Percy Jackson AU: Hell Born

Chapter 3

Percy follows the empousai down river, keeping his distance and jumping behind rocks when ever they slow. They aren't in a hurry and Percy is starting to wish he could just kill them.

The heat from the river bakes his skin, and breathing in the sulfurous air feels like inhaling glass. He drinks the fire water occasionally, refilling the bottles as needed. He is saving the last bottle of water for an emergency, and he still has a few snacks that he is rationing.

Time is impossible to judge. And he feels like he is in the labyrinth again, time crawls and then speeds past. For all he knows it could have been years or just a few hours since he fell. But he has to hope that the crew will be there for him.

Once, the demons speed up in excitement and swarm something that looks like a beached carcass on the riverbank. Percy can't tell what it is—a fallen monster? An animal of some kind? The empousai attack it with relish.

When the demons move on, Percy reaches the spot and finds nothing left except a few splintered bones and glistening stains drying in the heat of the river. Percy has no doubt the empousai would devour demigods with the same gusto.

As he walks, Percy thinks about the first time he'd fought the empousa Kelli at Goode High School's freshman orientation, when he and Rachel Elizabeth Dare got trapped in the band hall.

At the time, it seemed like a hopeless situation. Now, he'd give anything to have a problem that simple. At least he'd been in the mortal world then. Here, there is nowhere to run.

Wow. He now is looking back on the war with Kronos as the good old days—that is sad. He kept hoping things would get better for Annabeth and him, but their lives just got more and more dangerous, as if the Three Fates were up there spinning their futures with barbed wire instead of thread just to see how much two demigods could tolerate. And now he is here alone.

After a few more miles, the empousai disappear over a ridge. When Percy catches up, he finds himself at the edge of another massive cliff. The river spills over the side in jagged tiers of fiery waterfalls. The demon ladies are picking their way down the cliff, jumping from ledge to ledge like mountain goats.

Percy's heart creeps into his throat. Even if he reaches the bottom of the cliff alive, he doesn't have much to look forward to. The landscape below him is a bleak, ash-gray plain bristling with black trees, like insect hair. The ground is pocked with blisters. Every once in a while, a bubble will swell and burst, disgorging a monster like a larva from an egg.

The longer he looked the more he saw it as a living being, if the earth is a primordial, why not the pit? Anxiety threatens to drown him so he pushes the thought aside.

All the newly formed monsters are crawling and hobbling in the same direction—towards a bank of black fog that swallows the horizon like a storm front.

The fire river flows in the same direction until about halfway across the plain, where it meets another river of black water—maybe the Styx? He hopes not. The two floods combine in a steaming, boiling cataract and flows on as one towards the black fog.

The longer Percy looks into that storm of darkness, the less he wants to go there. It can be hiding anything—an ocean, a bottomless pit, an army of monsters. But if the Doors of Death are in that direction, it is his only chance to get home. Back to Annabeth. Back to his family.

As Percy peers over the edge, he mumbles to himself, "wish I could fly."

It brings his thoughts back to the shoes Luke gave him. Perhaps they are still down here. After all they were only cursed to come down here. Will they drag him down again if he gets out? If he finds them maybe, the pits surface has nearly shredded through the soles of his converse.

But as he looks up he decides against flying. Up in the hazy red sky, weaving between bloody hued clouds are dark winged shapes. At first he thinks they are furies, but there were only three of those, above there could be dozens. They can be anything the pit is the home of monsters. Thousands of creatures can be around him many long forgotten on the surface.

He starts to climb down, the empousai disappears into the flood over the ridge, it doesn't matter anymore, it is clear where he has to go. Follow the rivers to the heart of Tartarus.

Percy concentrates on the challenges at hand: keeping his footing, avoiding rockslides that will alert the empousai to his presence, and of course making sure he doesn't plummet to his death.

About halfway down the precipice, he finds a ledge up against the waterfall to rest.

His legs wobble so badly, Percy curses himself for not calling a rest earlier.

He nibbles on a snack bar, watching weird fish get washed over the fall into the river below. He briefly wanders if they are edible, before changing his mind. He can't bring himself to eat creature he can speak to. He loves fish and the gossip they bring.

Even as a little kid he refused to eat fish, his mother had always told him he was imagining things when he told her the fish would talk to him.

He wishes he could have remained that child but the Underworld seemed to bring out the worst in everyone—monsters, heroes, and gods.

He gazes across the ashen plains. The Titans are supposed to be here in Tartarus— maybe bound in chains, or roaming aimlessly, or hiding in some of those dark crevices.

Percy and his allies had destroyed the worst Titan, Kronos, but even his remains may be down here somewhere— a billion angry Titan particles floating through the blood-colored clouds or lurking in that dark fog.

Percy decides not to think about it.

He struggles to his feet. The rest of the cliff looks impossible to descend —nothing more than a crosshatching of tiny ledges—but he keeps climbing down.

Percy's body goes on autopilot. His fingers cramp. He feels blisters popping up on his ankles. He will have to drink again soon.

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