take me to the lakes where all the poets went to die, i don't belong
𝖎𝖓 𝖜𝖍𝖎𝖈𝖍 a mortal girl is thrown
into the godly world and forced to
save everyone before its too late.
[ percy jackson x oc ]
[ percy jackson & the olympians ]
[ the ligh...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Imagine the largest concert crowd you've ever seen, a football field packed with a million fans. Now imagine a field a million times that big, packed with people, and imagine the electricity has gone out, and there is no noise, no light, no beach ball bouncing around over the crowd. Something tragic has happened backstage. Whispering masses of people are just milling around in the shadows, waiting for a concert that will never start.
That's how Marlowe tried to describe the Fields of Asphodel, but even her words couldn't live up to what it actually looked like.
The black grass had been trampled by eons of dead feet. A warm, moist wind blew like the breath of a swamp. Black trees—Grover told Percy they were poplars—grew in clumps here and there.
The cavern ceiling was so high above them it might've been a bank of storm clouds, except for the stalactites, which glowed faint gray and looked wickedly pointed.
The quartet tried to blend into the crowd, keeping an eye out for security ghouls. Marlowe couldn't help looking for familiar faces among the spirits of Asphodel, but the dead are hard to look at. Their faces shimmer. They all look slightly angry or confused. They will come up to you and speak, but their voices sound like chatter, like bats twittering. Once they realize you can't understand them, they frown and move away.
She wondered if she would find her parents—her real parents—milling about aimlessly, walking around forever in a pit of hell.
She then thought about Hazel Levesque, who should be sitting by herself in the fields. Marlowe sometimes found herself shying away from the group to search for the curly haired girl, but after Percy found her dangling over a ledge, he pulled her back, making sure to keep a close watch.
They crept along, following the line of new arrivals that snaked from the main gates toward a black-tented pavilion with a banner that read:
JUDGMENTS FOR ELYSIUM AND ETERNAL DAMNATION
Welcome, Newly Deceased!
Out the back of the tent came two much smaller lines.
To the left, spirits flanked by security ghouls were marched down a rocky path toward the Fields of Punishment, which glowed and smoked in the distance, a vast, cracked wasteland with rivers of lava and minefields and miles of barbed wire separating the different torture areas. Even from far away, Marlowe could see people being chased by hellhounds, burned at the stake, forced to run naked through cactus patches or listen to opera music.
She hoped her father was rotting there. She hoped he was imagining her torturing him for all of eternity.
The line coming from the right side of the judgment pavilion was much better. This one led down toward a small valley surrounded by walls—a gated community, which seemed to be the only happy part of the Underworld. Beyond the security gate were neighborhoods of beautiful houses from every time period in history, Roman villas and medieval castles and Victorian mansions. Silver and gold flowers bloomed on the lawns. The grass rippled in rainbow colors. Elysium.
