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LiFS Chapter 3 - Lost
🕑 Added 2023-09-25 05:02:01 +0000 UTCIt was gone. All of it. Just… gone. Missing. Absent. Camp, Olympus, Atlantis, my mom’s apartment, all of it. Just… just gone. I didn’t understand. What the hell had happened? Where was I? When was I? What was I going to do?
The sea beneath me felt strange, though that might just have been the panic clawing at my throat. It had taken less than an hour to get from Brockton Bay to the north shore of Long Island, except instead of Camp Half Blood’s familiar beachfront I found a big hotel and a few restaurants.
In hindsight, that was when the denial started to kick in. I decided I must have somehow forgotten the location of one of the most important places in my life and spent the next hour zooming up and down along the shoreline trying to find it.
I found nothing. Not a single sign that the camp had ever existed. I even stopped at a small local library that I had no memory of and checked the phonebooks. There was no entry for Delphi Strawberry Service. The old, tired-looking librarian told me there had never been a local strawberry grower here as far back as she could remember.
My next attempt took considerably less time. Finding an isolated bit of shoreline, I used my powers to create a misty rainbow and tossed a gold drachma through it. “Oh Iris, goddess of the Rainbow, please accept my offering.”
I didn’t even bother trying to give a location. The coin fell straight through the mist and plopped onto the wet sand. It seemed like Iris wasn’t taking calls today. I picked up the coin, rinsed it off, and dove back into the sea.
From there I headed inland, moving deep underwater following the east river until I was nearly at the Empire State Building. Or well, the place where the Empire State Building should have been. Instead, there was a new-looking skyscraper that very much wasn’t it. There were similarities, but it was shorter and squatter, and the spire above it was considerably less impressive looking. More than that, even focusing as hard as I could to push the Mist away from my eyes, I couldn’t see a single sign that Olympus was hanging high overhead.
As a matter of fact, everything around me looked unfamiliar. I’d been on this street a hundred times by now, fought and killed right here, but I could not recognize so much as a single building. Only the street signs were the same, their presence a glaring hole in many of the theories swirling through my head.
Furthermore, while the Empire State Building was missing, I could recognize another rather conspicuous building, or rather pair of buildings, towering high above me. I was too young to remember seeing them in real life, but high school had certainly taught me what the World Trade Center had once looked like. I could see both towers, neither looking singed, much less destroyed.
My head spun, but I wasn’t done yet. It took another hour to get from 34th Street to the apartment that Paul and my mom lived in. Along the way I checked a few other local spots. Some were there. An old bakery Mom had sometimes got discount bread from was open, but it had a new storefront and I didn’t recognize the girl behind the counter. Others had been replaced by completely unfamiliar storefronts at addresses where I knew they did not belong.
By the time I arrived, I already knew deep down what I was going to find. The entire neighborhood looked completely different, newer and with a lot more construction going on than I remembered. The apartment building wasn’t there, replaced by a much shorter building with a restaurant on the ground floor and three stories of offices above it.
I barely remembered stumbling my way back to the sea, carried along more by the promise of saltwater and healing than anything else. The trip down to Atlantis was a blur of gentle, soothing water and hot tears burning my eyes. As I expected, there was nothing there but sand and fish. No palace beneath the waves, no forges filled with my cyclopean brothers, no Triton with his wry humor and warm smile, no Poseidon waiting to greet me with a smile and a pat on the shoulder, no nothing. I would have even welcomed Amphitrite––as much as my father’s divine wife didn’t like me, at least she would have been a sign that I wasn’t going insane.
I broke down then, kneeling in the murky depths with a school of fish swimming around me as tears leaked from my eyes only to be immediately washed away by the current. I was so confused, so lost, so hopeless.
What was going on? Where was I? What happened? I could only make half-hearted guesses and baseless assumptions.
I’m not quite sure how long I spent down there. It must have been at least a few hours, maybe longer. Slowly but surely, the panic receded as years of experience reasserted themselves. I had been in more hopeless situations before. Had I panicked when I faced Kronos face-to-face in the throne room of Olympus? No. I had kept my wits about me and through my choice I had banished the titan back into the depths of Tarturus. Had I panicked when I met Hyperion in Central Park, his armies arrayed around him and his body burning with divine power? No. I had fought and raged, dousing his fires and suppressing his martial skill until my allies could deal with him permanently.
I had not folded then, and I was not going to fold now. I took several long, slow breaths and stood up, my power anchoring me to the seafloor. Looking around, I finally allowed myself to acknowledge something that I had noticed hours before. The ocean here felt different. Colder. Not so much in temperature, but in the way it welcomed me.
I focused inward, feeling the thrum of divine ichor rushing in my veins and echoing through the waters around me. There was no answering thrum, no sign of my father’s might suffused throughout his domain. It was something Poseidon had shown me before he allowed me to go off on my own to explore the depths of the sea. If ever I could not feel his presence, it likely meant I had stumbled onto something dangerous. Certain monsters, lesser sea-gods, and even places of power could suppress Dad’s reach.
Here though, it felt different from how he’d shown me. There was nothing in the water at all, or perhaps it was simply too faint to feel. When Triton asserted his own dominance over the waves around him, I could feel his divine power in every drop of water. Amphitrite’s touch was lighter, gentler and more refined, but even still I could sense it with time and effort. No matter how hard I focused, no matter how much I strained my senses, I could find nothing but the faint traces of my own power echoing back at me.
I shivered. For a moment, the icy depths around me felt like Stygian iron pressed against my throat. The ocean, no matter how cold and dark, had never felt so suffocating before. It still welcomed me as its prince, my eyes cutting through the murk even as I stayed warm and dry, but it didn’t feel the same. I could almost imagine a shadowed shape flitting in the distance, just out of sight. A dark, malevolent creature watching me, hunting me, looking for an opening.
Moving purely on instinct, I slammed my hands into the ground and the earth and sea answered me. Knife-like currents tore through the waters around me for a hundred feet in every direction. Seaweed, too-slow fish, bits of human garbage, and an unfortunate crab were torn to shreds in seconds. Massive clouds of sand erupted from the ocean floor, rendering the already dark waters completely opaque.
I knelt there for a long moment, waiting for something, anything, to happen. A threat to appear, a monster to make itself known, even just a dolphin to swim by and apologize for spooking me. I would have welcomed a good fight, or even just a swarm of lesser monsters to exterminate. After Kronos’s defeat, there had been a lot of those that needed disposing of before they could hurt someone, but that had mostly been taken care of months ago. I wanted a distraction, something to take my mind off the growing worry building in the back of my mind.
Nothing happened. Then I just felt rather silly. What an overreaction to an imagined threat. I thought back to the curious haddock that had greeted me when I first came down here and felt slightly bad. Most fish were kind of stupid, but I hadn’t meant to kill them. I hadn’t even left them in an edible state, what a waste.
I stood up and shook myself, gentle currents brushing away what few grains of sand had landed on me and clearing the waters in a small bubble around me. Taking another deep breath, I refocused on the situation at hand.
The evidence was undeniable. Wherever I was, there was no Poseidon here. No sea god at all. I could imagine a few ways such a thing could have happened, but I didn’t like any of those possibilities.
Olympus was missing. Camp was gone like it had never existed in the first place. By Hades, the Empire State Building just wasn’t there! What the fuck?! I needed answers, and I needed them yesterday.
I tried to think back, tried to remember the voice I’d heard. It had been talking, saying… something. The attempt left me doubled over and gasping for breath as a renewed spike of agony cut through my brain like Riptide through an Empousa. Even completely submerged in healing seawater, it felt like a bad idea to keep trying. I wasn’t sure how much more of that my brain could handle.
If that was a dead end, where did that leave me? I fell back on Chiron’s lessons. ‘If you don’t know what to do, start by taking stock of what resources you have and what you know about your situation. That will at least tell you what your options are.’
Fair enough. First of all, what did I have on me? I sat down on the seafloor and began to take stock. Pockets first. Gum, wallet, keys, a few gold drachma, the card the weird flying girl had given me, Riptide, two chocolate wafer bars in blue plastic wrappers, a broken pencil, the pen I accidentally stole from the old librarian, a bit of lint, and a nice carbon-steel knife that Rachel gave me for my birthday.
What else? I had my armor––though I was only wearing the chest plate right now, I could easily summon the rest of it by tapping my chest. I rarely did so––with the curse of Achilles, my skin was harder than even god-forged celestial bronze, but it was handy to help hide where exactly my Achilles heel was. The armor had been a gift from Hephaestus himself, a reward for the hero of Olympus. It fit me perfectly, was temperature controlled, and could shrink down until all that remained was a nearly-invisible harness that conveniently covered the small of my back. I had only taken it off a few times since I had received it, and only reluctantly at that. Never again would someone die trying to cover for my weakness.
I was also wearing my favorite blue sneakers, navy blue sweatshirt, blue jeans, and orange camp T-shirt. With that all accounted for, I grudgingly unbuckled the Mist-covered fanny pack that I always kept hidden under my sweatshirt. Inside was my camp necklace, a small baggie of ambrosia squares that I was suddenly happy I’d forgotten about (who knew when I’d be able to restock), more drachma, Tyson’s latest transforming watch-shield, and a plastic bag that I reached into without looking and then tucked away. Annabeth’s cap, knife, and camp necklace with its nine painted beads were all there, but those were memories I did not need to deal with right now.
With everything laid out on the sand in front of me, it was easy to see the one option that might tell me something about where I was and what the Hades was going on. I picked up the paper card and stared at the words written on it. ‘Point_Me_@_The_Sky’. The strange flying girl had told me to send her a message on PHO, whatever that was. It wasn’t much, but it was the only clue I had to go off.
It took only a few moments to tuck everything away. I stood up, made sure I hadn’t forgotten anything, and then shot off like a bullet towards shore. Hopefully Glory Girl and Brockton Bay would hold the answers I needed. Otherwise… well, I would cross that bridge when I got to it.
