INTREPID ▸ connor stoll

[𝟏.𝟎𝟑] what are you afraid of?

┍━━━━ ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ━━━━┑
chapter three
what are you afraid of?
┕━━━━ ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ━━━━┙

There is little else that can undermine the weeks of terror spent hunting a dragon and being hunted by a dragon but the improbable becomes immediately possible when the Fates have the sense of humour that they do. Perhaps, all this time eaten by failed search parties and injured hunting parties was just a premonition for a much larger scheme but there is hardly time to think about the future when even the present is uncertain and as a demigod, this is a constant state of being. Devi's brain, at least, is not made to calculate moves on a board this big and ambiguous.

The camp is a difficult territory to navigate when everything is in such rapid motion. Bodies are moving from one place to another on seemingly random trajectories, like displaced atoms. A static of anticipation and panic is ringing in the air; it makes the hairs on Devi's arms stand on end and she just knows, with a sinking heart, that something has happened. This flavour of pandemonium is the bitter, unwelcome, delirious sort that Devi does not have the palate for – at least, not today.

Clarisse, like Nyssa, is nowhere to be found, an hour later, which does not bode well for the Ares campers, who are getting restless and therefore, impulsive. The recent failure is less of a blow to their confidence than a sacrifice of their beloved war games and none of them are particularly brilliant at killing time without, well, killing. Not having Capture the Flag on Friday evenings is their equivalent of skipping a booze party which, for the likes of her siblings, is simply not a possibility.

She makes an effort to hide her hand by pulling her jacket sleeve over her wrist and concealing the rest of it in her pocket when she arrives at her cabin. It's an abomination of barbed wire, red brick walls and an angry boar's head hanging over the front door to greet her home sweet home when she passes under the doorway. She takes the route around the land mines, hoping that there aren't any new ones that sprouted over the past two days, and makes it to the door in one piece.

Inside, it is just as welcoming and hospitable as its appearance, with all the charm and mess of an army barrack: closely-packed bunk beds with identically military green sheets, rusting metal headboards, and walls covered in shotguns, revolvers and shoulder-fired missile launchers. How many of these actually work, Devi doesn't know. They're relics, spoils of war from previous Ares children, who exist only as names on the far wall, which is nothing short of a memorial with old photographs, letters written by soldiers to their families back home just before they died, and names carved in stone.

The uniformity could breed solidarity, but it is just an epic depersonalisation event for Devi whenever she becomes conscious of the imposing, never-leaving identity of her father embedded in these walls that never sleep. How can anyone live like this? She asks every time she returns to her cabin and sees that wall, full of memories and grief. How do people pay the price of their leaders' incompetence with their own lives? Maybe one day, she'll touch the photographs and talk to the dead soldiers and they will answer.

Worse than the obviously bright, colourful and happy atmosphere of the cabin is a storm of tense-looking teenagers and this stress, combined with the sheer muscle mass, is an ugly combination. Already, Devi is compelled to shrink into her jacket and hope that is enough to make her invisible. Being the smallest and the quietest makes her a convenient target of ridicule when her siblings have no other means of blowing off steam, and she takes it quietly most days, but she won't be able to handle it so gracefully today.

"You're back!" Sherman is the first person to get to his feet to greet her. His gaze drifts to her hand, which is still carefully out of sight and he must notice something in her face that indicates he continue without mentioning it. "Clarisse is at the counsellors' meeting because..." He scratches his buzzed head. "You missed out a lot. Why don't you sit down and we'll fill you in?"