Nothing is mine.

Percy finds four new horse friends, but then things heat up...

Nature's Pyre

Smoke streamed across the Big Bear Lake, billowing up past the swathe of green trees at the shore toward the mid-morning sun in a thick, grey column. Upon the steep mountainside above, a patch of orange fire spread, eating through the forest in a host of flickering tongues.

'I guess we just head right for that,' Katie murmured. 'And whatever happens, happens. Like you always say, what is going to happen always was.'

'Yes, Cheerio-leader.' Percy saluted. 'Come on, Clarisse. What are you even doing, trying to count all your hoplons?'

Clarisse shot him a sharp grin as she polished the front of her bronze hoplon. 'I only have one.'

'That just makes it more embarrassing, really, doesn't it? Just use your fingers like you usually do.'

'Better my fingers than a cucumber.'

Percy frowned. 'What? Why would you use a—'

'Forget about the cucumber,' Katie blurted, pink-cheeked. 'Thalia and all of Artemis's hunters are coming. I do not want Artemis to hear the cucumber joke.'

Clarisse cackled. 'She might tell Percy.'

'Someone has to tell me,' he said. 'Why would you use a cucumber to count with?'

Katie buried her flaming pink face in her hand. 'Please stop.'

'You heard your Plant-princess,' Clarisse said. 'No more cucumber jokes.'

'I wasn't even making any,' he protested, 'but fine.'

'Are you ready for the big day, Perce?' Thalia yelled. 'Or is the heat going to boil you like a lobster?'

The big day isn't today. Today one will be extinguished by wild silver host. And it might not be me in the end anyway. Percy turned from the lake and the mountain, unease stirred within like small ripples spreading across a winter pond. But if it's not me, who will it be? Clarisse? Katie? Thalia? Iphi?

Katie squeaked.

A soft hand rested upon his shoulder. 'Your sisters are prepared, Perseus,' Artemis murmured. 'Are you?'

Between Percy's shoulder blades, a thousand hot needles sank deep into the ghost of the handprint upon his spine, burning through him to the bone. 'Katie is the quest leader, so I am ready to do as I'm told.' He paused. 'For once. I usually do the exact opposite of what I'm told.'

The corner of Artemis's mouth twitched. 'I am bound, by my father's strictest decree, to offer no aid beyond my normal responsibilities save in opposition to the Gigantes. Fortunately, Perseus, you happened to be holding on to your friends' hands when I transported all of my companions across the lake to inspect the fire that rages through my domain.'

'Thank you, most great and wise Artemis Aristo.' Percy grinned and held his hands out.

Clarisse grabbed his wrist. 'Right.' She pounded her spear haft against her chest. 'Let's get to it.'

Katie wiggled her fingers through Percy's and clung on tight; a fierce flush climbed her cheeks as she stared across the lake away from Artemis.

Oh Katie. Percy's heart wavered. I don't think I can; it just doesn't work like that.

'Close your eyes,' Artemis murmured.

Percy squeezed them shut and a bright flash of silver stabbed through his eyelids; he opened his eyes into the searing heat of crackling, rippling orange fire.

The forest crumbled into it.

Tall pines blazed like torches above an inferno of flame swirling through the burning ferns and thickets, sending streams of bright orange sparks up into the sky amidst the whirling grey smoke, and the thin stream winding down the blackened scorched strip of mountainside before them steamed, full of still floating little fish.

The Gigantes must be up here somewhere. Heat seeped through the soles of Percy's shoes from the smoking ash and fading embers beneath his feet as he stared at the peak through the smoke. Waiting, probably. Or disguised as something ridiculous. Like a very large cheerleader.

'This bit is all burnt up already.' Clarisse released his wrist and shielded her face behind her hoplon. 'So where's whatever it is we're going to have to beat the shit out of?'

'It started the fire,' Thalia said, striding past, one arm across her face. 'It's started a whole bunch of them over the last few weeks. Let's go up the mountain through this burnt up patch until we see them.'

'Look what they've done,' Katie whispered; her grip tightened on Percy's hand like a vice. 'They… they… Why?'

'Maybe someone beat them up for stealing strawberries.' He gave her hand a small squeeze. 'And now they're holding a grudge against everything green.'

'I'll beat them up again,' Katie vowed. 'Summer is the Search, it's grief and rage, it happens for a reason; this is just… just… unnecessary.'

Clarisse grinned. 'Come on then, Plant-girl, let's go apply a marrow to someone's skull.'

Katie drew her short, broad, leaf-shaped bronze blade, her green eyes bright with fury. 'It's not going to be a marrow I hit them with. Not for this...'

'Sea-boy?' Clarisse motioned up the hill with her spear. 'Are we going up?'

Percy nodded.

They started forward, picking their way across the smoking ash. Thali and Iphi split their sisters into two groups and jogged past them, flitting across the ash and leaving a drifting cloud of pale smoke behind their heels.

He watched them go. Will it be one of them? I didn't lead them here, but they still follow me anyway. His heart sank, crushed into the depths of bottomless black waters and ground down to a single speck, like a shell, seized by the sea and scoured down to less than a grain of sand. If it's not me, it will be them, won't it? That's just how it works.

'Do not fear, Perseus,' Artemis murmured in his ear and through the tang of the smoke came a faint wash of sweet pine sap and sharp juniper. 'You will not disappoint anyone; you have only ever made us proud.'

Percy's heart trembled like a single shivering drop of water clinging to the tip of his finger. 'I know. Not today.'

'Put out these fires for me, Perseus.' Her hand vanished from his shoulder and she stepped alongside him, her hair dark as ebony and her eyes as bright and red as Calypso's amaranth. 'I will come when you need me; you have my word.' She leapt up into the smoke, blurring into a dark-winged hawk and soaring high into the sky.

'Yes, my lady,' Percy whispered.

He hurried up the steep slope and found Iphi crouched down within a huddle of her sisters, peering at the ground.

'What have you found? Please tell me it's a new Ipod for Thalia, her old one has nothing but weird screaming music on it.'

'You probably just listen to Sea Shanties,' Thalia retorted. 'By Miley Walrus's alter ego Hannahfish Montanafish.'

'That's… not a real person.' Percy shot her a grin. 'And you're demonstrating an awful lot of knowledge about Disney princesses right now, Thals. Something you want to admit to? Maybe in the form of bursting into a spontaneous song?'

'I'll admit you,' Thalia growled. 'To a hospital.'

He laughed. 'What have we actually found?'

'A footprint, or half of one,' Iphi said.

The group drew back as Percy moved forward.

Half the rear tread of a shoe marked the damp ash at the very edge of the stream.

'Not very big feet for a Gigantes. Thought they'd be, you know, more giant.'

'It's a person,' Iphi said, pointing the head of an arrow up the slope. 'There are what could be others, too, though the ash has been disturbed by the wind, but no monster tracks. Just this bootprint and what might be horses.'

'Horses?' Percy cheered. 'Finally, some good news. I like horses. Maybe I'll finally have someone smarter to talk to than Thalia.'

'No normal mortal would bring their horses up here into a fire,' Iphi replied. 'So be wary.'

'Let's keep going,' Clarisse said, cracking her knuckles. 'I don't care about marks in the mud, I want to feed someone their own teeth.'

'Me too,' Katie declared. 'We should set fire to them and see how they like it.'

Percy eyed the pitch-black tips of her fingers as they set off up the mountain again. 'Are you…?'

'Angry.' She glowered up the slope. 'Look what they did to all the beautiful plants! They didn't deserve this. They were happy and growing and green and…' The darkness crept a little further up the tips of her finger. 'It's all just heat and death and—' bone-white crept through her green irises like little pale roots '—and I don't like it.'

'We'll deal with whoever started the fires,' Percy promised.

'I'm going to do a bad thing,' Katie muttered. 'I can feel it, Percy. I don't want to, but… they hurt all the plants. They were just here being sweet and nice, like strawberries, and they burnt them.'

Percy wrapped an arm around her shoulders as his sisters spread out into a loose line ahead just below the peak.

She blinked and some of the white faded from her eyes. 'Percy?' A little pink blossomed across her cheeks. 'What about… her?'

'It's just an arm, Captain Crunch. I don't want you running in by yourself because you're mad and end up getting hurt.'

'I won't,' Katie declared. 'I don't just grow strawberries. I can fight. I'll make you proud.'

Like Bianca. His heart plummeted. Katie, no, please don't choose this. I don't want it to be you.

'I'm already proud of you,' Percy whispered. 'You don't need to be anyone else or do anything else. You saved the entire camp by destroying the labyrinth, remember?'

'It feels like a long time ago.'

'It does,' he said. 'But it wasn't. And I haven't forgotten.'

She swept her blonde hair off her face, hooking it away from the sweat-beading her temples. 'Well I'm going to make you proud again. I want you to look at me like you must look at her. Just once.'

'Katie…'

'No.' Katie slipped out from under his arm and picked up her pace. 'You'll see. I can be like you. I can be brave.'

Percy trudged after her, his heart sinking like a stone. But I don't want you to die. I don't want anyone to die following me ever again.

Great pieces of iron sprawled across a series of small pits gouged out of the mountainside, gleaming in the light of the fires; the crude metal limbs, each part as long as Percy was tall, lay scattered all across the camp, joined by a web of thick, steel cables. Amidst them, a scorched wooden cabin squatted and a narrow zig-zag of wooden canals ran from the stream on stilts to a blazing mud-brick furnace. Crouched in the mud beside it, a slight, dark-haired boy shovelled charcoal into the furnace at a feverish pace.

'Oi,' Clarisse yelled. 'Kid.'

The boy twisted around and sprang to his feet. 'Oh, hi babe.'

Clarisse snorted. 'Who are you calling, babe, kid? You look about thirteen.'

'Thirteen?' The boy flexed his biceps, the muscles under his tanned skin rippling. 'With guns like these? And all natural, too. None of that hot-girl fit, gym-bod stuff.' He winked. 'Want a closer look, babe? This shirt comes off, you know…'

'Yeah, most shirts do.' She stomped forward, running one hand through the cloven crimson crest upon her helm. 'But I do like a front row seat to the damage.'

'Sure, babe.' He laughed. 'Why are all the hot chicks so loco, bro?'

'Clarisse,' Percy called.

'What, Sea-boy?'

'Do you mind if we talk to him a bit before you break him in half?'

'Sure.' She shrugged. 'As long as the breaking bit still happens after.'

'Gonna break me in half, babe?' The boy flashed a broad grin of white teeth. 'Sounds like wild ride; sign me up. I'm Leo, by the way, Leo Valdez, son of, well, it doesn't matter, does it?'

'It kind of does,' Percy replied. 'But I'm guessing, since you seem to be building your own version of Talos, that I know who your dad is. I met him once. He warned me about love, sent me to fight a bunch of extremely powerful monsters I had no hope of killing, and offered me a lump of rock; I ended up blowing up a mountain and getting stranded on an island in the ocean. I don't think he's a great people person.'

Leo stared back at him, measuring him with an intense gleam in his eyes. 'Who are you, bro? I dreamt of you. Not, like, in the way I'm gonna dream about your girl there… it felt real. You were holding something up, something people weren't meant to hold, but you were left stuck under it and you just had to hold it anyway. And you did. You did what nobody should have been able to do. And I thought, you know what, if he can do that, then maybe I can do this.'

'I'm Percy Jackson, son of Sally Jackson. I was holding the sky, which is really really heavy, so, if Atlas or someone else suggests you do that, politely refuse.'

Leo laughed. 'I like your style, man. Yeah, fuck your dad. We don't need 'em. Who does? We've outgrown 'em. If you can hold the sky like Atlas, why can't I make something better than my dad ever did?'

'It doesn't work like that.' Percy frowned. 'You can't outgrow the nature of the world; you just get to choose, so you choose well, and live or die without regret.'

'Er… yeah you can, bro.' Leo gestured around him with the shovel. 'Look. That's all that nature is good for; it's fuel, a resource for us to shape into something better. We started just shaping clay and rocks and sticks, and now we can make amazing things. I'm going to make something so amazing that it changes the world.'

A little growl escaped Katie. 'You burnt all the trees.'

'Gotta keep the furnace hot, babe.' Leo glanced between her and Clarisse. 'Actually, sorry hot chick number one, but Leo's got a tiny bit of a thing for blondes. You okay with taking a rain check, or are you both happy to keep it casual and both have a bit of Leo together? Can be at the same time if you're into it…'

'Can I kill him?' Thalia asked.

'Permission to kill, milady?' Percy said in his best and highest falsetto. 'Permission granted, Lieutenant Sparky.'

'I hope Artemis heard that,' Thalia retorted.

'She's probably going to drop me in another cold lake,' Percy admitted with a grin. 'But it was worth it. Unless she follows through on the breasts threat, then this idiot might hit on me.'

'No, I won't, bro.' Leo stabbed the shovel into the dirt and stuck a hand down the front of his shirt. 'You'd still be packing more of a surprise than I'd be prepared to handle.'

'Please don't take it off,' Clarisse said. 'I've seen better, I promise. Even Fish-face here.'

'Not yet, babe,' he said, pulling a slim bronze whistle out and raising it to his lips. 'And here I was hoping someone else would be the one doing the blowing.'

A sharp shrill note sliced across the clearing.

Percy pulled Anaklusmos from his pocket and extended it into a xiphos. 'If it's one hellhound, he's in for a nasty surprise.'

Four horses burst from the cabin, tossing their heads and stamping their hooves in the ash and mud.

'Horses!' Percy grinned. 'I love horses!'

'Not these ones, bro.' Leo dropped the whistle back down the front of his shirt. 'These ones eat people. Like, I'm only going to let 'em eat you, because these chicks are way too hot to let die, and they tend to settle right down after eating one person anyways.'

'I'd rather be eaten,' Thalia retorted.

Leo winked. 'That can be arranged.'

'Urgh.' Katie grimaced. 'What is wrong with him?'

'I don't think he gets out much,' Percy replied. 'Obviously not having much luck with girls when he does, too. Not that I am either, of course, mostly I seem to just get them killed or leave them behind on an island for eternity. I guess at least I sound like I have a bit more class?'

'Bro, forget classy, chicks don't really dig that; you need a bit of Leo's magic.' Leo leant on his shovel. 'The ladies love me; they're just easily overwhelmed is all.'

'Okay, I'm sick of listening to him,' Iphi snapped. 'Shoot him. And then shoot the horses.'

Silver arrows flashed across the clearing.

Leo dived into one of the pits and the silver shafts sprouted from the furnace, bursting into flames.

The horses tossed their heads and breathed a roaring stream of fire across the mountainside, incinerating the arrows. Iphi and her sisters scrambled back, patting out little tongues of yellow that caught on their clothes.

Percy took hold of the stream and the water trickling through the canals, sweeping it across the pits and squashing the fires, smashing the four horses back into the cabin and hitting the furnace with a great hiss of steam. Leo scrambled from his pit, dashing back past his ruined cabin and behind the fingers of the vast iron hand lying upon the mountainside.

'I don't think these are very nice horses after all,' he said. 'Does anyone have any sugar cubes to calm them down when they come back out?'

'No,' Thalia growled. 'Where did that stupid boy go?'

'You've really embraced the role, haven't you?' Percy joked. 'Quick, throw in some thees and thous. You already stole the tiara look, might as well go the whole way.'

'Shut up, Percy.' Thalia's spear crackled with bright white sparks. 'I don't like being eyed up like a toy in a shop window; I'm going to give him a little bit of couples therapy. Shock therapy.'

'Yeah, I got that.' He pointed at the cabin. 'You find that guy and zap him until he says something about the Gigantes we are actually here for, we'll deal with the world's worst equine experience.'

'Er…' Katie pointed her short bronze sword at the horses. 'How? What are they?'

'I have no idea,' Percy confessed. 'I usually make it up as I go along if there's nobody to tell me what to do.'

The four horses stalked from the cabin, little tongues of yellow flame flickering in their nostrils and their red eyes burning with ravenous hunger. Heavy bronze collars hung around their necks, dangling broken pieces of chain that swung and swayed about their knees as they pawed at the ground with their hooves.

'I don't know how to kill them,' he said. 'So let's not try in case they grow back more heads or explode or something. Katie, can you grow something strong enough to tie those chains together or hold them down? Then Clarisse and I can pin them down with her spear and make sure they don't do anything inconvenient?'

Katie nodded and dropped to one knee, pressing the flat of her palm to the dirt. 'To survive the summer, mom says the roots must grow deep,' she whispered. 'Where are you? Beneath rage, grief, drought and death, there is always hope.'

Thick pine roots burst from the ground, wrapping about the horses' legs and dragging them to the ground, creeping through the chains dangling from their necks and haltering them together.

'Keep their mouths closed!' Percy yelled.

Katie clenched her fists and the roots wrenched the horses heads down into the pit. Yellow fire spewed across the mud and guttered out.

The horses bucked and reared, gnawing at the roots over their mouths, straining against them with every sinew; they broke in loud cracks, spraying splinters across the pits. Iphi directed her sisters' arrows at them, but the silver shafts bristled from their skin like the spines of a hedgehog, goading them to greater fury.

Percy stepped in front of Katie, ignoring the splinters bouncing off his chest and tearing small holes through his t-shirt. 'I knew I should have got more t-shirts.'

Clarisse laughed behind her hoplon. 'She's probably happier you didn't.'

'Stop!' Leo cried, tossing away the broken shaft of his shover and scrambling through the pits away from Thalia's lightning-wreathed spear. 'Just stop! What don't you understand?!' He crawled through the mud, one fist clenched tight about the whistle. 'All of this is wrong! Why should we bow and scrape and serve them?! They're no better than us, no different, they're just more powerful. We should take the power! We grow and change and make new things, and they don't change. They don't care.' Leo stared down at the whistle in his fist. 'They leave us little trinkets and promises, but we'd be happier if they just didn't exist!' He ripped the whistle from about his neck and hurled it into the furnace. 'And, soon they won't!'

'They are different,' Percy said. 'You can't destroy the nature of the world, even if you fight against it, you're still part of it. Look, all you've managed to do is destroy this place and nothing's changed.'

'Unimportant things,' Leo spat. 'It's just a mountain. Just a few trees. I am going to make a God. Not one like them. One like us! One that we control. One that will let us do everything we should be able to. We don't use clay pots or wooden boats or bronze weapons or any of their useless old stuff. We're better than they are. It's our world now!'

The furnace exploded in a column of yellow flame, rising high above the mountain and searing the smoke from the sky.

Leo gaped at it. 'How…?'

The vast iron hand twitched in the dirt behind him; its fingers shivered with blazing heat, curling into a fist. Each huge piece of iron crept across the mud and ash, dragged toward the rising column of fire on the thick steel cables knotting them together like tendons.

A trickle of dread slid down Percy's spine. 'I think everyone should probably take a few steps back.' He raised Anaklusmos to his lips and pressed a kiss to the warm bronze blade, stepping forward toward the searing pillar of fire. 'I'm extremely hard to kill, so let me take the first turn.'

It's impossible to defeat an immortal, but Artemis said she would come. She gave me her word.

'Percy,' Katie called. 'Get back!'

'If it kills me, someone call my mom and tell her the good news,' Percy replied. 'But wait about six months first please, she has to have a nice normal baby first.'

Feathers brushed his ear and a soft, warm weight perched upon his shoulder. An ebony-feathered hawk cocked its head at him, one crimson eye staring at the column of flame.

Not today, Perseus. The hope you bring will not be extinguished while it is within my power to prevent. Artemis's voice swept through his thoughts like a fierce, sharp winter wind through the bare branches of the trees. Do not allow Hephaestus's lost son from aiding the Gigantes in the fight. You know well the importance of mortal choice in moments such as this; do not let his choice define the world to come. And do as you wish with the man-eating Mares of Diomedes; they have earnt nothing but suffering.

'Yes, my lady,' he murmured, stepping back.

She leapt from his shoulder in a blur, alighting on the balls of her feet, armoured in shining silver scales from neck to toe, her long auburn hair flowing behind her like a banner. 'Be brave, my companions.' Artemis drew back the fine thread of glowing moonlight that strung her bow. 'But do not interfere in our fight. This foe is beyond the reach of mortal arms.'

The iron pieces lurched into the air, crashing together; they drank in the column of yellow flame, sucking it from the sky, blazing hotter and hotter. The Gigantes limbs flexed as the heat rose past its shoulders to the crude iron face hammered across its great helm, countless red-hot cogs whirring and clicking away around thick steel cables. With one searing hand it reached down and lifted a vicious pick as long as Percy was tall from within the fading fire of the furnace.

'It worked!' Leo cried, leaping over the pit to its side and pressing one hand against the shivering hot iron; his sleeve burst into flames, the fire only danced on his skin as if it were cool as water. 'I did it!'

The Gigantes swatted him away with the back of his hand, sending him bouncing across the pits like a rag doll to smack into the flank of one of the horses. They sprang on him like starving wolves, ripping him limb from limb in a cacophony of shrill agonised screams, and gulping down every bloody scrap of flesh, settling down to gnaw at the bones.

What we choose in life, we echo for eternity.

'At last,' the Gigantes rumbled, clenching his iron fist about the pick with a metallic screech. 'Aigaion is born anew for the dawn of the next age.'

'Aigaion,' Artemis declared, her bow shifting into a long spear of shining silver. 'Begone. Or face the wrath of the Wild.'

The flat crude mouth hammered into Aigaion's metal face split at the corners, spilling trickles of molten metal down its cheeks as it curved into a grin that spread from ear to ear. 'The wrath of the Wild, little goddess? The Wild is tamed. Worked and ploughed. Fields to feed the workers. Fuel to feed the fires of industry and change. Mines. Quarries. Lumber. Ore. Oil. She is naught but unwilling mother to the children of invention, useful only until her womb runs dry and barren.'

A small ripple of rage swept through Percy, like rings of cold, heavy rain spreading across the surface of a lake.

Artemis lunged in a blur of silver.

Aigaion swung the pick, slamming it into the mountainside and covering everything in a thick cloud of ash. Within it, Percy glimpsed Artemis, weaving through the blur of Aigaion's limbs, striking sparks from the back of his knees and ankles, scoring deep scratches across the steel cables at his calves. The gashes bled thick, dark oil, catching alight and giving off coils of choking, greasy smoke.

'Strategos,' Clarisse yelled. 'What now?'

Dad. Percy spun Anaklusmos in his hand. Will you be mad if I kill some horses?

They are no steeds of mine. Poseidon's words broke over him like a great cold wave. Do not stay your hand for pity; the sea knows none for those that offend it.

'The sea knows no mercy,' Percy whispered, stepping forward. 'The storm has no pity.' He drove the bronze blade through the side of the nearest's skull, and cut through the throats of the others, flowing through their rearing legs and around their snapping teeth as they burst into golden dust. 'For Artemis Agrotera.'

Thalia and Iphi ushered their sisters away up the mountain.

'Go,' Percy ordered. 'Clarisse, Katie, go with them.'

Katie bit her lip. 'And you?'

Someone has to choose. And I think it should be me. So it can't be any of you.

'I'm going to try and see if I can help.' He reached for the stream, sweeping it up into a fine mist and casting it through the cloud of ash and pitch-black smoke. 'Even if it's just a little bit.'

Percy closed his eyes and opened a thousand thousand more within the swirling cloud of dust. Blazing heat seared them shut in clusters as Aigaion's limbs tore through; it cauterised every wound he took from Artemis's spear and bow, and with each splatter of thick, smouldering oil, Artemis's accuracy diminished.

'Why fight?' Aigaion clawed at her in crude, violent swipes, ripping at her as he spewed a flood of black smog from his mouth. 'It is inevitable. The world will change. Accept your new place within it.'

Artemis bent and weaved through them, a furious silver blur, flashing from one form to another so fast it sent sharp stabbing pains through Percy's temples. A swathe of roots burst from the ground beneath Aigaion's feet, pinning him in place, and arrows streaked through Percy's sight, shattering against the iron body of the Gigantes. Aigaion slammed the tip of the pick into roots as they burst into flame and ripped himself free, but the tip of Artemis's spear punched through his iron chest, sending Aigaion stumbling back to his knees.

'Ah…' Aigaion pressed his hand to the thick oil leaking from the gap and it caught alight at his touch, burning on all four of his fingertips. 'You fight hard.' The blazing heat within him swelled; it burnt the roots away like matchsticks, melted the steel cables and his iron face, and turned the huge pick in his hand into thick globs of slag. 'Of course you do. It has taken Man thousands of years of invention and struggle to overcome you.' A shifting, shining figure of molten metal streaked with slicks of effervescent oil formed within the coils of choking smog; its mask melted and the smooth gleaming metal surface of its face split open into a gaping maw. 'But the fight is over now. There will be fields and gardens and parks you may roam between the glass and steel and concrete and plastic. There is no need for the wilderness, no desire for it, no place for it. And though tamed and yoked you will be, far from endless suffering will you endure. I will take what I want from your womb, but you need not suffer more than that. So… submit.'

A hundred tendrils of white-hot molten steel sprouted from the tips of Aigaion's limbs and lashed forward; they sliced through the silver scales of Artemis's armour, spraying molten gold through Percy's vision as it scattered into darkness.

You will not touch her. Percy's fury swelled like the surge of the storm; the small ripple rose up from the darkest depths of the ocean to scrape the sky, waters as black as the moonless night hung there in his heart, smoking cold as the Styx. He let it loom over him, higher and higher and higher, until the crest of it towered so high its shadow blotted out the beat of his heart, the weight of the world, and the throb of pain in his temples. Never again.

He brought his foot down as the wave broke.

The mountain trembled beneath his heel and broke away; the pits, the splintered wooden cabin and the crumbled furnace crumbled down through the burning forest with a deafening rumble, sweeping Aigaion into the lake in a violent gush of steam and a cloud of dust.

'I will melt your bones and boil your blood, mortal.' Aigaion stumbled about in the bubbling, hissing waters as the mist cleared, broken trees snapping beneath his dark, stiff limbs in the cold, muddy waters. 'Your goddess—'

A flash of silver shattered the tendrils and severed his head from his shoulders.

Artemis rested her spear upon her shoulder as she watched the vast iron body crash into the lake, a fierce grin on her lips and a savage satisfaction in her sharp crimson eyes. She tossed Aigaion's head into the mud and crushed it into golden dust beneath her heel, turning away and stalking back up the mountain. Water dripped from the sleek, shining silver scales of her armour, mingling with the ichor trickling from the deep cuts across her stomach, hips and thighs.

Ever you choose well, Perseus. The murmur of her voice came through his thoughts like the soft dawn chorus of birdsong through the gentle green woodlands. Always you make me proud. The hunter wastes no moment of advantage, but strikes without mercy like the hawk from the sky.

Thank you. Percy's heart soared, swept up amongst the stars by the fierce fondness shining in Artemis's amaranth-red eyes. I do my best, my lady.

He swallowed a thick hot lump as he tucked Anaklusmos back into his pocket. 'How could I do anything less?'

AN: Follow the linktree to find loads and loads more of my writing (including a bit more of this one!)

linktr . ee / mjbradley