Fall Through Tartarus (Jiper) (Complete)✔️

Chapter 30

         Finally Chapter 30!!!!!!!!

             Piper decide the monsters wouldn't kill her. Neither would the poisonous atmosphere, nor the treacherous landscape with it's pits, cliffs, and jagged rocks.

              Nope. Most likely she would die from an overload of weirdness that would make her brain explode.

              First, she and Jason had to drink fire water to stay alive. Then they were attacked by a group of vampires and a bratty witch.

              They followed Bob through the wasteland, tracing the route of the Phlegethon as they approached the storm front of darkness. Every so often they stopped to take a drink of fire water, which kept them alive, but Piper wasn't happy about it. Her thorat felt like she was constantly gargling with battery acid. 

             Her only comfort was Jason. Every so often he would glance over and smile. Or squeeze her hand. He had to be just as scared and miserable as she was, and she loved him for trying to make her feel better. 

             The wall of darkness, now only a few hundred yards away. Bob's blue janitor's overalls were ripped between the shoulder blades, as if someone had tried to stab him. 

                They picked their way across the ashen wasteland as red lightning flashed overhead in the poisonous clouds. Just another lovely day in the dungeon of creation. Piper couldn't see far in the hazy air, but the longer they walked, the more certain she became that the entire landscape was a downward curve.

                She'd heard conflicting descriptions of Tartarus. It was a bottomless pit. It was a fortress surrounded by brass walls. It was nothing but a endless void.          

                  One story describe it as the inverse of the sky a huge, hollow, upside down dome of rock. That seemed the most accurate, though if Tartarus was a dome, Piper guessed it was like the sky with no real bottom but made of multiple layers, each one darker and less hospitable than the last. And even that wasn't the full, horrible truth . . . . .   

                     They passed a blister in the ground a writhing, translucent bubble the size of a minivan. Curled inside was a half formed body of a drakon. Bob speared the blister without a second thought. It burst into geyser of steaming yellow slime, and the drakon dissolved into nothing.

                       Bob kept walking.

                        Monsters are zits on the skin of Tartarus, Piper thought, She shuddered. Sometimes she wished she didn't have such  a good imagination, because now she was certain they were walking across a living thing. This whole twisted landscape----- the dome, pit, or whatever you called it---- was the body of the god Tartarus---- the most ancient incarnation of evil. Just as Gaea inhabited t=the surface of the earth,  Tartarus inhabited the pit.

                     If that god noticed them walking on his skin, like fleas on a dog . . . Enough. No more thinking.

                    "Here," Bob said.

                     They stopped at the top of a ridge. Below them, in a sheltered depression like a moon crater, stood a ring of broken black marble columns soundring a dark stone altar.

                    "What is this?" Jason asked turning to face to Bob.

                     " Hermes shrine, your escape. " Bob answered.