Mortem Obire

Chapter 8

Chapter 8: Summer camp, take number 2

It was surprising just how mundane a simple school year could be – not that Harriet wasn't grateful for such a thing. The year would have probably felt far longer had she been bombarded with monster attacks and her own brand of natural disaster. Harriet wondered if she was like a magnet when it came to her and disaster, or perhaps, more aptly, chaos. She didn't doubt a certain god who loved to visit her on the train in her dreams was to blame. He loved chaos far too much. Harriet didn't really know what to think of him, other than that he was very, very dangerous, and undoubtedly not someone to mess with or otherwise cross. A soft sigh escaped her, even as she packed her things up, readying herself to head off to summer camp. The summer camp of all summer camps: Camp Half-Blood.

Her odd sense of amusement hadn't allowed her to tell the twins that she was also going to Camp Half-Blood, and neither had she allowed her mother to tell either Josephine or the twins. Lennard had been giving her odd looks the entire time she had hung out with him and the twins, and he hadn't approached her about camp.

Harriet wasn't sure whether he'd definitely been sent there for her, what with how her father had personally delivered her own invitation to that camp. A camp full of ADHD children with too much power at their fingertips – ones who all, more often than not, aspired to impress their godly parent, ignorant to the potential cost.

The way they could end up eaten, devoured, or otherwise broken on the floor like a puppet whose strings had been cut. Harriet was all to aware of the potential risks, and her father was an utterly terrifying figure in her mind. He did, after all, known what she was.

Part of her shuddered at the thought of being around so many people, while another part of her longed to have some semblance of control over all her abilities, oddly numerous as they were. She didn't want to set another forest ablaze, and neither did she want to take the number of pandemics she had caused up to two. That was yet another reason why she looked forwards to going to camp, nervous as the thought made her of being under the watchful eye of gods. One of which was her father. The same father who she resembled far too closely, not that many people, if any, could actually see her golden eyes. Her father's wrathful eyes.

A vision clouded her sight, another golden-eyed figure standing there. "Come down, little half-blood," the voice rumbled, imaging changing to that of a pit and a green-eyed boy.

He had featured in her visions far too much.

Part of her almost pitied him – to have fate so woven around him tightly, connecting him to tragedy after tragedy. She empathised with such a creature, controlled by prophecy and fate. Yet she could change that. She was an arbiter of fate that time around. It was why she was going to change some things. She wasn't going to let any of her family die that time around.

Her teeth bared, even as she came back to herself, feeling a familiar trickle of blood from her nose. It had to have been an important vision, she mused, absentmindedly grabbing a hold of a tissue. He was ever so important, the echoes of a prophecy echoing in her ears – a prophecy much greater than the ones given out so very often.

A 'Great' Prophecy.

"A half-blood of the eldest gods," she murmured, the rest of that prophecy coming to her as clear as day, and Harriet could only ponder on how easily prophecy came to her – despite how she loathed its existence sometimes. Fate was a fickle, cruel thing, more so to her. Truly, she didn't know whether her ability to see was a blessing or a curse. Maybe it was neither. She couldn't decide.