λιακάδα ☀️ Pjo x Mcu WTM¹

Hemera Hates on Swords

The next few days I settled into a routine that felt almost normal, if youdon't count the fact that I was getting lessons from satyrs, nymphs, and acentaur.Each morning I took Ancient Greek from Annabeth, and we talked aboutthe gods and goddesses in the present tense, which was kind of weird. I discovered Annabeth and Hemera were right about my dyslexia: Ancient Greek wasn't that hard for me to read. At least, no harder than English. After a couple of mornings, I could stumble through a few lines of Homer without too much headache.

Leo shook his head, "The most unrelatable thing ever Homer always give me a headache." Both Hemera and Apolo let out identical  squawks of offense and Jason shook his head, "Leo, Homer was a son of Apollo." Leo sighed, "Of course he was."

The rest of the day, I'd rotate through outdoor activities, looking for something I was good at. Chiron and Hemera had tried to teach me archery, but we found out pretty quick I wasn't any good with a bow and arrow. They didn't complain, not even when Chiron had to desnag a stray arrow out of his tail.

lint and Hemera winced in synch.

Foot racing? No good either. The wood-nymph instructors left me in the dust. They told me not to worry about it. They'd had centuries of practice running away from lovesick gods. But still, it was a little humiliating to be slower than a tree.

And wrestling? Forget it. Every time I got on the mat, Clarisse would pulverize me. "There's more where that came from, punk," she'd mumble in my ear.

The only thing I really excelled at was canoeing, and that wasn't the kind of heroic skill people expected to see from the kid who had beaten the Minotaur. 

I knew the senior campers and counselors were watching me, trying to decide who my dad was, but they weren't having an easy time of it. I wasn't as strong as the Ares kids, or as good at archery as the Apollo kids. I didn't have Hephaestus's skill with metal work or—gods forbid—Dionysus's way with vine plants. Luke told me I might be a child of Hermes, a kind of jack-of-all-trades, master of none. But I got the feeling he was just trying to make me feel better. He really didn't know what to make of me either.

"S'okay Perc. You were still pretty great." Hemera said and Percy smiled and bopped her nose.

Despite all that, I liked camp. I got used to the morning fog over the beach, the smell of hot strawberry fields in the afternoon, even the weird noises of monsters in the woods at night. I would eat dinner with cabin eleven, scrape part of my meal into the fire, and try to feel some connection to my real dad. Nothing came. Just that warm feeling I'd always had, like the memory of his smile. I tried not to think too much about my mom, but I kept wondering: if gods and monsters were real, if all this magical stuff was possible, surely there was some way to save her, to bring her back....

I started to understand Luke's bitterness and how he seemed to resent his father, Hermes. So okay, maybe gods had important things to do. But couldn't they call once in a while, or thunder, or something? Dionysus could make Diet Coke appear out of thin air. Why couldn't my dad, whoever he was, make a phone appear?

Hemera started to randomly sing, "Because Zeus is a controlling whore~" Zeus thundered (heh get it?) as the rest of the gods stifled laughs. Her friends clapped and whistled as if she was a broadway actor and Percy wiped a fake tear away, "So beautiful."

Thursday afternoon, three days after I'd arrived at Camp Half-Blood, I had my first sword-fighting lesson. Everybody from cabin eleven (and Hemera, who had gotten banned from arts and crafts for a week because she helped the Stoll brothers steal from the camp store) gathered in the big circular arena, where Luke would be our instructor.