"Send me! Send an army! Send a thousand ships! I don't care, just bring her home. I hate being without her."
[ PERCY JACKSON x FEMALE OC ]
[ PERCY JACKSON SERIES ]
cover by @humaneity !
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0011. | THE UNEXPECTED BETRAYAL OF THE TRUTH TELLER
The entrance to the Underworld wasn't nearly like anything Percy had imagined.
He would have guessed the kingdom of a Greek God to be an abundance of white marble, columns, friezes, clear water springs, servants and followers ambling around in togas. He would have guessed the kingdom of the God of the Dead to be the very same, only with a black colour scheme. It was childish, but that was how he had been imagining it.
Now that he was there, seeing it all genuine and first-hand, no smear of his imagination, he was hugely disappointed.
Where he had once imagined an ancient display of Underworld justice, something gothic and terrifying, was actually quite modern and seemingly out of place for what he had imagined.
The Underworld seemed to be a huge cavern underground, but when Percy tried to look, he couldn't see the ceiling. It was too high and far too dark for his eyes to adjust to the height. He faced the same issue with trying to see an end to the size of the cavern. It stretched on for miles further than any horizon he had ever witnessed, and his mind seemed to fill in the blank of the distance for him, shading it with a black mist that meant he couldn't see much farther than four or five miles where it was flat—which was few and far between. The Underworld was surprisingly hilly and mountainous.
He couldn't see it yet as he climbed up the ashen walkway with his friends, but he could hear what sounded like volcanoes erupting, fires burning, and a high pitched sound that he didn't dare let his imagination roam over.
"This is Erebus." Grover murmured, reading a sign for Percy that he hadn't noticed in all of his sightseeing.
He looked ahead to his eye level rather than up at the skies.
The dead were beginning to congregate, splitting into queues, three of them. The first two were hardly shifting, seeming to be frozen in any movement at all. The last, was moving swiftly.
"What do you figure?" Percy ventured to them.
Annabeth spoke. "The fast line must go straight to Asphodel." She guessed (but Percy had learned that Annabeth's guesses were usually the truth). "No contest. They don't want to risk judgement from the court, because it might go against them."
Percy frowned. "There's a court for dead people?"
Unknowingly, he glanced to Octavia, waiting for her scathing comment for his cluelessness regarding mythology, but it never came.
Knowingly, he looked at her properly.
She looked pale. Not that she wasn't always, but typically, she let off an illuminated white glow, like a pearl. Then, she looked human, not so godly as usual. Her eyes were downcast, hidden from his view and her hair was braided down over her shoulder, hiding her expression.
