❝In a fight, they're lethal. Around each other, they melt❞
"I'm fine." I said, trying to hide the frown and tears that threatened to spill.
Percy looked at me once.
"I'm not going anywhere, unless you tell me what's wrong," he declared and I would h...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
I had been sitting in this damned cell for about a week now. After about 3 days, I remembered I could Iris Message someone.
So, I had been Iris messaging Caelan while Nico was sleeping every night.
But don't worry, I haven't been alone the entire time. No, I had a cellmate. His name was Briares and he was the most depressing creature I had ever met. He was human-size and his skin was very pale, the color of milk. He wore a loincloth like a big diaper. His feet seemed too big for his body, with cracked dirty toenails, eight toes on each foot. But the top half of his body was the weird part. He made Janus look downright normal. His chest sprouted more arms than I could count, in rows, all around his body. The arms looked like normal arms, but there were so many of them, all tangled together, that his chest looked kind of like a forkful of spaghetti somebody had twirled together. Several of his hands were covering his face as he sobbed. He was a hundred-handed one and a useless one at that.His face was long and sad, with a crooked nose and bad teeth. He had deep brown eyes—I mean completely brown with no whites or black pupils, like eyes formed out of clay.
"Hey Caelan, I'm gonna take a nap."
"Kay, love you, Lee."
"Love you too, Cae." I whispered before swiping my hand through the connection. I laid against the cell wall and tipped my hat to block out the sun some. "Hey Briares, wake me up when Kampê comes back, please and thank you."
He didn't look up but nodded and I drifted off into a dreamless sleep.
I was woken up by Briares shaking me and I glanced out of the cell. Kampê was making her way back down the cell row.
Kampê was sort of like a centaur, with a woman's body from the waist up. But instead of a horse's lower body, it had the body of a dragon—at least twenty feet long, black and scaly with enormous claws and a barbed tail. Her legs looked like they were tangled in vines, but they were really sprouting snakes, hundreds of vipers darting around, constantly looking for something to bite. The woman's hair was also made of snakes, like Medusa's. Weirdest of all, around her waist, where the woman part met the dragon part, her skin bubbled and morphed, occasionally producing the heads of animals—a vicious wolf, a bear, a lion, as if she were wearing a belt of ever-changing creatures. I always got the feeling I was looking at something half formed, a monster so old it was from the beginning of time, before shapes had been fully defined.
