Invisible ― Jason Grace

xix. the children of neptune drown

CAMILLA WAS DROWNING. 

Growing up, she hadn't had much experience with water. One of her foster homes had had a swimming pool, but her foster parents hadn't bothered to keep it clean, so none of the children could actually swim in it. There were a few community pools in the neighborhoods she used to live in, but none of her foster parents were ever the Let's take the kids to the pool and have a good day! kind of people. 

After finding out she was a daughter of Neptune, she'd assumed she'd never know what drowning felt like. Children of the sea god were supposed to be able to breathe underwater—the water was their element, because their father ruled it. Even if Camilla was more or less estranged from her godly parent, that didn't change that he was her father, and his domain was meant to help her, to protect her. The water was her weapon to wield.

She shouldn't have ever known what it was like to drown. 

Then Frank told them about Ella's prophecy—the children of Neptune shall drown—and she started to wonder. Could children of Neptune actually drown? Was there some body of water outside of Neptune's control, where even his children couldn't survive?

Now, Camilla was drowning—not in water, in earth, in the domain of the one goddess who wanted nothing more than to kill Camilla and her friends, to destroy the world and the gods that ruled it. 

Is this what the prophecy meant? she thought as the dirt swallowed her and her brother whole. Is this what it means to drown? 

She panicked. She knew instinctively that that wasn't what she was supposed to do—panicking took a lot of energy, and it made you lose your oxygen faster, and it was overall the least helpful thing a person could do in this kind of situation. 

Stop, she told herself. You're a soldier, start acting like it. 

She needed a plan, now. She knew you were supposed to move slowly if you got stuck in quicksand, and although muskeg was definitely not quicksand, maybe it was the same thing? 

A hand grappled for her wrist, panic clear in its movements. Camilla knew it was Percy—knew he was panicking, facing the same horrifying realization that being a child of the sea didn't mean they were immune from the feeling of suffocation under the weight of an element they had no control over. 

Camilla kicked a leg out experimentally, feeling how the dirt and mud moved. Everything was too dense, too good at sucking them deeper into the earth's clutches. This was what Gaea wanted—for them to know the agony of drowning, to take them out of commission, to make it easier for her to take over the world. 

She was feeling lightheaded. Percy's fingers on her wrist were tight, but she could feel them loosening as the seconds went by. They were suffocating. They were going to die down here. 

What would her mother think of her? She didn't want to care, but she was a teenage girl, and as much as she hated it, she wanted her parents to be proud of her. If nothing else, she wanted to make them proud just to spite them, to prove that they were wrong to count her out so easily. 

But she was a daughter of water and ocean and storm. The earth was outside of her control. 

Even as she thought it, though, she realized that wasn't entirely true. She'd spent so much of her time at Camp Jupiter studying different gods, trying to find one who could be her godly parent. She'd studied their powers, their symbols, their epithets. 

The Romans had no special epithets for Neptune—why give a god they feared and reviled a nickname? But the Greeks had several. 

The Stormbringer. Father of Horses.