Chapter Text
i see you
the observer has always been the observed
warn him if you like
he won’t hear you
“And if we somehow don’t all die horribly,” Luke said far too pleasantly with a stiff toothy smile. “I will murder you.”
I didn’t believe him, but I also didn’t not believe him, if you know what I mean.
When he felt like it, Luke was a scary guy.
We were kind of way up shit creek without a paddle because I wanted to save a dumbass rabbit and the memory of Luke punching me in the face for being a moron was still fresh. The key for Hecate was somewhere on that island city, because of course the key of an Elder God was hidden in the depths of a gothic city. Fifty - fifty on it being at the bottom of a dungeon or at the top of a tower. You’ve read that story or seen that movie before and we were in the Dreamlands.
Dream logic rules all.
Clovis already knew dreams. He just needed me to put the pieces together to fully understand. The Dreamlands was a reality independent of our own. It obeyed its own rules. There were no objective truths. Everyone else was just along for the ride.
How do you tell someone that I was more worried about the nightmares they - I could spawn from my own subconscious than I was about the nightmares already here?
Without making them freak out and have it all go to shit anyway?
I don’t think I can.
“Just hear me out!” I protested tiredly. “Look, this time, I’m super sure I’m on good terms with all his kids, okay? Time likes knowledge seekers and I have a ton of questions - “
And since we’re in the Dreamlands, I probably won’t accidentally the human race if he doesn’t feel like answering.
“Percy,” Artemis said tiredly. “No.”
Khione, Ms. ‘Bait a giant tentacle murder dog with her soul’ herself, was looking at me like I just confessed to making out with wood chippers in my spare time. She glanced at Artemis and then looked at Luke with pity.“This is what you had to deal with on your Quest?”
“Oi.” I sighed. “Sam, back me up here.”
The orange tabby licked at his left paw before stating, ‘All of his plans are fooking barmy.’
“I - okay.” I glared down at him. “I’ma need you to don’t. ”
‘Make me.’ My asshole pet quipped with a lazy swipe of his tail. ‘It is absolutely the truth.’
“It is not!” I snarled back and out of the corner of my eye, Luke raised his hand. I snapped at him, “Your last plan involved jumping off a three story building onto a N’athm.”
“And yours got us into a face to face conversation with the Dread Lady,” Luke countered nastily.
He was not wrong and I hated it.
I still tried to defend myself. Call it a bad habit.
call it amusing/intriguing/inherited
“To be fair - “ I started.
“No.”
Khione’s dark eyebrows made a valiant charge towards her hairline. “I’m sorry. You came face to face with who?”
“Stuff,” I said stiffly in response. I really didn’t want to talk about it right now? The last thing we all needed was my subconscious trying to build Persephone here. “And things.”
“When did you - “ She pinched the bridge of her nose. “No. Never mind.” Thank God. “Anything I should know about the Dreamlands?” Her pretty eyes slid off to the side, towards the too far and too close horizon across the black sea. “I know only vague details about the…inhabitants.”
‘Capital,’ Sam muttered under his breath. ‘The muppet is also useless.’
Luke huffed out a soft laugh. Khione’s mouth twitched into a small frown, but she was determined to ignore him.
“Yeah. The most important thing -” Guilt churned in my stomach like venomous centipedes. I knew enough by now to know that Olympus and my sisters had given the Boreide more than a few scars. I guess there wasn’t a person among our little party that didn’t have some hurts to exploit.
Well, maybe not the cat.
There was no good way to ask if they were just badly healed wounds or if they were still bleeding.
So I didn’t.
Maybe that makes me a coward. “The Dreamlands wants to hurt you.”
Her answering smile was bitterly cold. “I’m used to that.”
I swallowed thickly.
Yeah.
Guess she was.
“My hunters will be there,” Artemis said in a small voice. “In the city. My monsters.” As if summoned by her words, another eerie long tolling of a bell rolled out from across the water and then the too loud silence that squirmed in my ears. Her silver eyes closed. “My regrets.”
I looked at Luke only to see him looking back, already grimacing.
Her victims.
“So it’s a prison,” I said as gently as I could.
Artemis hesitated. “It’s a nightmare.”
nightmares are dreams/illusions/simulations as well
“Alright.” Luke rubbed at his temples. “Don’t listen to the moon voice. Hostile location, everything there is going to be mad at us. What else?”
I bit my tongue. Hard.
Luke thought this was just going to be like sneaking into that secret library in Houston. Figure out the defenses, the available routes, how to get past or through the guards, what doors had locks and where the cameras were and everything would be fine.
Dreams didn’t work that way.
Sometimes the door was locked, sometimes the door opened to a wall, sometimes the door tried to eat you and sometimes you shrunk Alice in Wonderland style and walked through the giant keyhole because you had a bag of spicy Cheetos before bed and you regretted it. At the same time, what his subconscious believed would happen had influence on what would actually happen leaving me, the local Dreamlands expert, with no idea on what to actually say that would help.
“If there are pools of tar, we’re going the wrong way,” I said eventually. “Always.”
‘Keep track of yer noggin,’ Sam chimed in.
I nodded. “Right. If you suddenly can’t think straight, we need to back off. There are things in the water, don’t go too deep. If there are any temples - “
“There are,” Artemis rasped, breath starting to come in fast as she swayed in place.
mine
‘Ah, fook.’ Sam sighed.
“We’ll avoid them,” I said quickly. “Don’t look people in the eyes for too long. We can’t mark where we’ve been, like with breadcrumbs or chalk lines or anything because it’s all about meaning here and others can pick up on it - “
“And follow us,” Luke said grimly.
“Follow us out.” Khione figured it out immediately and it made me wish I hadn’t been a little idiot when I was younger -
What did we learn?
I breathed out and banished the prickle of fear trying to escape the nape of my neck down my spine.
“If Sam tells you to do something, do it.”
My cat’s tail stopped swishing incredulously. ‘Hold up. Are you serious - ‘
“You can get on my ass for being a hypocrite later,” I shushed him. I tried to smile at the joke but my lips felt like they were made out of cardboard. “Sometimes the Dreamlands likes being what it seems, but most of the time, it doesn’t.”
“You cannot save anyone here,” Artemis whispered. “We should not waste our efforts trying. This nightmare will not end.”
I bit my tongue again.
“Alright. On that cheery note!” I clapped my hands. The sound was muted, more like the limp ‘plap’ of a dead fish hitting something than a clap. “I vote we don’t use the creepy tunnel to get to the city.”
Come on, a stone tunnel down into blank darkness with the historic name of ‘Dante’s Gate?’ That tends to mean something and you’ve also seen that movie before.
It was probably Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
But the point is, no.
“You just said there are things in the water,” Luke pointed out.
“Just don’t fall in?”
“I can freeze a bridge,” Khione volunteered, which smacked me right upside the head with my dumbassery.
Knew I was forgetting something.
“Uh, maybe.”
Her eyebrows rose. “Maybe?”
“If you’re thinking ‘it’s water, so I can freeze it,’ you are using logic.” I raised both of my eyebrows in return. “We’re in the Dreamlands.” And I knew from experience that sometimes ‘I made the submarine, so I control the submarine’ was too much logic for this place. She was an ice goddess, but, well, there was a reason why Young Gods didn’t come here.
slaves. prey. food
“It might work, because freezing things is what you do, but it might not.”
She clicked her tongue, closed her eyes for a long moment and then said, “Lucid dreaming principles, I presume?”
Luke opened his mouth.
“Psychology degree.” She waved a hand in the air, drawing my attention to the large welts of the roots under her skin running down her arms. “Only a Bachelor’s, unfortunately.”
“Why.” He asked flatly.
She cut us a thin smile that looked weak at the same time. Like a knife that had been sharpened so much, it would just snap in half at the slightest bit of pressure.
“I was curious.”
Badly healed wounds or still bleeding. She didn’t offer anything more than that and none of us felt like asking.
The vote to not walk into the obvious trap named Dante’s Gate passed with an overwhelming ‘hell no’ majority which just left…
The black sea.
Sam’s claws caught on my pant leg, holding me back a moment as the others cautiously headed for the gray sand shore just beyond the pale flowers.
‘Moon’s red .’ He hissed softly.
It was.
Since I first fell in when I was two, the moon had always been golden.
Instead, here it was an orangey-reddish color, a paler shade than what everyone uses for Halloween commercials, surrounded by oddly twinkling stars on a bleached canvas. It looked almost like what an elusive Harvest moon would look like Awake, except the pits were darker and of a stranger shape than what was visible on Selene’s corpse.
No eye though. Not sure how to feel about that.
‘What does that mean?’ Sam hissed again, tugging his paw free with some wild flailing.
It was just like with Persephone and the Pit.
I dropped my eyes from it. I shrugged one shoulder and crushed the hysterical bubble of fear welling up in my throat. I can’t lose my head. Not now.
Somehow, somewhen, Selene’s corner of the Dreamlands had become just that.
Selene’s.
It meant there was a reason why she had Time’s key.
“Means my mother’s not here.”
There weren’t many things that could keep her away. The Pit could do it. The Night could withstand her anger. The Hunter opposed her.
Time…
yes.
If just the presence of his key was enough for Mom to avoid what used to belong to the Moon, then maybe asking him for a favor really hadn’t been the best idea in the world.
Who’d a thunk?
Sam examined my face with his eyes narrowed and airplane ears. I smiled weakly, feeling an inch tall under that red moon, and my pet huffed as he started walking towards the water.
‘The shit you get into, I swear…’
My throat burned. So did my eyes. I tried to breathe without sniffling and I don’t think I quite managed it.
“Thanks,” I croaked. “For coming.”
He didn’t say anything. Instead, he circled back, rubbed against my leg with an arched back and when I picked him up, he didn’t scratch me to within an inch of my life, which said it all, really. I breathed into the top of his little head for a couple of seconds, biting back sobs now that no one else was looking.
Mom wasn’t here.
But I’ve been here since I fell in when I was two years old. If it was just me and Sam, I’d be more confident, but it wasn’t. It was Luke and Khione and Artemis. I couldn’t be the burden or the lucky break. This time I was the one who would have to protect them, even from themselves. I wasn’t looking forward to it.
I didn’t have a great track record so far.
I bit my lip.
We’d get through this.
We had to.
you did pick a good/adequate/amusing one to watch
of all the variations of failures/successes to observe
of all
this one is my favorite/mine.
Khione’s first attempt at an ice bridge was, uh, not a failure, exactly.
“Yeah,” Luke drawled as he examined the black ice. It was translucent, cracked and looked like it was made out of frozen oil rather than water. Complete with ominous cracking sounds. “I don’t trust that at all.”
Khione sucked on her teeth. “It’s fighting me.”
You know?
“It’ll do that,” I said lamely, because I didn’t know it actually did that? Sure, things didn’t work out exactly how I thought sometimes, but I never felt like there was resistance. Was it because she was a god?
‘Any reason why we aren’t walkin’ cross?’ Sam had a paw raised. Artemis blinked, her head rearing back and the cat sighed. ‘Because you didn’t know you could or how. Gotcha.’
“Uh, let me try?” I stepped forward and the same way I made underwater scooters and a submarine and built my apartment, I just…
Made a boat.
A medium sized fishing boat with a propeller engine on the back and a manual rudder bobbed off shore, ropes, red and white safety donuts, plastic oars strapped to the side and all. It was a moss green color with an upturn prow at the front. It looked like it could have sat in the pier off the coast of Florida as I ate ice cream on the boardwalk with my grandparents with dozens of other boats just like it.
“How - “ Khione stopped herself.
‘Lil’ Fucker is bullshit,” Sam said, like he always did. ‘Don’t think about it too hard.’
“I’m awesome. Duh.” It was my usual response, but this time…this time the words lodged in my collarbone and throbbed. I cleared my throat. “All aboard?”
Sam hopped in first, completely trusting. And why shouldn’t he be? It’s not like he wasn’t used to my Dream constructs and he’s a cat. Keeping it simple. If it works, it works. I pulled the pieces of the Titan Lord out and the Pit and glued them back together with nothing but my Dreaming mind. Kronos had said the same thing Khione did.
How?
I didn’t think anything of it at the time.
Fuck if I know, amirite?
Khione was next. There was a moment of awkward balance when the boat bobbed when she expected it to dip before she claimed the middle bench. Luke scooped the rabbit off the ground, who squirmed for a second before giving up.
“Hermes Oneiropompus,” he said with one raised eyebrow. Conductor of Dreams. “You?”
I shrugged uncomfortably.
It wasn’t a demigod power. I was just…used to the Dreamlands. I had the feeling that saying it was because Mom had little interest in guarding my Dreams beyond the bare minimum to keep me sane and alive wasn’t going to do me any favors.
I’m not that stupid.
He sighed. “Your mother didn’t teach you about this either, huh?”
I shrugged again. “She didn’t have to,” I muttered. “I’ve always been able to do this. That I can remember?”
He hummed, but let me off the hook. Once he was in, I pushed the boat off the silky sand bed into the open water. I shook out my sneakers. Habit mostly. Once I forgot they were wet, they wouldn’t be anymore.
Then I walked on the water.
Luke hesitated with the pull string for the engine. I waved him on. “Speed doesn’t matter much.”
Time and distance didn’t matter much either.
Honestly, we're lucky the engine didn't promptly explode into butterflies, but actually worked.
“Dream logic,” Khione murmured. She lowered a hand to the water. Ice formed under her fingertips, then melted. Then she stopped, her eyes widening as she looked into the water. “Is that you?”
“Huh?” I said intelligently.
Sam leaned over in his seat. ‘Oh yeah. That.’
I looked down and stared into a watery reflection that had way too many burning green eyes.
“Whoa.”
It was more than the blurry shadow I saw in my Dreams, but defined. It looked a bit like a three headed hydra with crested serpent heads with long, barbed spines coming off its back. Thin tendrils like braids tasted the space around it. Four powerful legs tipped with black claws and armored in tough black scales held its weight underneath dark wings so big, they faded into the rest of the dark water. The lower body spilled from the lower jaw of the middle head into a great, gaping maw framed by vicious looking teeth. The black water was leaking between the rows of pearly whites like saliva, but instead of a throat or tongue, there was just an abyss where my green eyes burned like stars.
Was that me?
…
Holy shit, I’m handsome.
Luke shifted to look over the side too. I watched his brows furrow. “I don’t see anything? Wait. No, I do, it’s just - ” He covered his normal eye with a hand. Then blanched. “What the Hades is that?”
“His divine form!” Khione nearly squealed . “When did you - “
“I’m a demigod,” I reminded us both. There was a painful lump in my throat. There was just no way. I bleed red.
“So?” She shrugged. “Dionysus had one while mortal.” Artemis’ breath hitched but she stayed out of the conversation. “It will not be capable of killing mortals, but - “
“It only shows up here,” I cut her off again. “In the Dreamlands. It’s just my subconscious.”
Wanting to be more than I was again.
So it couldn’t be.
“You’ve had wings before,” Luke murmured.
And I couldn’t control it and maybe that was all I could ever do. “It’s not what you think, okay?”
Khione pursed her lips, hesitating. I don’t know what expression I made trying to silently beg her to drop it, but she rolled her gorgeous eyes. “Fine. A pity. I think you would have been rather cute.”
I coughed, feeling my face heat up and looked away from Luke's flabbergasted expression towards the city.
The moon gods rose up from the water, sickly gray with too many limbs, but each one unique and unsettling in their own way. Which meant making sure that we weren’t caught in a never ending loop where the destination could only get farther and farther away would be easier.
“Máni,” Artemis said quietly, hushed.
I nodded at the large, cuttlefish looking Norse god of the moon. All five of his mouths gaped at the pale red moon above us. The large eyes on either side of his triangular head rolled a full rotation before he found me.
“Hey, man,” I called out, raising my hand. “No sign of Ragnarök yet.”
One of his tentacles moved, sending a wave splashing against the boat as a low moan rumbled through the water.
Luke’s shattered eye tracked the god as we passed. “Why?”
“Selene was…well liked,” Artemis hesitantly offered. “Radiant, when she wished to be. Kind. Patient.” Her voice darkened. “And oh so generous.”
The boat bobbed in the water, disturbed by a contrary current.
“She was willing to give of the Moon, all it required was that the takers also partook of her flesh. And why not?” The rabbit spat. “Understanding, bright, knowledgeable Selene was no one’s enemy. Always willing to share her insight. Brave Helios trusted her like a sister.”
“...are you sure it was like a sister?” I quipped. “They had four children together.”
Khione raised an incredulous eyebrow at me. Luke looked ill.
I sighed. Goddamn. “Greek, right. Sorry.”
‘Muppets,’ Sam said sagely.
“To feast and gain power was not unprecedented.” Artemis’ silver eyes were a million miles away, staring blankly at everything and nothing. “And her promises were fulfilled. New moon gods rose to match their counterparts of the sun without the sacrifice.”
I grimaced.
Rule Numero Uno of deal making.
Always know the Price.
Rule two was to never ask for what you can’t easily give back.
“Or so everyone thought,” I finished the story.
“Yes,” the moon rabbit whispered. “When it all went wrong…” The debt was collected, twisting them. It only made me wonder about the gods of the Moon that escaped unscathed.
Like Hecate.
I wouldn't say Artemis had, because Diana was still watching us from the other shore. Half intact, half-warped. Maybe you don't know this, but Artemis didn't actually become known as a goddess of the Moon until the Romans. Before that, she was just a Huntress. So what happened, exactly? Maybe she did eat some and that was part of the bargain to protect her in that struggle between pantheons? But then...
Maybe I should be wondering if our mascot ate too little to get trapped.
Or maybe too much.
Maybe I should be wondering why Selene was so intent on sharing herself, even with someone she cared about, when the results were all around us, pitiful and afflicted, unable to leave.
I guess it wouldn't surprise you to know after everything I've told you that I didn't care enough to ask and Mom hadn't volunteered the answer.
Slightly choked, Artemis moved on. “Bendis.”
The Thracian goddess looked more like a crocodile that escaped from an experimental lab. Long, scaled and half submerged in the black water so that only the growths and vestigial limbs on her back showed.
“Kušuḫ.”
It took me a second to place the Hurrian god because he looked like he’d been torn in two. Both quivering halves were only held together by slick black tendons draped between like telephone lines. Each side of him was balanced on one thick elephant leg, a tough featureless hide on the outside and teeth like one side of a zipper faced the other half from the bleeding tear.
Our boat passed underneath the tendons, the sound of water and the hushed putter of the engine.
Artemis kept naming the moon gods manning the prison. Egyptian. Sámi. Baltic. Welsh and more. Each name sounded like it drew more and more blood from her heart to find the strength to say.
She was hoarse by the end.
Then it was just water and the other shore.
At first, I thought it was covered in briar bushes, that kind of gnarled dead wood looking bushes that seemed endemic to abandoned buildings and historic sites. It only made sense that you could expect to see them around a gothic city.
Then we got closer.
“Fuck.” Luke breathed.
They weren’t bushes. They were women.
Naked torsos dissolving into puddles of flesh where the leg should be as the ‘trunks’ of this grotesque tree, the contorted, tortured branches with reaching limbs silently begged for release. Sometimes separated enough to be almost human, but often melded together into chimera twins of multiple heads, five arms, three breasts or other combinations. Floating in the water by the shore like dead logs were drowned corpses with the pale, bloated looking skin but still floating, gossamer threads of hair spidering out on the surface of the water.
It was like visiting a museum of wax mannequins or clay figures except some idiot with a hot iron ran around, thinking the entire place would look better if it was just one, big, display.
Except the part where they were all still alive.
“We - ell,” Khione said slowly. There was this strange kind of resigned-but-amused knowing in the narrowing of her eyes and twist of her lips, like there was a cruel joke she had just thought of, but would rather keep the punch line to herself. “This is… fascinating.”
Luke gagged and covered his mouth with a hand.
“I did not - “ The rabbit tried. “This is not - I - “
We all looked at her. She went quiet.
I sighed.
“Arty. You had some issues.”
Luke cut the engine, looking decidedly too green to be healthy, letting the boat continue to drift closer.
(Dreams have no sense of pacing)
The prow gently knocked against one of the floating corpses.
It wasn’t a corpse.
It reared up with a shriek that jabbed my eardrums full of brass needles. Not a woman, the twisted facsimile of one made out of a fleshy humanoid spider.
I moved.
There was a flash of bone white.
The creature screamed as Damocles tore two of its skeletal arms off from my throw. Sam yowled as he leapt into the air - the force twisted the bloated form so instead of capsizing the boat, its side crashed into the front catapulting the back and everyone in it into the air.
“Sam!” I yelled. “Catch!”
I willed my Dream construct to break apart, trusting my cat to get everyone to safety.
Knife.
My fingers closed around the familiar weight of Erebus’ dagger. The thing rose from the water, wet limp hair draping it as it lunged at me with a face that was blank. Featureless. Nothing but rotting skin and a bloody mouth.
I didn’t even try to dodge.
When you’re prepared for it, you can make distance mean anything in a Dream.
Its lunge was a foot short.
Mine wasn’t.
The black blade sunk into its skull like a hot knife through butter. I twisted then ripped it out to the music of its pained wail. It clattered against the hard surface of the water.
Of course water could be hard.
I’m standing on it, aren’t I?
I brought my foot up and right where the lumpy torso narrowed, bloated skin drawn tight over vertebrae before its wriggling thorax, I brought it down with a satisfying crunch. I did the same to each of its twelve limbs, listening to it scream. I don’t even know why. Habit, I suppose. Sam always said it was more satisfying to wait until they deserved it and he was right.
With nothing more to break, I drove my birthday gift into the base of its skull and this time, I heard the death rattle.
Only then did I let it sink.
I sheathed Damocles onto my necklace because why wouldn’t I have my sword? Because I threw it? Who has the time to look for details like that in a Dream?
It was only then that my hands started to shake.
No doubt there was going to be worse things waiting for us. We still had to find a way to get out with Time’s key, with sanity and limbs intact. If I had been just a bit slower, if I had misjudged the throw…
But I hadn’t.
And my hands weren’t shaking from fear.
I was smiling.
Once I forgot I was supposed to be afraid, I wasn't, and everything came back, like slipping on a tailor made jacket. My cat and I in the Dreamlands.
Just like old times.