The Fate of Olympus | Reynabeth [✓]

1. Annabeth Loses Her Faith in the Gods

Part I

The gods were dead.

Dead to mortals, specifically. Mortals in ancient Greece had known that gods existed, but modern American mortals didn't. Why?

According to what she'd learned at Camp Half-Blood, the mortals' beliefs had all changed during a pivotal development in European culture, the Enlightenment. Later, Annabeth read the documents for herself and came to a different conclusion: the gods' deaths had come before the Enlightenment, during the fall of Rome, when a singular all-powerful God became the dominant religion. The Greco-Roman gods had persisted, but always at the fringes of society. Sure, the gods told their children that they ran the whole world, but over time Annabeth had begun to realize what a lie that was. Still, Annabeth supposed that the Enlightenment was the final nail in the coffin for the gods, so to speak.

The only way to truly understand how thinking had changed was to read Enlightenment documents. Primary sources were the most reliable for understanding past perspectives.

Luckily, the library in New Rome was extensive. Annabeth had grown up hearing about one Ceric Lang, a subversive thinker who'd once cataloged a list of all the gods, but later contributed to mortals' disbelief in Greco-Roman mythology. Ceric Lang was the Benedict Arnold of the demigod world.

When she went to the library in New Rome, she found something curious. The New Rome library did not have any opinion pieces written by Ceric Lang. The library didn't even have any documents reviewing or summarizing Ceric Lang's opinions, either, even though he had been a fairly prominent author in his day.

She went to the San Francisco Public Library instead. Over time, she had learned to take advantage of mortals' resources. Despite their ignorance of the gods' existence, the mortals were capable of wonderful things. For Annabeth, that mostly meant libraries and neoclassical architecture. And neoclassical libraries.

She sat down for the day with a pile of audiobooks and began committing information to memory. Reading with dyslexia was a Sisyphean task at best.

At the library, she listened to audiobooks about the gods and their brutal oppression of Greeks, stories that she'd read before. As a child, she'd never had an emotional reaction to those tales. Now, when she re-read the story about Poseidon and Medusa, she was horrified that the gods had punished a victim of a violent crime, while the perpetrator got off free.

Annabeth knew she could have handled that better than the gods had.

No, she had to put those kinds of thoughts out of her mind. That was just her hubris talking, a fatal flaw that could get her killed. Besides, ancient Greece had been a different time. Things had changed since then.

She read about how the gods had started World War II. Fewer than a hundred years ago wasn't such a different time from now, she realized. It seemed the gods had learned nothing in their thousands of years of conflict. It seemed that mortals remained tools for the gods to dispose of while they waged their eternal war. It was disgusting.

There must be a reason for all of this.

She shook her head. She'd gotten distracted. She'd come to find out why mortals had stopped believing in the gods, not to discover that the gods were cruel. Everyone knew that already.

An intrusive thought entered her mind: why does everyone put up with gods that we know to be cruel? She scrawled the question in her notebook, then went to work.

She found a scan of a Ceric Lang-inspired book in the mortal public library that had been missing from the New Rome library. She slid it into a microform machine, stared at it, then remembered that her dyslexia rendered modern English virtually unreadable, especially when the words were written in a small, dense typeface.