Serendipity // PJO

I'm crying, 'cause dam, it's smelling good at Hogwarts

When I exited the carriage, the smell nearly overwhelmed me - honour, ancient knowledge, pumpkin, power. And here, in front of the gates of stately Hogwarts, I sensed the many subordinated scents for the first time. Cinnamon, melted bittersweet chocolate, curiousity, wishes, ambition, fear of failure, bacon, books, pies, parchment and ink. 

My nose felt like it was tickled, the same was with my head, directly behind my fore head. Under my tongue it was tingling. A weirdly distorted smile built on my lips and I was probably looking like a lunatic right now. But this odour - it embed in my brain, it was like I was for the first time seeing properly only that I was smelling instead of seeing. As if my nose had only existed until now, but it had suddenly started to work.

Oh, how would the Olymp smell then? Inhabitated of myriads of gods and nymphes... My mouth started watering. The smell of the demigods let me expect big: ambition, bestiality, wild boar, sweat and loyality from Clarisse; gloom, cinnamon, fortune and elegance, intermingled with undiscovered mysteries and a splintered heart; temptation, monstrosity, roses, wax, ripping desire, lurking in the dark, marksmanship.

And somewhere I was sensing something ancient, powerful. Blood, control, bitterness and hopelessness. Only brief, then it was away.

Also, I noticed the sparkling dust. I had barely noticed it, when the pictures started to bombard me. Nobody had stood here without wishes or expections. I was seeing already known faces and milliards of unknown. Sometimes I was able to predict the approximate time the students were from because of their hairstyle or the purple formulations in their head. The school uniform always stayed the same even though Howarts seemed to be a few centuries old.

"Percy! Percy?" From far away I heard a voice. It was cutting through the curtain of pictures the dust was showing me. Without the messages the dust was delivering me, I was able to examine the dust for the first time as what it was without the interruption of the pictures. But I wasn't even able to see anything else. The dust grains were so numerous, that they were building a thcik wall in front of me. They were shimmering in gentle pastel colours, amazing and stunning.

"Percy, damn!" Somebody pinched my cheek and I blinked. Clarisse and Blaise were standing in front of me, above us the imposing silhouette of Hogwarts was towering. And suddenly I started to cry my head off, I was whimpering, like if there wasn't going to be a tomorrow.

I didn't even really know, why I was crying but Annabeth wouldn't ever get to see Hogwarts or anything else of this fantastic world, no matter, how much she'd liked it, how intrigued she'd been. She wouldn't experience any of it, not the architecture, the culture or the mindset.

My nose was working like usual again. The shock of being without all of those amazing scents again took my breath.

Tears were streaming down my cheeks, I whimpered, as if somebody had stabbed my heart.

"I know, that Hogwarts has to be something like a prodigy for you uncivilized Americans but isn't this a bit... exaggerated?", I heard Draco say.

"You've even drooled", Blaise added full of incomprehension.

"Oh gods!", I cried. "Oh gods!"

"Do you have several gods in America?", Gregory asked tentatively, his cheeks tinted in a light shade of red because he was feeling embarrassed for not knowing this. Well, insofar as I was able to comprehend it, after all I wasn't really able to see anything due to my tears.

"Yes." Hazel's answer was a bit hurried but better like that, than somebody got the idea of educating Gregory about the religions of America.

"We don't have gods", Blaise explained.