Chapter Text
Now six half-bloods shall answer the call.
To storm or fire, the world must fall.
An oath to keep with a final breath,
Foes must bear arms to the Doors of Death.
A hero spurned, Six becomes Seven,
And a god must make a confession.
Annabeth has a lot of time to think about how she is going to splat on the ground of Tartarus once she finally finishes falling. She has tried to think up any way to avoid that fate, but the exhaustion and impossibility of the situation has finally gotten to her. She’s thought about using the webbing or clothes attached to her to make some sort of parachute, but every design she thinks of never gets any closer to solving the problem.
It also gives her too long to think about the prophecy. Ever since Hazel had started to dream of Nico in trouble, she had been sure he was the answer.
“A hero spurned, Six becomes Seven.”
As a child of the big three, Nico certainly had the power to make a huge difference in the coming war, and as a child of Hades, he seemed to think himself outcasted as he wandered instead of staying at camp. Moreover, he was the first to learn about both camps, keeping the balance of three from each camp while not necessarily being a part of either.
However, it seems wrong that as soon as they had rescued him, Annabeth had fallen into Tartarus, leaving only 6 left in the world above again. Not to mention whatever “confession” a god was going to have to make once he returned.
But then again, Annabeth isn’t sure she fully believes in the words of great prophecies anymore. After all, “A half-blood of the eldest gods, shall reach sixteen against all odds” had certainly never seemed to come true. Thalia and Nico were both very much not sixteen when the war against Kronos happened, and even after finding and learning about Jason, his birthday did not coincide either.
She shakes thoughts about the last war out of her head, her heart still clenching whenever she thought of Luke and the many, many deaths he caused.
She returns to thinking about how she is going to land at the bottom of this pit. She reaches up to the webbing trailing above her, trying to pull it closer to her, but she still doesn’t have the strength to pull it to her against the force of the air. She is once again extremely jealous of all the demigods who get powers like Jason and Frank who could’ve saved themselves from this fall. Even Leo may have been able to fashion something midair.
But of course, it was Annabeth who fell in instead with no supplies, no powers, and no ideas.
It always seems to be Annabeth.
She can’t believe how twelve-year-old her craved a quest so badly, sending her into a never-ending chain of some of the worst quests known. Now she just wants to be done with them, but they never seem to tire of her.
She is so tired and hungry, and her ankle still aches, making thoughts difficult. And now she is nearly out of time because she can just start making out the edges of the walls around her as a small bit of light seems to return. Twisting slightly, she can just see that far below her there is finally a small rim of red light approaching her. The whistling in her ears turns into more of a roar. The air becomes intolerably hot, permeated with a smell like rotten eggs. She honestly does not know how much time she has been falling. She knows an old Greek poet named Hesiod speculated it would take nine days to fall from earth to Tartarus, but even now having done it herself, she still cannot confirm or deny such a hypothesis.
Finally, she spills past the rim of light to see her first glimpse of Tartarus.
It’s ugly and red and her brain twists at the sight of it. Red clouds hang in the air like vaporized blood. The landscape — at least what she can see of it — is rocky black plains, punctuated by jagged mountains and fiery chasms. To Annabeth’s left, the ground drops off in a series of cliffs, like colossal steps leading deeper into the abyss. Somewhat below her, a glittering black river flows, and far off in the distance there is a bright trail of another one.
And if she is going to die anyways, that’s not what she wants her last thoughts to be of. So, she closes her eyes and thinks about the good in her life. Thalia. Piper. Jason. Leo. Hazel. Frank. Nico. Everyone back at camp. Camp itself, and the strawberry fields and beach and her cabin.
I’m sorry I failed you all.
Then she plunges into something so freezing cold it shocks all air right out of her lungs. Her limbs turn rigid as she tumbles through the water, unable to tell what direction is up, and all her thoughts are warped into how all the good things she remembers will be destroyed as she fails. Voices whisper and wail and scream in turn as thousands of heartbroken voices cry out as if the river is made of distilled sadness, weighing her down and freezing her worse than the cold as they get inside her brain.
As she tumbles through the water, they all scream at her for her hubris of thinking she could take on Tartarus alone, her friends’ faces surrounding her in mirages of white foam as they mock her.
I didn’t have any choice! she screams back at them mentally.
Yes, you never have any choice. What’s the point of struggling? they tell her. You’re dead anyway. Even if you survive this, you’ll never leave this place.
She can just sink to the bottom and drown, let the river carry her body away. That would be easier. She is so, so tired. She can just close her eyes…
Her mind slows, the voices turning into a lulling whisper of sadness that beckons her closer to the quiet darkness. The voices invite her to wail her sorrows with them. She has so much to be sad about. Her father and step-mother chasing her out. Thalia leaving her. Luke betraying her and then dying. Her uncaring mother who only acknowledged her to send her on death quests. All of her friends and fellow campers who died in the Battle of Manhatten. All of them being forced into another war that none of them had asked for.
Yes, sing your sorrows, the voices beckon. Life is so unfair.
She’s about to open her mouth to join them, feeling completely numb when she finds herself suddenly spat out of the water and onto the shore, rolling over the sharp rocks that cut through her shirt and skin like glass.
She lays there for a moment, not sure what just happened as the voices continue to scream in her brain, getting quieter every second as the water on her skin beads and slips off her until even her hair dries completely, but she can’t quite fully shake the numbness that has spread through her body.
She's alive. She doesn’t know how, but the river caught her. And then released her. It doesn’t make any sense. Had it left the riverbed to do that? If she had hit it normally, her body would have still been broken when she hit the surface, and she had seemingly hit it long before she would have guessed from how high she was when she closed her eyes. It seems like it had to have, but that makes even less sense.
But if it had, then that means every monster knows exactly where she landed, and her scent is probably pointing them to a lovely snack, too exhausted to even put up a fight.
She can’t just give up now after this gift of her first two obstacles of Tartarus seeming to solve themselves for her, no matter how tempting it is to just lay here and go to sleep, so she sends a prayer of thank you to whatever god or being may have saved her and pulls herself together.
She’s really here, in Tartarus. A place no other known demigod besides Nico has ever been before.
She looks around her. In front of her lays the Cocytus, misery in its purest form. Her ankle is still covered in the webbing, and she knows it is too heavy for her to drag, especially when a monster finds her. The sulfurous air stings Annabeth’s lungs and prickles her skin. When she looks at her arms, she sees they are already covered with an angry rash and many small scratches from the extremely sharp jagged black-glass chips that makes up the beach, some of which have been embedded into various cuts in her skin. Carefully, she sits up.
So, the air is acid. The water is misery. The ground is broken glass. Everything here is designed to hurt and kill. Annabeth takes a rattling breath and wonders if the voices in the Cocytus are right. Maybe fighting for survival is pointless. She is certain to be dead within the hour.
She wants to curl up and cry until she becomes a ghost melting into the Cocytus. But she can’t. She has people above relying on her, and maybe, just maybe, something looking out for her down here.
Yeah, she isn’t counting on that last one.
At the very least, if she is going to die here, she will at least give this stupid quest the best shot she can give it.
She forces herself to take stock. Her foot is still wrapped in its makeshift cast of board and Bubble Wrap, still tangled in cobwebs. But when she moves it, it doesn’t hurt. The ambrosia she’d eaten in the tunnels under Rome must have finally mended her bones.
Her backpack is gone—lost during the fall, or maybe washed away in the river. She hates losing Daedalus’s laptop, with all its fantastic programs and data, but she has worse problems. Her Celestial bronze dagger is missing—the weapon she’s carried since she was seven years old.
The realization almost breaks her, but she can’t let herself dwell on it. Time to grieve later. What else does she have?
No food, no water…basically no supplies at all.
Yep. Off to a promising start.
Grabbing one of the larger pieces of sharp glass-rock around her, she sets to work trying to cut the cobwebs off her foot. By the end, her hands are sliced badly, and her lungs burn, but the webbing finally releases her. Using the rock again, she slices off a piece of fabric from her shirt to wrap around her now bleeding hand. Her fingertips are turning blue, and she’s pretty sure that’s hypothermia settling in from her nice dip in the Cocytus. Hopefully once she gets moving, the sweltering humidity of Tartarus will warm her up.
She pulls herself to her feet and starts following the river downstream with no other ideas of where to go. She figures that downstream probably leads deeper into Tartarus, for better or worse. For once she forces herself to not think of the logistics, or it will overwhelm her. She has no way to locate the Doors. She doesn’t know how much time it will take, or even if time flows at the same speed in Tartarus. How can she possibly synchronize a meeting with her friends? And Nico had mentioned a legion of Gaea’s strongest monsters guarding the Doors on the Tartarus side. Annabeth can’t exactly launch a frontal assault.
She can’t think about it. She knows her odds are bad, but after swimming in the River Cocytus, she’s heard enough whining and moaning to last a lifetime. She promises herself never to complain again.
Not thinking is easier than expected. It’s hard to strategize with her stomach growling and her throat burning. Each step is harder than the last, and she wants nothing more to just keel over and fall asleep, but she will not fail her friends.
She knows the proximity to the river is sapping away her mental strength, but she also knows that the river had saved her, and even the slightest possibility of an ally here is not something she can give up.
She walks and walks, and then freezes.
Across the river, a familiar-looking baby-blue Italian car is crashed headfirst into the sand. It looks just like the Fiat that had smashed into Arachne and sent her plummeting into the pit. Under the crushed hood a broken Chinese handcuff cage sits. It is unmistakably empty.
Her brain freezes in panic for a moment, not knowing how she could possibly fight Arachne again, with even less supplies this time.
Unbidden, tears start to rise in her eyes. She can’t do this. She’s going to die here to the spider woman.
Finally, her analytical side catches up, and she sees the remnants of gold dust clinging to the cage.
She takes a couple deep breaths again, the air hurting her lungs each time, but needing to try and calm herself.
Think Annabeth.
Okay. She wouldn’t have survived the fall if the river hadn’t caught her, so maybe Arachne couldn’t either? Or, the river had killed Arachne after.
She likes that thought better, as it aligns with the absurd thought that maybe, just maybe, someone or something is looking out for her down here despite her reasonably knowing that’s impossible.
She keeps walking, even as her stomach growls, and her throat and lungs burn. She’s still slightly shivering, despite the hot, humid air, but luckily she had been dried of the river completely, and she is slowly regaining some heat. More alarmingly, the glass cuts on her body are still bleeding, which is unusual for her. Normally, she heals fast. Her breathing gets more and more labored. It isn’t long until the hairs on the back of her neck raise.
She is being watched. She doesn’t know by what, and every time she looks over her shoulder, she can’t see or hear anything. She can’t even tell which direction it’s coming from. All her instincts can tell her is there’s something dangerous stalking her out of sight. She doesn’t know why whatever it is doesn’t attack her. She’s obviously weakened. She’s unarmed except for the large piece of glass she has, and that will do almost as much damage to her as whatever enemy she has to face when she uses it.
Maybe it’s waiting for her to fall asleep. She will have to rest soon, she knows. She had been at the end of her stamina when she faced Arachne what seemed like a lifetime ago, and the only rest she’s had since was while falling.
More importantly, her body feels like it’s slowly dying just being in Tartarus.
As she breathes, her eyes blur.
Oh. Oh. She is dying just being in Tartarus. The air is not meant for mortals.
Okay. She needs to think. What does she need to survive?
Food. Water. A way to survive the air. A weapon to defend herself. A way to heal her ankle.
For water, she definitely can’t drink from the Cocytus. However, that brief glance at the landscape as she fell had told her there was another river. It flickered like flame.
What were the stories of the river of fire again?
The Phlegethon, which burns, but also keep souls alive to suffer eternally.
Well, that sounds just perfect. She is certainly suffering right now, but she’d also like to stay alive to do so.
Taking a last glance at the Cocytus, she turns, and hopes whatever had saved her continues to follow her away from the river.
There is certainly something still following her, according to her admittedly frazzled and unreliable instincts, but she decides she can’t stop to worry about it until she reaches the Phlegethon unless it suddenly decides to attack her. She needs to be able to breathe before anything else.
After climbing up the bank, it starts out flat. Soon however, hills, cliffs and valleys pit the landscape like scars. She trips over a sharp jut in the ground and tumbles down one of the rocky valleys, cutting and slicing herself up, and making her ankle twinge, but she can’t stop as each breath comes shorter and shorter.
She doesn’t allow herself even a moment to sit, knowing if she stops she will never get back up. Wrenching herself to her feet, she continues stumbling towards the distant river.
She tries to patch up some of the scratches as she walks, but she’s sure she drips some blood along the way, making a bright scent trail for monsters to follow.
She’s right, of course. Despite her luck to have not seen a single monster so far, this is Tartarus. It can’t last.
And it just so happens she is found by one of the worst ones.
It starts with the sound of clattering rocks as something heavy and large drags itself along one of the many adjacent valleys. As it slowly gets closer, she can start to hear heavy breaths as it scents her blood in the muggy air.
She keeps moving. She has to. Eventually, the sounds start to come from behind her, and she knows it has found her trail in the stagnant air.
It has a direct line straight to her. She starts running. Her ankle, which seemed to have healed, starts to ache again, as if reinjuring itself.
The roar behind her flashes her back to the Battle of Manhattan. To Silena’s death.
She forces herself to sprint on her injured leg, charging towards the river.
She twists down the next narrow path. A few seconds later, the slithering moves above her, on top of the cliffs.
Left. Right. Left. She holds the mental map of the landscape, keeping the river in her mind’s eye. Every couple turns she has to leap back and choose a different path due to a pit or cliff or otherwise untraversable terrain.
She’s close, but the twisting, narrow paths are widening back out. Each time she puts pressure on her bad foot, she wants to yelp, but she wouldn’t have been able to if she tried, her throat blistering and cracking from the air. Her eyes sting with her own sweat, and her arms and legs shake with the effort of each step, but she forces herself to keep moving.
She bursts out, into a wider cavern, and comes face to face with a cliff, the only path stretching back behind her.
The river is somewhere through that cliff.
“No, no, no!” she screams and pounds her fist on the wall. At some point blisters started to grow and burst on her arms from exposure to the Tartarus air. Backing up, she looks for any hand or footholds she can use, trying to find a spot she might be able to climb, even though her body is shaking. She’s climbed the lava wall more times than she can count, but as she tries to grasp the first hold, it crumbles in her grasp.
Her lungs heave, but she can barely feel her ankle anymore, the adrenaline pushing her well beyond her limits. Her brain has grown hazy in panic and fear and the poisonous air, and her stomach feels clenched tighter than a fist.
She has to hurry, but it’s hard to even think in the haze her pain is causing her, let alone move.
A clattering of rocks, and then a heavy thump and hiss sounds behind her. She twists around and the drakon slithers towards her, it’s gaze holding her.
It’s smaller than the one Clarisse killed, her brain helpfully supplies. Only marginally, but it is.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t increase her chances of survival. She turns to continue running, but trips over her own feet as her limbs feel heavy and slow, her body and brain disconnected.
She collapses on the ground, her breath ragged, but making everything worse as each second she breathes in more poison in the air. She tries to climb to her feet, praying the adrenaline is enough.
It isn’t.
She’s failed, she realizes with startling clarity. She didn’t make it to the river. She can’t fight the drakon following her.
She didn’t make it to the Doors of Death. She’s failed, and everyone she knows and loves will die because of it.
She pulls herself to sit against the wall, and then her body goes limp as it loses all energy. She pants as her eyes haze, and she closes them.
The hissing of the drakon fills her ears. It grows closer and louder until she can hear it directly above her.
She opens her eyes. It’s beautiful, in a terrible way, the gold of its crest glinting in the faint light into her failing eyes.
Something lands on its head from the cliff above her, the hissing cutting off abruptly as its jaw is slammed shut by the impact.
There’s a roar as suddenly it whips into motion, trying to throw something off and hissing as its entire body undulates. Its long tail thrashes and gouges a large cut into a wall, spraying debris across the canyon. One more pained roar cuts off as its head suddenly drops to the ground in defeat, and then with a last twitch it shimmers and collapses into dust.
A figure drops into it and then emerges from the thick dust, coated in gold. It stops in front of Annabeth, and she wheezes as she tries to make her eyes focus. She’s sure she’s hallucinating because what she can make out looks like a man. Then again, with how shiny he is, and how easily he dispatched that drakon, he might be a god. He drops into a crouch in front of her, and all she can make out of his face is a blob of black hair, pale white skin, and the colour of startlingly deep green eyes, all coated in gold. What seems to be a hand reaches out to her face and she flinches.
His hand pauses, and then continues to a strand of her hair that's spilled out of her ponytail down next to her face. She’s absolutely positive she’s hallucinating as her eyes seem to think he…twirls… his finger through the curl gently before pulling his hand away.
She stares at him, panting in the air and trying to force her eyes to clear and her throat to say anything, but nothing seems to be working anymore.
His head suddenly jerks to one side, and she swears she hears a low whistle. Hardly a second later, a dark shadow emerges from behind him, but he doesn’t seem to see it. It comes closer and closer, and Annabeth’s brain helpfully decides that’s a hellhound.
Despite everything, she tries to warn the hallucination about it, but she can barely breathe as the air rips through her throat and throttles her vocal cords.
Then in a startling turn of events, the man stands up, and seems to…get on the hellhound like a pony. She wants to laugh at the absurdity her dying brain is cooking up, but everything hurts too much.
She swears he gives her a last look over his shoulder, and then he’s gone.
Her eyes slip closed, and her mind turns dark in a pain filled haze.