestry of fate. Afterall, when better to stop a threat than before it had begun?
How could he have known that killing someone as irrelevant as Sally Jackson would ever lead to this?
The moment she had laid eyes on him, she had known the course of her life had irreversibly changed. She had known the moment his sea green eyes (and how could so much power, so much emotion so much…so much be conveyed through one's eyes alone) met hers that there would be no escaping him. Not that she wanted to. A whirlwind romance had consumed them that summer - filled with emotion, adrenaline and the sensation of weightlessness and freedom only felt when in the grasp of the unbound ocean itself. Dangerous, uncontrollable, unpredictable. But so, so alive. And throughout all that blur of a summer, what Sally remembers most is swirling, powerful sea green eyes, staring at her filled to the brim with everything known to mortals and immortals alike. Staring at an exact copy of those eyes looking down at her now, filled instead with tears and sadness and grief much too potent for someone so young, she wasn't sure she could regret the change, even if it led to this.
Laying on her back, blood trickling through her mouth, she chanced a glance at the cause of the end of her story. Pasiphae's son was yards away, arm still extended from having thrown the tree that had broken Sally's spine. As he slowly lumbered towards them, she looked back at Percy.
"Percy, honey, it's okay. You don't need to be scared." Her voice, faint as it was, remained strong and powerful.
"Mommy, get up mommy! We have to get away from the bad man!" Her strong little boy was tugging at her fruitlessly.
"Oh baby, I can't." She raised a bloody hand to absently trace his face, which was becoming blurrier and blurrier by the second. "I'm so sorry my sweet, sweet Percy. You have to be strong, you have to run now. Run far, far away. Run to the ocean, you'll be safe there."
"But I don't want you to go! I want to stay here with you." He sobbed, clinging to her more tightly.
Sally gave him a blood stained smile, "I wish you could, sweetheart. But I'm dying, Percy, and I am so, so sorry that I won't be there for you. But you have to run Percy. To the ocean! Now run!"
His sobs broke her heart. "I don't want you to go, Mommy! Please stay."
"I know, love, I know it's hard. But you have so much love inside you. And you are so, so loved baby. Remember that. Always remember that baby. I love you."
"I love you too mommy."
Sally caressed his face one more time, bloody hands tracing abstract patterns.
"I love you. I love you, Percy. Now RUN!"
As she watched his tiny form run away, she kept her stormy blue-gray eyes locked onto his sea green ones. And as her sight slowly faded to black, the last thing she saw was those two sea green orbs.
'Poseidon, save him. If you ever loved me, if you ever felt anything for Percy, please save him. Take care of my baby, take care of our little boy.'
And as Sally Jackson took her final breath, the last thing she heard was the scream of her dear child, wild and unrestrained and full of grief and terror and true, unbridled rage. And echoing this scream, permeating the very fabric of reality itself, was a roar equally as enraged and grief-stricken. A voice much deeper than her young child's, infinitely more powerful, ancient.
The combined roars echoed throughout the world as the oceans thrashed, tectonic plates shifting as storms of unprecedented destruction raged all throughout the Earth.