Fate Withstands

Chapter 20

Nico stayed for the war games, spent the night in the Underworld, and came back for the meeting the next day. When the quest was prepared and all formalities were over, he pulled his sister aside before she could go far.

"I'm going back to the Underworld," he explained. "Dad's going to need all the help he can get. The Fields of Punishment look like a prison riot. The Furies can barely keep order. Besides...I'm going to try to track some of the escaping souls. Maybe I can try to find the Doors of Death from the other side."

"Be careful," Hazel warned. "If Gaea is guarding those doors-"

"Don't worry," Nico smiled. "I know how to stay hidden. Just take care of yourself. The closer you get to Alaska... I'm not sure if it'll make the blackouts better or worse."

"If we free Thanatos," Hazel said, "I may never see you again. Thanatos will ignore you but send me back to the Underworld..."

Nico reached out to hold her hand. "I wanted to give you a chance at Elysium. I knew how hard the fields could be. If...if worse comes to worse, you'll at least be in a better place. But...but I don't want to lose my sister." He kissed her forehead. "Good luck, Hazel." And with that, he melted into the shadows.

Sure, he helped his dad for a little bit, but he couldn't do much. Shades didn't listen to shades. The prospect of life caused rebellion. Before long, he knew his father needed a long term solution instead of a helping hand.

But where he thought those doors were...

Maybe the rumors were false. Maybe they were anywhere else in the Underworld. But he looked. And soon he knew that where he most dreaded to go was where they had been all along.

So he got his weapons, gave the sun and the moon one last goodbye, and prepared to never see the land of the living again as he descended to the edge of the pit.

As he got closer, Nico could feel it pulling him in. Before he even fell, he finally saw that there were things worse than death.

And then, well...he couldn't say if he jumped or fell, if he went willingly or not. Because before he knew it, he was free falling into a pit that no one had ever returned from alive. A pit that was designed to torture and kill. A pit he never should have gone near.

But he had, and for the first day of falling, his fingers scraped against the walls in hopes that he could catch himself. But by the second day, there were no walls to try and grab onto.

The darkness was darker than any shadows he had traveled through. The cold... He couldn't move his muscles, they seemed to have frozen in outstretched positions. His teeth chattered, his lips and face ached. Nico was half convinced that the cold would kill him before the fall had a chance to.

But it didn't. By day nine, the heat started to kick in. At first it was relief. Then...then it was such an unbearable pain that he felt as if he was on fire.

"Phlegethon..." His throat had dried long before, but the word morphed into existence on his lips. He knew the rivers of the Underworld, could only hope that the temperature he was feeling was from what he would land in. It would hurt, it would hurt like hell, but it was the only thing he could fall into and survive.

And when the air turned to poison and his lungs felt like giving up, he fell into the river of flames.

It burned, it hurt like hell, the heat was too intense. Oh gods did it hurt. The fire ran into his lungs, filled what should only have been filled with air. Every breath felt like the end. Just the river itself was worse than anything he could imagine.

But the River Phlegethon was nothing compared to the rest of Tartarus, a fact he would soon learn the hard way. A fact he might not survive learning.

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Nico thought he would experience death again. He thought, over anything, that he would feel the unmistakable feeling of your soul leaving your body, the fact that your time was up and you would never get another chance.

But that didn't happen.

Instead, he went through hell. He went through what, what he could positively say, was worse than death.

And in this hell, in this pain and torture, he missed his days in the fields, knew that he should have been happy where he was. Because the fields hadn't hurt. It hadn't tortured. It hadn't taken every last bit of humanity left in him.

Because down here, in the depths of Tartarus, he regretted ever going after Thalia and Percy that day. He regretted ever deciding to live.

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Ever since he was a soldier on a distant battlefield, Nico had been able to see through the Mist. In all honesty, he couldn't not see through it. Maybe it had been his powers deciding to protect him one day, when instead of a soldier attacking him, an ancient monster had decided to. But whatever the case, he could never get back to what it once was.

And now, as he saw Tartarus for what it really was, he could only pray for the Mist to return to his eyes. For he couldn't walk without feeling the body beneath his feet, couldn't drink from the Phlegethon without seeing the vein that held the water. He passed tumors, couldn't hide behind them, passed cells and blood and oh damn so much blood.

There was a reason nobody survived Tartarus. For once you were within the god, there was no way to escape.

His every cell fought against you just as a body's would any intruder. But even if a wronged cell killed the host, it would go down with its victim.

But Nico believed in fate. He always would. And if the Fates had brought him back from the dead to go through this hell, maybe, just maybe something good would come out of it.

So he kept going, even when his sanity was slipping. He kept going, even when every breath felt like his last. He kept going, even when he knew that it would haunt him until the end.