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“What was it like?” Percy asked quietly. “Dying, I mean.”
Thalia stiffened. Her time as a tree wasn’t usually something she looked back on if she could help it. She owed it to Percy, though. Especially with what she was about to do, all that she was going to drop on his shoulders.
“My circumstances weren’t exactly normal. In fact, I’m pretty sure I never fully died. For lack of a better word, my soul was suspended.” Thalia already knew the answer, but she asked anyway. “Why do you ask?”
“One shall perish by a parent’s hand,” he recited, playing with the grass by his hands. “To be honest, until it happened, I never even considered Zoë. I thought it would be you, me, or even Bianca.” He swallowed hard, looking at the ground. “Then, Bianca was ‘lost in the land without rain’, and that only left the two of us.”
Thalia nodded in understanding. “It would make sense for them to want us gone, you know? I was Kronos’ second chance at controlling the prophecy. You were his first. To the gods, both of us are loose cannons.”
“Gotta say, that one is kind of their own fault. Both of us are products of a broken oath.” Percy commented.
Thalia snorted. “Right? Like, just don’t have children if you’re that worried.”
”Does it make me a bad person to say I’m almost jealous of Bianca?” Percy asked abruptly. “Obviously, I wish she had lived. I promised Nico I would protect her, and I couldn’t. But even though her death was a tragedy, she didn’t live long enough to feel the weight of the prophecy settling on her shoulders.”
He huffed out a humorless laugh. “I’ve never even heard it, and I still feel like a dead man. Annabeth told me a little bit about it - something about a choice at sixteen either dooming or saving the world as we know it.”
“You’re not a bad person,” she assured him. “None of us want to face the prophecy and what it means.”
Thalia couldn’t avoid telling him any longer. She knew it wasn’t fair to keep it from him - he had every right to know what awaited him. “I’m joining the Hunters, if Artemis will take me,” she admitted quietly. “I won’t ever turn sixteen.”
Percy turned to meet her gaze. Thalia looked away, unable to face the boy she had dumped the fate of the world on. “it just–it feels right. Like something that’s meant to happen.”
Then he sighed, laying back onto the soft soil. Thalia followed suit. “On some level, I think I knew that it was meant to be me,” he admitted softly. Thalia looked at him curiously. He looked so young reclined in the grass, too young to be talking about such dark matters. They both were. “When I was twelve–before I even knew I was a demigod–I saw the Fates.”
Thalia flipped onto her side to look at him, giving him a disbelieving look. “The Fates? Like, the honest-to-gods, string-cutting Fates?”
“Yep,” Percy confirmed, popping the p. “Grover and I were on a bus, heading back to New York from our boarding school. The engine broke down, and we all had to hop off. Across the road, there were these three old ladies, knitting these huge socks. One looked right at me while she cut the string.” He shuddered. “I didn’t know that I was a demigod, or even who the ladies were. Gotta say, it’s pretty obvious now.”
“How are you still alive?” Thalia asked incredulously.
Percy gave her a crooked grin. “I’m not really sure - it’s not for lack of trying on Luke’s part.”
Thalia grimaced, but Percy continued on. “Did you know he gave me a pair of shoes cursed to drag the wearer to Tartarus on my first quest? Great thing for Grover to find out when he was almost dragged into the Pit.”
“Not to mention he also poisoned my tree!” Thalia grumbled. “Annabeth told me he said that I’d agree with him if I was alive. He literally tried to kill the only thing left of me.”
“Still,” she continued, almost whispering. “I feel bad for kicking him down a mountain. For a long time, it was just us, y’know? We were family even before we found Annabeth.” She couldn’t help feeling like that. Logically, she knew that Luke was her enemy now. He had hurt her, he had hurt Annabeth, he had hurt all the campers at Camp Half-Blood. Emotionally, she missed her older brother, the boy that used to fight at her side. She sighed, looking up at the night sky. The Huntress glimmered back at her.
“If the prophecy’s mine now, then I just have to make sure it never falls to Nico,” Percy said, breaking the silence that stretched between them. His sea-green eyes were determined. “It already sucks that we’ve had to deal with this. But Nico? Nico’s just a kid. I won’t let this fall on him. I won’t.”
Thalia winced guiltily. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry for leaving this to you.” She knew it was incredibly selfish of her to pass off the responsibility to someone else, but she couldn't deny the gut feeling that joining the Hunters was her path in life.
“It’s okay. We all need more time to prepare for the end of the world, anyway,” Percy said, half-joking.
“I agree, though. Nico’s already lost his sister, he doesn’t need the fate of the world balanced on his shoulders as well.”
Percy nodded in agreement. A comfortable silence stretched between them, broken only by the sound of the wind rustling the leaves of the trees above them.
“Dying felt like warmth. There was a split second of pain, followed by this all-encompassing warmth. It felt like comfort, above all; like how ambrosia and nectar taste like your favorite food, dying feels like your best memories. For me, after the warmth faded, there was only nothingness. I can only assume that the emptiness was because of how my soul was suspended and not truly in Hades’ realm.”
“I still feel it sometimes,” Thalia admitted, barely whispering. “I’ll be relaxing, or eating lunch, or doing anything, and the numbness will creep in again and it feels like I’m dead all over again.”
Percy hummed sympathetically. “I know it doesn’t really compare, but I still sometimes feel a phantom pain in my palm where the pit scorpion stung me. I still haven’t been back to the part of the woods where it happened.”
Thalia sat up. “Man, we’re kind of screwed up, aren’t we?” Standing up, she extended a hand out to Percy.
“Just a little bit,” he said, accepting her hand. He mock-frowned at her. “Now that is attire unfit to be worn before the Olympian Council.”
Thalia’s pants were covered in dirt from laying on the ground. She scowled. “What, like you’re any better?” His clothes, in fact, were worse.
“Man, I wish I had clothes that weren’t covered in dirt and monster dust. Seriously, that stuff’s like glitter. It gets everywhere. Plus, who cares about the Council? All it shows is that we came directly from fighting a war for them.”
“Fair enough,” Thalia agreed. “Speaking of the Council, I believe we must be off.” With that, both demigods went to speak with the gods (and hopefully not get killed!).