He felt it happen in the middle of the night — woke from sleep to the specific wrongness of it, a shimmer-signal that cut through his extended perception like a fist through paper. He was outside the Apollo cabin before he was fully awake, barefoot in the grass, looking up the hill toward the dark shape of Thalia's Pine.
It was dying.
Not at the pace of ordinary dying — not slowly, not naturally. He could feel the poison from where he stood: something dark and intentional threading through the root system, unwinding the divine energy that had been sustaining the tree for three years. The barrier was weakening. He could feel that too, the camp's divine protection thinning at the edges like a tide going out.
He ran up the hill.
He pressed both hands to the bark and pushed every bit of Hecate-resonance he had into the tree — not healing, he could not heal this, but presence. The same thing he had done with the garden in New Orleans for years: aligning with what was already there, reinforcing it, refusing to let the connection break. He could feel Thalia inside the wood, the warmth of her that he had been visiting for two years, and it was still there — faint, flickering, but there.
'Stay,' he said, to the tree, to the girl inside it. 'I know what's coming. The Fleece is coming. Just stay.'
He could not sustain it indefinitely. His MANA was dropping. But he could buy time — maintain the connection while the camp woke around him, while the alarm went out, while Chiron and the counselors arrived and assessed and began to manage.
Chiron arrived and looked at him — hands on the bark, face pale with exertion — and said nothing for a moment. Just nodded, the nod of someone acknowledging that a thing has been done that needed doing.
'I can't hold it,' Kael said. He could feel the limit. 'I can slow the decay. I cannot stop it.'
'We know,' Chiron said. 'You don't need to stop it. You need to hold it long enough.' He looked at the tree, then at Kael. 'The Fleece. There is a quest being prepared.'
He knew. He had known for a year that this summer would bring the Sea of Monsters and the Fleece and the resolution of everything this tree had been waiting to resolve. He said: 'The Golden Fleece — it's in the Sea of Monsters. A demigod with clear sight and a specific kind of luck needs to get there and back. And the quest needs to happen in time.'
Chiron looked at him. 'You know a great deal about what is needed.'
'I know enough,' Kael said. 'Get Percy Jackson on that quest. He's the right person. And get Clarisse the official assignment — she needs the recognition and Percy will end up doing it regardless, and that paradox is part of what makes it work.' He was thinking aloud, the careful management of foreknowledge into usable information without breaking the shape of events that needed to happen as they happened. 'The tree will hold long enough if I reinforce it every evening.'
Chiron was quiet for a moment. 'Every evening,' he said.
'I know what it costs,' Kael said. 'I've been visiting this tree for two years. I'll stay for whatever time is left.'
He reinforced the tree every evening for thirty-one days. It cost him substantially — MANA, sleep, a fatigue that accumulated into a bone-deep exhaustion he had not felt since the hellhound in City Park. He did it without complaint because he had said he would and because the girl in the tree deserved to have someone stand at the door while she was waiting.
[ THALIA'S PINE — SUPPORT LOG ]
Days of active reinforcement: 31
MANA expenditure per session: ~25
Total MANA spent: ~775
Peak fatigue: 73% capacity
Outcome: Tree sustained until Fleece arrival
Decay slowed sufficiently
Barrier integrity: maintained at ~65%
(minimal monster incursion)
ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: KEEPER OF THRESHOLDS
Description: Stood at the door so someone else
could stay inside it.
Did not leave when it was hard.
Bonus: +3 WIS, +2 END
New WIS: 31 | END: 16
HECATE NOTATION:
She watched every evening.
She said nothing.
Her presence at the hill was its own comment.
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