𝕱𝖗𝖎𝖊𝖓𝖉𝖑𝖞 𝖋𝖎𝖗𝖊 - a Leo Valdez slowburn

Chapter fourteen

Chapter fourteen.

[Leah finally wakes up]

"Look up at the stars,

and tell me you don't see a thousand spirits,

waiting to answer your call."

Aiden had decided that he didn't like Hermes's method of flying. 

The god had a rather peculiar style: a mixture of 'I'm immortal I can't die' and 'demigods want to die anyways', abbreviated (by Aiden) to 'Let's die'. They thought it fit perfectly, although he didn't say it out loud. He didn't want to be smoten for something like this. 

The wind howled around them, leaving Aiden's and Hermes's hair incredibly messy and in their faces. Aiden had a panic-stricken expression on his face, his eyes wide, whereas Hermes was smiling widely, shouting with glee. 

"Isn't this great?" he shouted over the winds. Aiden vigorously shook his head. "No! No, you idiotic god, it isn't!" his feelings evident over the subject. Hermes decided to ignore them, instead just picking up the pace. Aiden was sure that physics class had said he'd be burned by the friction by now, with how fast they were flying - and without protection too! But that didn't matter at the moment. Aiden was just scared that they'd fall from this height (he wouldn't survive it - Hermes would just get a nasty wound). 

It took them about a good forty-five minutes to reach the river: specifically, an abandoned village by the river. Hermes set the demigod down hurriedly, saluting to them and then running away again. He risked a glance back at Aiden. "Call me when you need to go back!" he shouted, and then he disappeared into the mist. 

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Leah didn't know what time it was. She'd given up on screaming: it didn't help. Nothing did in the Dream. She didn't think it had been even a day since she'd collapsed in reality, but it felt like decades; centuries, even. 

Khione and her little army had been a distraction, and Leah had been thankful for it. She'd been sure to pray to the healing gods she knew of. She sent a particularly nice prayer (for her taste) to Apollo, seeing as he issued her the prophecy she was fulfilling at the moment, and to Hypnos, who would probably know what to do in this situation, seeing as he was the god of sleep and all. Or maybe Morpheus would be more significant in this situation? She decided to send a prayer to him as well.  

Leah didn't like being lonely. Of course, she couldn't help it: the Dream prohibited all contact. She frowned. Maybe not all contact... why hadn't she tried that before? "Because you're an idiot," she told herself angrily before focusing on what she tried to do. 

She tried picturing Percy Jackson - that shouldn't be too hard, she'd been searching for him for months now. She pictured his messy black hair, the orange camp T-shirt that must be in tatters right now, his sea-green eyes... slowly but surely an image appeared. 

Before her Percy Jackson himself shimmered into existence. He didn't seem like he was in his prime, Leah noted. He'd been missing for - what, eight, nine months now? She saw what that had done to him. 

His T-shirt, as she'd guessed, was in tatters: the logo of the camp had faded away almost completely, just leaving enough for Leah to identify that it was indeed a Camp T-shirt. She recognized the place he was in; she'd been there not too long ago on Jason's quest, at the Wolf house. It didn't seem to be in real time, her Dream, but it seemed realistic enough to keep Leah busy and distracted.

Percy's hair had become shaggy, in desperate need of a haircut. His loyal sword, Riptide, or Anaklusmos in Greek, was gripped by his hands loosely. He seemed to be fighting a monster of some sort: gorgons, maybe? They were blurry, seeing as Leah wasn't imagining them and hadn't seem gorgons in real life up close, well, ever. But she thought she could identify them.