The King bearer three

Part 4: A Girl

The girl retraced her steps from the night she saw the sky torn apart, the night she found that rotting corpse. It was a curious thing. Whenever she retraced her steps, beat for beat, step for step, she found the corpse as it had been, lying in the muck and roots beneath Thalia's tree. This would only occur if she had left her cane behind, and stalked out during the night towards the tree, following the same track she had made the first time, step for step from her cabin to the fleece itself. If one thing was different, however, the crow would disappear, to be replaced by something else or nothing at all. If she placed her foot wrong at any point, there would be nothing, if she took her cane with her it would be a vulture, so on and so forth. 

The worst was when it was in the light of day. If the sun was shining, and she made her way exactly as she had that first night, something horrible awaited her. The corpse of a crow, rotting and putrid, same as it had been the night the sky had split, moving. It would hop from branch to branch, glitching, shivering and shimmering, fazing in and out of existence like a mirage. It would caw in a low rasp, mimicking the crows that had mourned it on that haunting night. Then it would leave, dissolve into dust, and the sensations would follow. The same as she had felt that night, just as loud, just as harrowing; the sky tearing apart, the earth shifting and shaking. Someone would find her there later, still recovering from those same sensations, hours after the fact. She avoided Thalia's tree when she could

This night, however, was different. She had retraced her steps, beat for beat, her cane somewhere lost in the mind - boggling mess of Cabin 11, the night sky shining blissfully above her, quite as a breeze, and found nothing. She hadn't known what had compelled her to retrace her steps, frankly she hadn't wanted to after the living corpse incident. Yet there she was, standing on Half - Blood Hill, leaning against Thalia's tree, reliving everything that she had done that first night and just waiting. She didn't even know what she was waiting for, just that she was waiting for something to happen like it had that night, the crushing sensation, the splintering sky, the crows, the corpse, something. 

She must have fallen asleep under that tree, after all it was very peaceful a scene. She must have expected to see the rocky, jagged planes of Tartarus stretch out to the River Styx, because her face showed no surprise. She hardly even reacted when she felt a bullet pierce through her hand as she tried to get up. Best not to respond to pain here, so she had learned. She got up from the ground, and inspected her surroundings. She could see tread marks left behind in the ground.

Not far from the tunnel, she reasoned. She shook her head, chuckling to herself. The Underworld gods always liked to do these things, make her think there was a chance. A chance for escape, a chance to get out of here. The tunnel lead back to Camp Half - Blood, she had gotten that out of Achlys the one time she had tried to go out that way. The girl wondered vaguely if that tunnel would be useful to someone in the future, and then turned around. She was not one to repeat her mistakes very often, and that tunnel was one to never repeat. Never. Not again. 

She still remembered what had happened the first time she had walked, no, sprinted through that tunnel. She had barely made it through the entrance when she was met with a wall of fire. The pain was immediate, she was burning after all, and when it vanished, and she saw the black stone curve of a tunnel before her, she'd thought herself free, that she had paid the price for running, that she would finally be able to run from here. That she'd be able to live.

Thinking back on it, it should have been obvious that the tunnel had changed; the stone wasn't the same and the tunnel that she had entered had no trace of the sharp, jagged stalactites she had been surrounded with. Still, she had remained unawares until she ran into Achlys, Goddess of misery, who, with her dry face cracking like pottery at the width of her smile, had pumped the girl so full of poison she couldn't see straight. "Now, honey," Achlys had crooned, "You ought to know better than to run from Hades. Oh, what would your father say. Tsk, I doubt he'd like to know he had such an idiot for a daughter, tsk, tsk, tsk,"