The week after the reveal of the Great Prophecy, I decided, was going to be mine.
Not in a dramatic way. Not a declaration. Just — a quiet, private, completely non-negotiable decision that whatever the universe had planned for the next seven days, I was going to eat breakfast at a reasonable hour and sleep without dreaming about Titans and nobody was going to stop me.
The universe, for once, cooperated.
MONDAY
Clarisse was waiting at the arena at seven.
She hadn't told me she'd be there. I hadn't told her I'd be there. We had arrived at the same time through separate routes and the shared understanding that the deciding bout existed and would be finished.
No preamble. We went to the ring.
Third bout. First to one. I came in low — a proper low approach, knees bent, full commitment below her guard — and she pivoted on her back foot and drove the spear shaft into the back of my knee on the way through.
DOWN.
"ONE," Clarisse said.
I lay on the ground for a moment. The dirt was cool. Unexpectedly pleasant.
"Best of five," I said.
"It was best of three —"
"It's best of five now."
"THAT IS NOT HOW BEST OF —"
"Clarisse."
"WHAT."
"Best of five."
She looked at me on the ground. I looked up at her.
"...Fine," she said. With the energy of someone renegotiating terms under extreme protest.
We went again.
I won the next two on points. She won the one after that with a move I still haven't completely mapped. We called it at two-all and agreed that the series was ongoing and would be resolved through continued daily combat.
Which was, we both understood, the agreement we were going to have for the rest of summer.
We were both fine with this.
TUESDAY
Percy was in a mood.
Not a bad mood. Not a crisis mood. Just — a Percy mood. The specific low-level restless energy he got when camp was quiet and he had too much time to think and his brain had started doing things his face wasn't hiding properly.
I found him at the canoe lake. Sitting at the dock. Staring at the water with the focused attention of someone having a conversation they weren't announcing.
"Go for a paddle," I said.
"I'm fine —"
"Percy."
"I said I'm fine —"
"You have the face."
"I don't have a face —"
"You're doing the thing with your jaw again —"
"WHAT THING —"
"The clenching thing. You've been doing it all morning."
He was quiet for a moment. The water was very still.
"She asked about him again," Percy said. "This morning. Thalia." He stopped. "Not directly. She was talking about the old days and she just — mentioned him. Casually. Like he's still the same person."
I sat beside him. "She doesn't know yet. Not really. She knows what we've told her. She doesn't know what we know."
"Yeah."
"Give her time."
"Yeah," Percy said. And then, quieter: "She's going to be devastated."
I didn't say anything. He was right. There was nothing useful I could add to that.
We sat at the dock for a while.
Then Percy looked at the canoes. Then at me. I looked at the canoes. Looked at Percy.
"No," I said.
"I didn't say anything —"
"You had the face —"
"I —"
"Percy. I have seen the canoe situation. I am familiar with the canoe situation. The answer is no."
"It's completely safe —"
"For YOU —"
"It's literally just paddling —"
"It's NEVER just paddling —"
"Aditya —"
"Every single time something HAPPENS —"
"Once," Percy said. "One time —"
"TWICE. The count is TWICE and you KNOW the count is TWICE —"
He had the decency to look slightly guilty. "This will be different," he said.
"That is what you said BOTH PREVIOUS TIMES —"
"I have more control now —"
"Percy —"
"I'm SERIOUS, I've been practising —"
"I am AWARE of your relationship with large bodies of water and it does NOT inspire confidence for those OF US who ARE NOT sons of POSEIDON —"
He looked at me. I looked at him.
"...Fine," I said. With every reservation I had and several I invented on the spot.
I am not going to describe what happened on the lake.
What I will say is this: there were TWO of us in the canoe and only ONE of us ended up in the water and it was NOT Percy.
The score is now Boats: 3. Aditya: 0.
Percy helped me out of the lake and had the ABSOLUTE NERVE to look concerned about my wellbeing rather than guilty about his role in the incident.
"You're okay —"
"I am going to tell everyone," I said.
Percy's expression changed completely.
"You're not going to —"
"Everyone. Every single person at this camp. I will hold an assembly —"
"Aditya —"
"I will COMMISSION A MURAL —"
"Okay — okay — let's talk about this —"
"I am SOAKING WET —"
"That wasn't — I didn't mean for the wave to —"
"PERCY."
"Yes?"
"One more word. One more word about the wave. I will find Hephaestus personally. I will ask him to make me a small portable grill. I will carry it specifically for situations involving you."
Percy looked at me. Dripping. Entirely serious.
"...You wouldn't."
"Try me."
He was quiet.
We walked back to camp in silence. He never told anyone. I never told anyone.
The lake knows. The lake and us.
The score remains Boats: 3. Aditya: 0.
We do not discuss it.
WEDNESDAY
The singalong happened because Connor Stoll found a guitar in the Hermes cabin that nobody had claimed and had apparently been cursed by Apollo to stay in tune no matter what.
By which I mean: Connor Stoll is terrible at guitar in a way that should have made the guitar unplayable. The guitar refused to be unplayable. The result was something that sounded accidentally like music.
Travis had started it. Someone from Apollo cabin had heard it and joined. Someone from Demeter cabin had joined that. By nine in the evening there were twenty-three campers on the hill between the cabins making varying amounts of noise that somehow added up to something.
I was there. Thalia was there.
It was the first time I'd properly been around her since she'd woken up — we'd been in the same spaces but not the same conversations. She sat on the other side of the fire with her knees up and watched Connor make the guitar do things that were technically music.
She looked like someone who was still taking inventory. Seven years. A pine tree. And now a campfire and twenty-three teenagers doing a bad singalong of something from two summers ago.
I didn't talk to her. Didn't seem like the night for it.
But at one point she looked up and caught me watching and I looked away and she looked away and neither of us said anything and somehow that was fine.
THURSDAY
The prank happened on Thursday.
This one was Travis and Connor, which should have been the warning.
The target was the Ares cabin, which was brave in the specific way that only the Stolls managed — which is to say they had calculated the exact acceptable level of risk and gone two steps past it on purpose.
Nobody knows how they got the glitter into the Ares cabin's water supply. Nobody is asking.
What happened was that twelve Ares cabin campers walked out for morning training looking like they'd been kissed enthusiastically by a craft store. Every single one of them.
Sparkling.
Clarisse was leading them. In full bronze sparkling glory.
I was at the arena entrance. I looked at Clarisse. Clarisse looked at me.
"Say one word," she said. Quietly. With absolute certainty about what would follow.
I said nothing.
I trained with excellent focus that morning. Good session. Very professional. Not a single mention of the glitter.
I saved it for the dining pavilion.
I waited until she was mid-sentence talking to Silena. I walked past. Didn't stop. Just said, very casually, "Nice shimmer, Clarisse. Very intimidating," and kept walking.
The entire Ares table went silent.
Clarisse's chair scraped back.
I was already running.
I would like to say I had a plan. I did not have a plan. What I had was a head start and the desperate hope that she wouldn't actually put the spear through me because camp rules technically —
She caught me at hill near the amphitheatre, tackled me into the grass, and sat on my back while I wheezed into the dirt.
"Shimmer," I managed. Muffled but sincere. "Very warrior princess of —"
She pushed my face further into the ground.
"Worth it," I said. Into the dirt.
She got up. Walked back to the pavilion. Sat down and finished her meal with the focused serenity of someone who had resolved the situation to her satisfaction.
I lay in the grass for a moment. The sky was very blue.
Completely worth it.
FRIDAY
Thalia showed up at the arena on Friday.
I was mid-session with Clarisse — round three of our ongoing series, which I had won two to one and was not going to let anyone forget — when she walked in.
Not asking for anything. Just watching.
She had the look of someone who had been through the armory already, who had found a spear and a shield that fit and was now calibrating. Seven years in a tree and she was clearly working out what she remembered versus what she'd have to rebuild.
Clarisse noticed her. A look passed between them that I couldn't fully read — something old, something specific to people who had been on the same hill in the same crisis and had never needed to explain it to each other.
"Ring's free," Clarisse said. Neutral. No ceremony.
Thalia looked at the ring. Looked at Clarisse. "Later," she said. And left.
Clarisse turned back to me. "Stop analysing it," she said.
"I wasn't —"
"You were."
I was.
"She'll come when she's ready," Clarisse said. And came at me with the spear like the conversation had never happened.
SATURDAY
I found a tree.
Not Thalia's tree. Different tree. Better tree — for sleeping purposes specifically. On the eastern edge of camp where the hill sloped down toward the woods and the afternoon light came through at exactly the right angle and there was a patch of ground that was neither too soft nor too hard and perfectly, completely, ideally suited to being unconscious on.
I had approximately three days of information to not think about. The prophecy. Thalia. Luke. The whole shape of it pressing against the inside of my skull like something that knew it was going to win eventually and was in no particular hurry.
The tree did not ask me to think about any of it.
I slept for four hours. It was magnificent.
SUNDAY
Chiron gathered the camp.
Not a crisis gathering. He had the tone — the specific one he used when something was planned rather than reactive — and the camp settled quickly.
"Capture the flag," he said.
The camp made the noise it always made for capture the flag.
"Teams," Chiron said, and unrolled a small parchment. "Team one. Athena. Ares. Zeus." He looked up. "Apollo."
The right side of the pavilion reacted with the collective energy of people who had already done the math and liked it.
Athena. Ares. Zeus. Apollo. Strategy. Brute force. Lightning. Precision.
I looked at Percy. Percy looked at the teams list.
"Team two," Chiron said. "Poseidon. Hermes. Demeter. Hephaestus." A pause. "Aphrodite."
The left side of the pavilion was quiet for a moment.
Then Travis Stoll said, slowly, like he was running a calculation and getting a number he didn't believe:
"...Chiron."
"Yes?"
"Did you just put Athena, Ares, Zeus, and Apollo on one team."
"I did."
"Against Poseidon, Hermes, Demeter, Hephaestus, and Aphrodite."
"Correct."
Travis looked at Connor. Connor looked at Travis. They both looked at the list.
"That's —" Connor said. "That's — with respect, sir — that's extremely —"
"Strategic positioning," Chiron said pleasantly.
"IT'S COMPLETELY UNBALANCED —" Travis started.
"Unbalanced," came a voice from the Ares table.
Everyone looked. Clarisse. Looking at Travis with the calm of someone who had not yet decided whether this was worth her full attention.
"You're calling it unbalanced," she said.
"I mean statistically —"
"Statistically," Clarisse said, slow and even, "you have Percy Jackson, who stopped a war. You have Hephaestus cabin, who build things that should not exist. You have Hermes cabin —" a pause, "— who are admittedly a liability —"
"HEY —"
"— and you are standing here calling it UNBALANCED because Athena cabin is on the other side."
Travis opened his mouth. "Clarisse —"
"Travis," she said. "I will let you finish that sentence or I will not. Those are your two options."
Travis closed his mouth.
Then from the Zeus table — new voice. Flat. Not interested in ceremony.
"He has a point though."
Everyone looked. Thalia. Arms crossed. Looking at the teams list the way you look at a map you already know is wrong.
Clarisse looked at her. A beat.
"Four offensive cabins plus a wild card," Thalia said. "Against a cabin that builds weapons, a cabin that cheats, a son of Poseidon, and three others." She turned to Chiron. "You want a game or a routing?"
"I am sure it will be a game," Chiron said. "Which is why the teams are as they are."
Thalia looked at the list again. Then at Clarisse. Something passed between them — different from Friday.
"Fine," Thalia said.
"FINE?" Travis said. "You just AGREED with me and now you're saying —"
"I said it was lopsided," Thalia said. "I didn't say it was wrong. Chiron knows what he's doing." She looked at him flatly. "Use your assets, Stoll."
Travis blinked. Connor leaned over. "She's kind of terrifying," he said quietly.
"She was a tree four days ago," Travis said. He seemed to be struggling with this enormously.
They disbanded. The camp scattered to prepare.
I found my tree.
The good one. Eastern slope. Perfect angle. Perfect ground.
I lay down. Closed my eyes. Plenty of time for a completely reasonable and well-deserved rest.
I was asleep in four minutes.
I was woken by footsteps.
Not one set. Two. Arriving from slightly different directions and stopping approximately three feet from my head.
I kept my eyes closed.
"He's asleep," Connor said.
"Obviously he's asleep," Travis said.
"How is he asleep? It's capture the flag in an hour —"
"Some people sleep anywhere. My uncle could sleep at a funeral. We need him to —"
"I'm awake," I said.
Silence.
"You were SNORING —" Connor started.
"I was resting my eyes."
"You were —"
"Loudly," Travis said. "You were resting your eyes very, very loudly."
"What do you want, Stoll."
They exchanged a look. I still hadn't opened my eyes.
"Okay so," Travis said. "The teams."
"Mm."
"You saw the teams."
"I did."
"And you noticed —"
"That Athena, Ares, Zeus, and Apollo are all on team one. Yes. I noticed."
"Right. So. We were thinking —"
"No."
"You didn't let me finish —"
"No."
"ADITYA —"
"I am on no team. I categorically live in the big house. I am here under the tree. I will be here under the tree during capture the flag. I will be here under the tree AFTER capture the flag. Goodnight."
"Chiron said you could be a floater," Connor said.
I opened my eyes. Looked at the sky. "Chiron said that."
"He did. Specifically. Like fifteen minutes ago. He said and I quote, 'Aditya is unaffiliated and may choose his own alignment for the evening.'"
"He set this up," I said.
"Almost certainly," Travis agreed. "Sir is not subtle."
I closed my eyes again. "My alignment is horizontal. Goodnight."
"OKAY but if you were going to join a team —"
"I'm not —"
"HYPOTHETICALLY —"
"Not even hypothetically —"
"We'd make it worth your while," Connor said.
"With what? You have nothing I need —"
"Information," Travis said.
I was quiet.
"Specifically," he said, carefully, "information about a certain incident. At the lake. On Tuesday. Involving a canoe and certain atmospheric phenomena that —"
I sat up.
Travis and Connor took a small step back.
"Percy told you," I said. Flat.
"Percy didn't tell us anything," Connor said. "We have a network. Information moves. It's nothing personal —"
"Percy told you."
"He may have," Travis said. "In passing. Under mild social pressure —"
I stood up. Both of them took another step back.
"HYPOTHETICALLY," I said, "if I were to join a team."
"We're listening —"
"I guard the flag. I am not running into the woods chasing anything. I am standing in one place doing the minimum required."
"Done —"
"And if anyone asks, the canoe thing never happened."
"Canoe thing?" Connor said. "What canoe thing? Travis, do you know about a canoe thing?"
"Never heard of it," Travis said.
I looked at both of them. "Go. And tell Percy I am going to grill him."
"He said to tell you," Connor said, already backing away, "that it was an honest mistake and the wave was completely —"
"GO."
They went.
I looked at the tree. The tree could not help me.
I went to find my sword.
THE GAME
The boundary line cut across the camp like it always did — the creek on one end, the tree line on the other. Somewhere on the far side of the field, team one was setting up. Athena working the angles. Ares planting themselves somewhere loud. Apollo finding high ground.
Our flag was at the base of a rocky outcrop at the northern edge. Good position. Defensible.
I was there. Just me.
Travis had given me a look when they'd divided up. "You're sure you want the flag? Alone?"
"I said minimum involvement," I said. "This is minimum involvement."
He accepted this. I suspected he'd also accepted it because putting me at the flag meant he got to go run around the woods, which was genuinely what he wanted to do.
The signal went up. Red flare. From Chiron's position.
The game started.
For twenty minutes, nothing happened.
Sounds in the distance. Shouting. Someone from Apollo cabin who had found high ground and was making everyone painfully aware of this fact. The specific clash of Ares cabin doing what Ares cabin did, which was hit first and strategize later.
I sat on a rock. Watched the tree line. Thought about nothing in particular.
Percy's voice carried from somewhere in the middle distance — doing whatever Percy did in capture the flag, which based on past evidence involved water appearing in places water had no business being and everyone on the other side having a very bad time.
Annabeth's voice, sharp and precise, barking formations from somewhere to the north. She was probably three moves ahead of everyone and mildly annoyed about it.
Miss a week of action, I thought. Everything's fine.
Then the Ares cabin arrived.
Not subtly. Marcus up front with three others behind him — the Ares cabin approach to flag retrieval being to locate the flag through direct frontal engagement with anything between them and it.
Also: the Hephaestus cabin arrived. Behind me.
Which was ideal as they were my team.
They were after the Ares cabin.
"Beckendorf," Marcus said.
"Marcus," Beckendorf said, with the specific calm of someone who had been waiting for this exact moment for approximately a full week. "The chariot race."
Marcus looked at him for one full second.
"Oh," he said. "You came for that."
"I came for that," Beckendorf confirmed. "With friends."
What followed was not subtle and not graceful and was absolutely beautiful.
The Hephaestus cabin had not forgotten the chariot race. They had spent the week not forgetting it very productively. Six of them against four Ares kids, and me standing slightly to the side watching with genuine appreciation as years of workshop frustration got expressed in the most direct way imaginable.
The Ares cabin was good. The Hephaestus cabin was better prepared. They had brought items from the workshop that were technically legal under capture the flag rules and practically constituted a small siege.
I helped where it seemed useful. At one point I caught Marcus mid-lunge, redirected his foot, and put him face-first into the grass. He looked up at me.
"Good one," he said. Flat. Sincere. The specific respect of an Ares kid acknowledging a move that actually worked.
I took it as a compliment and intend to keep it.
The Ares cabin retreated in good order — loudly, with promises of future violence and zero actual embarrassment, because the Ares cabin did not do embarrassment.
Beckendorf looked at me. "Good?"
"Good," I said.
He nodded. Took his cabin back into the woods.
I turned back to the flag.
And stopped.
The clearing was very quiet.
Someone was standing at the edge of the tree line.
Not from the Ares cabin. Not from any cabin that had been in this section of the field.
She'd come from the wrong direction entirely — around the back of the outcrop, through the far tree line, quiet enough that the entire Ares-Hephaestus incident had covered her approach completely.
The aegis( replica i learned that later) on her arm. The spear in her hand, its canister gleaming at her hip where it had collapsed back down. A circlet catching the moonlight. Static running in small bright lines along the spear shaft — not uncontrolled, not involuntary. Deliberate. The way someone holds a lit match after deciding to use it.
Fifteen years old and seven years in a pine tree and she moved across the grass like she'd never been either.
She looked at the flag. Then at me.
I looked at the spear. The static. Her face — which had the settled, specific calm of someone who knew exactly where they were, what they were doing, and had given the situation the full respect of actual planning.
Right, I thought. Right.
"So," I said.
"So," she said.
A pause.
"Chiron," I said. "He put you on team one. Zeus, Ares, Athena, Apollo." I looked at her. "Then called me a floater and let the Stolls recruit me so I'd end up here."
"Probably," she said.
"He did this on purpose."
"Almost certainly."
I looked at her. "The man told you I was a whetstone."
Something shifted in her expression. Not quite a smile. The thought of one. "He mentioned it."
"He MENTIONED it —"
"In passing —"
"That man," I said, with deep feeling, "is an absolute menace dressed in a cardigan."
"He's been doing this for three thousand years," Thalia said. "He's had time to get good at it."
"That is not a defence of his behaviour —"
"I didn't say it was a defence," she said. "I said he's had time."
I looked at her. She looked at me. Something in the air between us settled — not hostile, not entirely easy, but honest. Two people who had both been manoeuvred here by the same old centaur and had independently decided to see where it went.
Then the aegis came up.
All the way.
And something happened.
It wasn't a sound. It wasn't a voice. It was older than both of those things — something that went straight past the ears and hit the part of the brain that was solely responsible for staying alive. A cold, absolute, foundational wrongness. The kind that said: you are small. You are mortal. You are standing in front of something that does not care about you at all.
My body moved before I decided to move.
One step back.
One step. Involuntary. Feet doing it without consulting the rest of me.
The logical part of my brain — the part that knew what the shield was, what it did, why it worked — still running. Still present. Still saying you know this, you know what this is, stand your —
The older part said: back. NOW.
One step.
And then something else moved.
Not me. Not a decision.
The dragon heart.
It woke up.
Not slowly. Not gradually. It went from still to present in the space between one heartbeat and the next — a deep, ancient, deeply unimpressed pulse from somewhere in my chest that felt nothing like fear and everything like the absolute opposite of it.
The fire came.
Not from my hands. Not onto the Kavach like a coat of paint.
From inside it.
The Kavach ignited — not the surface, the seams. Every joint, every gap between plate and plate, every articulated edge where metal met metal. Fire erupted through the armour like breath through lungs, blazing out of the chest piece in furious lines of orange-red that matched no forge I'd ever seen. The greaves lit at the ankle joints. The bracers blazed at the wrists. The pauldrons threw fire upward in tongues of light against the underside of my jaw.
I was not wearing fire.
The fire was in me and coming out, and the Kavach was the shape it took on its way through.
The cold the aegis had put in my chest — still there, still broadcasting, still meaning it — met the heat blazing from inside and retreated. Not gone. Reduced. Pushed back to a distance I could look past rather than something I was drowning in.
I stood in the clearing and burned.
I looked at my hands.
Fire ran along the knuckles in even, steady lines. Not wild. Patient. Like it had always been there and had simply been waiting to be relevant.
I had not asked it to do any of that.
It had done it anyway.
"...Huh," I said.
"Huh," Thalia replied.
We looked at each other across the lit clearing.
Her expression was not what I'd expected. Not frustration. Not recalculation. Something more honest than both — the face of someone who had just watched something happen that they had not seen before and were still processing what it meant.
The aegis was still up. The fire in my armour's seams burned steady.
"That's new," she said.
"For you or for me," I said.
"Both," she said. Flat. Accurate.
I reached back over my shoulder and lifted the sword off — easy, unhurried, the way you take a bat off a rack. The blade caught the light blazing from the Kavach's joints and threw it back in warm lines of orange and gold.
Her spear came fully forward. The static along the shaft wasn't small anymore — it ran the full length now, blue-white and deliberate, crackling at the tip with the focused energy of someone who had found their footing and planted it.
The corner of her mouth moved. Not quite a smile. Something that had decided this was worth its full attention.
"First touch," she said.
"First touch," I agreed.
END CHAPTER