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chapter ninety-seven. ☄︎. *. ⋆
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I STILL HADN'T HAD TIME TO PROCESS EVERYTHING: My siblings' deaths, Ethan's sacrifice, Percy's mom being mega-hot behind the trigger of a shotgun, Luke playing the hero once more, the fall of Olympus. And now I was looking at my dad and trying not to burst into tears over it all.
I can't remember the last time I saw him. Whenever it was, I had been much shorter than him. But now we were eye-to-eye, our faces level. He seemed much less scary now that I was older. Less all-knowing. He even looked.. younger than me, what with how he presented himself as a sixteen-year-old. He'd been so cool the last time I saw him. Did his all-knowingness really sizzle away, or had I just wisened up in the past few years?
"Dad," I said, giving him a tight nod of nobility.
"Theodosia." When I looked up, he was smiling; but it wasn't his typical cool-dude surfer smile. It was a genuine god-like smile. "You've fought bravely for someone who has been cursed for the past week."
"We're talking about that later," Percy muttered, next to me. I looked to over to him, unable to formulate a sarcastic reply. There wasn't much I could say, really. For the first time in my life, I was speechless.
Percy looked horrible. He was all bloodied and bruised from his fight with Kronos. Although I doubted I looked much better.
The Three Fates themselves took Luke's body away.
I hadn't seen the old ladies before. They looked just about as creepy as you'd expect them to—three ghoulish grandmothers with bags of knitting needles and yarn.
It is done, one of them said.
The Fate held up a snippet of blue yarn—Luke's lifeline. It had already been cut in two.
They gathered up Luke's body, now wrapped in a white-and-green shroud, and began carrying it out of the throne room.
"Wait," Hermes said. The god unwrapped Luke's face and pressed a kiss to his forehead. He murmured some words in Ancient Greek—a final blessing.
"Farewell," he whispered. Then he nodded and allowed the Fates to carry away his son's body.
As they left, I thought about the Great Prophecy. The lines now made sense to me. A hero's soul, cursed blade shall reap. The hero was Luke. The cursed blade was my own dagger—cursed because of Ethan's hold on me. A single choice shall end his days. Percy's choice, to give him the knife, and to believe, as Annabeth had, that he was still capable of setting things right. Olympus to preserve or raze. By sacrificing himself, he had saved Olympus.
