Prytaneum
Illumination From Above
I stumbled down the tower's stairs in a daze, staring around with wide eyes.
Right then and there, I started really worrying. Not to brag or anything, but I liked to think I'd been around the block a time or two in my time as a demigod. I might have only been aware of my heritage for a few years now, but…how did the saying go? It's not the years, it's the mileage? Something like that—the point was that my time had been short but eventful, like a train wreck. Since I'd staggered into Camp without a clue four years ago, I'd done a lot. I've been from Olympus to the Underworld, sailed across the Sea of Monsters and walked through the Labyrinth. I've met every major god that ever came out of Greece, fought a few of them and some titans, too, and ended up with pretty much every monster I ever learned about in school trying to kill me at least once. I wasn't arrogant enough to assume I'd seen everything, of course, because that was the type of mentality that got demigods killed, but on the whole? I'd seen more than most.
So the fact that I had absolutely no idea where I was sent some alarm bells ringing. Sure, I was no Annabeth, but from simple experience, I could usually get some idea of what was going on, but I was drawing a blank right now. If I'd been in the Underworld, it wouldn't have come as too much of a surprise—I remembered dying, after all. If I'd woken up beneath some titan prison or in my own personal hell, that…would be pretty depressing because it'd mean I'd failed utterly, but still, it would make some kind of sense. I could roll with it and think of something.
But how did I get from sacrificing my life atop Mount Olympus to…this? It didn't feel like Hades and didn't look like a place of endless torment, but what was with that strange maze, then? Why was there a tower built on top of it and a city built around the entrance? Could it honestly be that no one was aware that there was a monster resort and spa right beneath their feet? But then, what was with all those people with armor and weapons? I was becoming increasingly convinced that I had no idea what was going on and that was almost always a bad thing.
And, worse, I was the only one treating any of this as weird. All around me, relatively normal looking people were greeting bulky, armored guys with animal ears like it was nothing or trying to draw them towards their stores. Normally, I'd just chalk that up to the Mist doing its work as usual, but even if the Mist was doing its job, normal people wouldn't react like that. Sure, Riptide might not look like a glowing bronze sword to most people, but it usually still looked like a weapon, especially if I was using it like one. These people might not have looked like they'd walked out of a fantasy movie if they were hidden by the Mist, but that didn't mean they'd have looked normal. There was a reason I kept getting kicked out of school and it's because there's really no way to burn down your gymnasium in a battle against some monsters without looking a little odd.
But then, everything looked odd around here. From the people on the streets to the shops to the very look of the city…it didn't make much sense for the Mist to be hiding everything, did it? Not if this was how the city was supposed to look and I couldn't exactly see any high-rises around here. In that case, wouldn't it make more sense if I was the odd one out?
I took a slow, deep breath and nodded to myself.
Probably. I was a bit high-strung what with everything that was happened, so I'd been thinking about this the wrong way. Rather than assuming something here was off, I should focus more on myself—I'd been the one to wake up and stumble out of somewhere strange, after all, and everything I'd seen so far pointed to this place being the way it was supposed to be, however odd it seemed to me. The important question, then, was still how I'd gotten here and where here was.
Okay then, I thought. The first thing I had to do was calm down and focus on what was important. No one was here to do my thinking for me, so I was just going to have to do it myself. First of all, let's assume everything was the way it was supposed to be—I could do that, no problem. Guys with animal ears? I had a half-brother who was a flying horse that flew out of a woman's neck when she was decapitated; who was I to talk? And people with long pointed ears that were totally elves? Hardly the weirdest things I'd seen; they didn't even scrape the top one hundred. And some huge, ancient-looking city full of all this stuff? I still felt like I should have heard of it, but hey, I went twelve years without knowing Mount Olympus was on top of the Empire State Building so what do I know? I could accept all of that as fact because it was staring me right in the face and I'd have been an idiot to deny it.
So. How did any of that help me?
I look a moment to scan my surroundings carefully, picking up details with all the attention to detail of a trained demigod.
…Yeah, I got nothing. Well, nothing useful to me right now, at least. Maybe if I was someone else, I'd have already recognized some key element and put everything together—but it was obvious that that wasn't happening, so I was better off looking around for something that did. I needed to find either something I recognized or that told me something useful. A map would be nice if I could find one and with all these stores there had to be something, right? And even if I didn't have any cash on me right now, no one could charge me just for looking around. If I could find out what state—or maybe country?—I was in, it'd be a big help in figuring things out. Barring that, anything I could learn about this city could be useful and, though this place didn't really seem like the type that had cellphone coverage, if I could find a phone I could try calling home.
Nodding decisively to myself, I took another glance at the massive tower I decided to use as a land mark, picked one of the streets that led from it at random, and started walking. Quite frankly, all the streets looked about the same to me so it didn't make much difference which one I picked; if need be, I'd just make my way up and down each street until I found what I was looking for, whatever it happened to be. As long as I could at least figure out my location, that'd be enough; after I figured that out, I could get some help from—
I stopped in my tracks for a minute, closing my eyes near the entrance of the street.
In the end, I wasn't very good at lying to myself—or, at least, not good enough that I could convince myself that that wasn't what I was doing. But the truth was…I wanted to believe that there were others like me; that some of my friends had found themselves here as well. The thing that worried me most about the fact that I didn't recognize this place was that it made me worry and doubt. If I'd found myself in the Underworld instead, I'd have honestly been relieved. Not because I particularly wanted to be dead or anything, but simply because I'd have known that the others were here, somewhere. Even if this had been a prison or a punishment from the titans, I'd have felt reassured by the simple fact that they were here somewhere. I know it hadn't exactly worked out last time, but as long as we were together, I…I guess I'd believe we could still win, even if we were trapped. With the simple knowledge that they were somewhere out there waiting to be found, I'd have felt certain about what to do, if not precisely how. And once we met up again, we'd figure it all out anyhow. Annabeth, Beckendorf, Bianca, Zoe, Michael, Silena…it was pretty sad to think about it, but it wasn't as if I didn't have enough dead friends to fight a war with.
But if this was the living world, did that still hold true? I wanted to believe it was still possible—because I'd woken up here, hadn't I? So it should have been, even if I wasn't sure of anything. In fact, maybe I didn't want to be sure, as long as it meant I could believe there was a chance. For all the people who'd died…who I'd lead to their deaths and may well have failed…didn't they deserve a second chance? Was there some way I could cash in mine to give them one? I'd do it in a heartbeat if it was possible. And even if it wasn't…
For the first time since I thought my mother had died, I thought of Orpheus who'd nearly lead the woman he loved from the Underworld. I thought of Hercules, who'd wrestled with Death. It was possible, I thought. A bad idea, probably in ways I couldn't even begin to imagine, but possible. Hell, I didn't even know if there was anyone around to stop me anymore; for all I knew, Hades had died in the fighting, too. Most of the gods had, if not all of them—if I had Mrs. O'Leary take me down to the Underworld, would anyone be there to complain?
But…if there weren't, what state would the Underworld be in, exactly? Without Hades there to maintain it, I doubted everything would just continue to run smoothly and I didn't really want to think too hard about what could happen if the Underworld went out of whack. But that might be the type of thing that could, say, result in a demigod who should have been dead waking up somewhere weird; there were enough paths in and out of the Underworld to allow for it. That was another possibility when it came to finding my friends, I supposed.
On the other hand, I really didn't want to have to deal with a zombie apocalypse, even if people came back like I had. While there were a lot of people I thought deserved a second chance, there were also a lot I would just as soon stay dead—putting aside my own feelings towards Luke and some of his misguided minions, Greek Mythology had its fair share of dead assholes.
Not that I'd have much choice if things were messed up. It didn't seem like fire was raining from the sky yet—always a good sign in my book—but I honestly had no idea how the death of the gods could affect anything. Supposedly, if my dad and Zeus had fought each other, it would have resulted in natural disasters all over the place, but with them dead, who knows. And I didn't even want to think about what might happen to Love or War or whatever.
I sighed again, leaning my head back and shaking it lightly. A part of me wanted to ask—to call upon my father or Hermes or anyone to just try and get some help or explanations. But the gods were dead, or at least most of them were, and I knew it better than anyone else. They couldn't help me now, even if most of them probably wouldn't have been particularly helpful to begin with, not that I had any way of getting in contact with them either way. If there were any survivors, I'd have to hope they were the ones who liked me and not the ones that have always wanted a chance to turn me into an animal or something. Until I found something, though, I'd just have to deal with whatever happened to come my way.
Opening my eyes, I did my best to brush those thoughts away—dead or alive, gods or no gods, I had work to do. I lowered my gaze back to the streets—
And snapped it right back up, brain catching up to me. I took several steps back, glanced from the sign to the store, and read the words written on them again and again. I thought I'd made a mistake—I'm dyslexic, so it's not exactly uncommon for me to misread something—but no, this wasn't different. The words weren't written in English but in a language I understood as well as if it had been hardwired into my brain, primarily because it had.
"Hephaestus…?" I wondered aloud, still staring in disbelief.