It was morning and Katie, Rose, Travis, and Connor were having breakfast at a small cafe from which you could see just the top corner of the Golden Gate Bridge.
The anxiety was palpable. None of the four of them showed it, but they were all very stressed about the battle to come. They were just four demigods against what could very possibly be an entire army of empousai.
As to try to diffuse the tension, Travis and Connor started talking about all the monsters they'd met and all the weird encounters they had had before a satyr came to pluck them from their normal life and take them to Camp Half-blood.
Katie joined in happily. She had lots of curious meetings to recount.
Rose, on the other hand, pulled out the book the elderly lady had given her and started reading it as she ate her toast with raspberry jam.
"-no way, your P.E. teacher fell into a thorn bush that wasn't there two minutes before, and they started wrapping around him?" Travis said, outstanded, staring at Katie.
She shrugged. "He was being mean, so that all happened," she said. "It was weird at the time, but now it makes sense."
"Story of our lives," Travis said.
Katie turned to Rose, half expecting her to bring forth her own story of "Before Camp".
She turned to see that she was still deep in her book.
She scowled. "What are you even reading, Rose?" she said.
Rose looked up. She swallowed her toast. "It's a book the lady under our place gave me. It's pretty interesting."
Katie reached out to grab the book. Rose's first instinct was to grab it and hold it out of her reach, as if she didn't want Katie to discover it. But she retained herself, because that was a really weird feeling. Why shouldn't her sister be allowed to see her book?
"Hey, how are you reading this?" Katie said, skeptically flipping through the pages.
"Uh, there's words, and my eyes see those words and process them-"
"No, that's not what I meant," Katie said, "I can't read this!"
"That's just your dislexia," Connor said. "Reading English is basically impossible. The word blood should be pronounced bl-oo-d, but noo, it's gotta be bl-uh-d."
"It's not my dyslexia!" Katie snapped. "It's not English or Greek!"
"What?" Rose said.
She grabbed the book and flipped through the pages. "I have no problem reading this, it has to be English, what are you even...?"
Just then, she started noticing that the words weren't exactly what she thought they were.
They had the same meaning as the words she saw, but it wasn't written the way she saw.
She frowned.
She looked closer.
Where she read "he was a great leader", actually said "magnus dux erat".
Where she read "the gladius was the preferred weapon of the legionnaires", it actually said "gladius legionum praelatus erat".
But the meaning she understood was the same. She didn't know how, but she knew it was.
Was this some kind of trick of the Mist?
"Actually... you're right Katie, it's not English. I don't know how I can read it, this doesn't make sense..." Rose said, more to herself than to anyone else.
YOU ARE READING
He Stoll My Heart - Connor Stoll.
Fanfiction"Looks like I Stoll your heart, huh, Rosie?" "I hope Aphrodite makes you fall in love with a blood-sucking mosquito." "Ouch." - - - Rose Louloudi, daughter of... Demeter? All her powers correspond. All her talents. All her qualities. Everything ab...
