ɪ'ʟʟ ꜱᴇᴇ ʏᴏᴜ ᴀɢᴀɪɴ ᴡʜᴇɴ ɪ ᴇꜱᴄᴀᴘᴇ

Do I Really Need To Come Up With Chapter Titles?

PERCY WAS TIRED of walking. Yeah yeah, he swore that he would never complain again, but his feet felt like Titan mush. And he was bored. Maybe he was trudging through hell itself, but seriously, the suspense was killing him. He wished something would just happen so that he could actually do something.

Then, he froze. There it was again. He'd tried to pretend he was imagining it, but he couldn't fake it anymore. The whispers that he heard ever since he fell down here.

Sometimes just a voice muttering indistinguishable words. At other times... something worse. Sometimes, the voice told him to betray his friends, to help him rise again. It scared Percy. Not just the creepy voice, but the fact that sometimes, he thought it was right. After all, did he really owe the gods anything? What did they ever do for him?

He shook it off. No, he didn't owe the gods anything, but he would keep fighting, if not for them, then for his family. For Annabeth, Nico, Grover, Tyson. His friends on the Argo ll. For all of them.

"Bob? How much longer? And do you happen to know of any more food stops along the way?" Percy asked.

"No, no. No more M&Ms for Bob and Percy. Not for a long time. Time is hard in Tartarus. Bob does not know how much longer."

Percy almost growled in frustration. "Please, Bob, can you at least tell me where we're going?"

"The lady. Death Mist."

"I know Bob, but who exactly is this lady?" He asked. It wasn't that he didn't trust Bob, it was that his new friend happened to be a Titan. And, well, demigods and Titans have very different definitions of the word 'friendly'. He wanted to make sure he wasn't walking into a trap.

"Naming her. Not a good idea." Bob replied.

Percy sighed, but Bob was probably right. Names did have power after all. Not that he'd ever really paid that much attention to that rule, but he was in Tartarus, and pretty much everything here wanted to kill him, so he decided not to push his luck.

"Um, how far then?" He decided to ask. Surely Bob would have some sort of answer to that, even one of his vague, confusing ones.

"I don't know," Bob admitted. "I can only feel it. We wait for the darkness to get darker. Then we go sideways."

"Oh, yes. Sideways. Of course." Percy sighed.

He wanted to ask for a rest, but decided against it. He was tired and hungry, but the heat wasn't getting to him as much anymore, or even the bone-chilling cold. Almost as if his body was adapting to this place. He shook that disturbing thought out of his head.

He continued plodding after Bob over sharp rocks and through thick, dismally black fog. He wondered whether or not Rachel had gotten his burnt-napkin message, and even if she had, he hoped that Reyna would hear her out.

He trusted Reyna, but the Romans and Greeks were sure to be on a thin line after that.. accident with the Argo ll.

Bob stopped abruptly, causing Percy to nearly run into him.

"Here."

"Here? Is this where we go sideways?" Percy asked.

"Yes. Where the darkness is darker." Bob replied, staring into the distance.

The actual darkness hasn't changed much, but he could tell that it was much damper, and the air felt chiller. Surprisingly though, it didn't bother him that much. He didn't particularly like feeling like someone had dumped a bucket of Mrs. O' Leary's slobber all over him, but he had expected the change in temperature to affect him more.

He was standing in a kind of forest, but the trees had no branches and the trunks were perfectly round, like a huge follicle of hair. The ground was smooth and rather pale. Oh great, of course he had to be walking straight through Tartarus' armpit.

Suddenly, he heard a faint rustling sound somewhere in the trees. He froze, drawing his sword (he decided to call his jagged bone that). She heard another noise and whipped around just in time to see one of the skeletal trees quiver.

"Something's moving." He muttered, closing ranks with Bob so that they were back to back. He strained his eyes, trying to look into the distance to see what was attacking, but it was too dark.

Could he have imagined it? He'd almost decided he'd imagined it when a horrible winged ugly monster dropped to the ground far too close to him for his liking.

Furies he thought. Batty wings, sharp talons, tattered dresses. Then, about three more landed in front of Percy and Bob. They raised their respective weapons as a dozen more touched the ground and others fluttered above them. Definitely not furies then, unless they had somehow managed to clone themselves.

"What are you?" He demanded.

The arai. The curses. Hissed a voice from the crowd of bat hags.

None of them had even moved their mouths. The demons looked dead, like puppets being controlled by a singular other mind.

Percy clenched his fist, seizing the blood of the demon ladies, about to tear them apart in a moment's notice.

Perseus Jackson. You have caused much pain, so much suffering and death. We will curse you a thousand times in the name of Mother Night.

"Oh, really? Just a thousand times? And here I thought I was in trouble."

~🌊