Embers of Renewal | Leo Valdez

Chapter 3

Nova didn't sleep that night.

She laid awake for several hours after the campfire, thoughts rampaging through her mind. She remembered the Prophecy of the Seven all too well, the way Rachel's eyes had glowed green and smoke spewed out of her mouth—it was her first prophecy as the oracle.

Nova had taken Chiron aside as all the campers filed out of the amphitheater seating, back to their cabins for the night. Confronting him, she told him that she had an inkling about where Jason was from. The Latin? The Roman names of the gods? That couldn't be a coincidence. Nothing ever was, especially for demigods.

Chiron had stopped her before Nova started rambling. It was dangerous, he had said, to have that sort of knowledge. He had sworn many lifetimes ago to never say a word, for the sake of the lives of demigods. The centaur had stopped himself, then, and told Nova to go to sleep.

It wouldn't do well to dwell on that sort of thing, Chiron had reminded her.

But when she went to bed, Nova couldn't turn her brain off. It wasn't unusual to have difficulty sleeping, but she usually got an hour or two in each night.

After three or four hours laying in bed, staring up at the ceiling, Nova threw her blankets off of her. She paced around the small guest room in the Big House that had been her home for the past few months, and rifled through a large wooden crate of blank canvases.

She vaguely remembered the shape and size of the frame Harley had made her, and tried to pick a canvas that was the closest in size.

Settling on a small square canvas, about twelve by twelve inches, Nova set it on an easel in the corner of the room. Not thinking too deeply, she grabbed a few tubes of paint and mixed them on a palette, before messily spreading the color over the white canvas. It was a rich indigo, the color of a dark evening sky, far above any glimpse of the earth that was inevitably beneath it.

Several hours later, Nova had a semblance of a painting in front of her. The strokes were slopped and the shapes vague, but it was a fully fleshed-out idea.

The deep indigo that had covered her canvas was transformed into a twilight sky, with misty lavender-gray clouds and a dusting of faint stars. The strange thing about the painting was what was in the middle of it. A large wooden boat—it looked to be a Greek trireme—was flying in the middle of the painted sky. It had one sail and a few banks of oars, with a bronze hull and a dragon head at the mast.

Nova wasn't sure how the idea had popped into her head, or if it had actually come from her own head at all. Her hand had moved almost on its own while she was painting; she wasn't sure if she had been in control of her art. It was a creepy sort of feeling, like someone had channeled their ideas through her hands onto the canvas. She shivered, rinsing her brushes quickly and letting the paint dry on the easel.

The sun had risen, and the bright yellow rays of light streamed through the window, shining on Nova's face. She closed her eyes, feeling comforted by the warmth that bathed her skin, until she nearly jumped out of her skin when the camp alarm blared.

A conch horn blew, and Nova hastily pulled on a jacket over her tank top and pajama pants before rushing out of the Big House. Her mind raced, millions of possibilities circulating through her head. Did monsters break into camp? Did someone get hurt?

Screams rang out near the cabins, and Nova rushed to find the source of the yelling. Satyrs bleated with terror, and half the camp had run outside in a mixture of pajamas and amor. All of their heads were turned up, staring in horror at something above their heads.

A giant bronze dragon swooped down from the sky, Leo sitting atop it grinning like a lunatic. The dragon set down right in the middle of the field, and Leo yelled, "It's cool! Don't shoot!"