A Too Familiar Place, A Sky Too Old

by MochiDestial_Winter

Summary:

Percy Jackson wakes up stranded in Ancient Greece after sleeping in Poseidon’s palace. To the locals, his sea-given powers and striking presence mark him as a divine being—a belief he irritably denies. After using a strange, truth-compelling siren song to save a village from bandits, he accepts their help while struggling to understand his new abilities. Unbeknownst to Percy, his display of raw power and haunting voice has drawn the intrigued attention of two Olympians: Ares, fascinated by his battle prowess, and Apollo, captivated by the mystery of his song.

Notes:

I’ve always shipped Ares and Apollo with Percy soooo here it is!!!

Chapter 1

 

The last thing Percy Jackson remembered was the cool, damp sheets of his father’s underwater palace, the quiet groan of the Atlantic deep, and the profound, soul-deep exhaustion that came from saving the world—again. Sleep had pulled him under like a gentle riptide.

He woke up to sand in his mouth.

Not just any sand. Gritty, sun-warmed, smelling of salt, thyme, and goat. He coughed, spitting, and pushed himself up onto his elbows. The sea—a brilliant, impossible blue—lapped at his ankles. The beach was a crescent of white pebbles and dark sand, climbing to scrubby hills dotted with olive trees. The air was cleaner, sharper than any he’d breathed before.

And it was quiet. No distant hum of traffic, no planes in the sky. Just the wind, the waves, and the bleating of a goat somewhere up the hill.

“Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” he groaned, flopping back onto the sand. 

His clothes were still the soft, modern cotton he’d gone to bed in. His sneakers were soaked. Riptide was a reassuring weight in his pocket. So, not a dream. Probably.

He stood, brushing off sand, and scanned the horizon. No signs of civilization. Just pristine, untouched coastline. “Great. Just perfect. Dad? A little help? A ‘Welcome to Whatever-B.C.’ sign would be nice!”

The sea only whispered back, a familiar chuckle in the foam. Poseidon was listening, but his silence felt… different. Intentional. Ominous.

“Fine,” Percy muttered. “Be that way.”

He picked a direction and started walking. An hour later, he found a path. Soon after, the path found a village.

It wasn’t a town. It was a cluster of maybe twenty whitewashed huts with terracotta roofs, centered around a well. A few fishing boats were pulled up on a smaller beach. The people stopping to stare at him wore simple tunics of linen or wool. Their faces were weathered, open, and currently, slack with awe.

Percy sighed internally. Here we go.

He raised a hand in what he hoped was a universal gesture of peace. “Uh, hi. I’m sort of lost. Any chance you speak English? Or… ancient Greek? The really ancient kind?”

A young woman carrying a water jug dropped it. The clay shattered. She didn’t even glance down. Her eyes, wide and dark, were fixed on him. Then she sank to her knees. One by one, the others followed—fishermen mending nets, old men in the shade, children who had been chasing chickens.

“Oh, for the love of—” Percy began, but an old man, his beard grey and braided, stepped forward. He wasn’t kneeling. He was staring with the fervent intensity of a scholar who’d just found a lost text.

“Daimon,” the old man breathed, his voice thick with an accent Percy’s brain somehow parsed. “Spirit of the sea. You have come ashore. Your form is… is…”

“Annoyed? Confused?” Percy supplied. “Seriously, please stand up. I’m not a daimon. I’m just a guy who took a wrong turn at the Atlantic.”

But his words seemed to have the opposite effect. The way he stood, the confidence in his voice, the strange cut of his clothes—it all fed their certainty. The old man’s eyes fell on the faint, just-visible trident scar on Percy’s forearm, a mark that sometimes glowed when he was angry or using his powers. He pointed a trembling finger.

“Son of the Earthshaker,” he declared. The village let out a collective gasp.

Percy opened his mouth to deny it, then closed it. Denying his dad never ended well. Explaining he was from the future sounded like a one-way ticket to a straitjacket—or a sacrificial altar. He defaulted to his base setting: deflection with extreme prejudice.

“Look,” he said, crossing his arms. “I don’t know what you’ve heard, but I’m not here to… bless your crops or curse your enemies. I just need some directions, maybe some food that isn’t sand, and possibly a timeline. What year is it?”

The old man blinked. “It is the time of the sowing, under the gaze of the Lord of the Silver Bow.”

“Right. Helpful. Very specific.” Percy ran a hand through his hair. A breeze kicked up, swirling around him, carrying the scent of the sea. Unthinkingly, he muttered to it in Greek, the language flowing naturally. “Could you not blow sand in my face?”

The breeze immediately stilled, dying down to nothing as if chastised.

The village fell so silent he could hear the blood pounding in his own ears. The old man’s face was pale. “You command the very breath of the world.”

“I asked it politely!” Percy exclaimed, exasperated. “It’s a family thing! Look, forget it. I’ll just—” He turned, intending to walk back the way he came, and tripped over a loose stone in the path. He stumbled, arms windmilling, and to stop himself from falling face-first, he threw out a hand. A spray of seawater shot up from a puddle he hadn’t even noticed, arching like a liquid hand to steady his balance before splashing back down.

He righted himself. The puddle was now dry.

He looked at the villagers. They looked at him, their expressions having moved past awe into sheer, unadulterated terror and devotion.

“That was an accident,” he said weakly.

It was at that moment the trouble arrived. Not divine trouble. Mortal trouble. The clatter of hooves and the jingle of poorly-kept armor announced the arrival of five men on horseback. Bandits, by the look of them—greasy, armed with spears and short swords, led by a man with a scarred lip and greedy eyes.

“Well, well,” Scar-Lip sneered, his gaze sweeping over the cowering villagers. “Making offerings to a new rock, old man? Hand over your grain and silver, and we might leave your hovels standing.” His eyes then landed on Percy. “And who’s this pretty one? A tribute from a neighboring village? He’ll fetch a fine price.”

Percy felt the familiar, cold calm of battle settle over him. The villagers’ fear was a tangible thing, sour in the air. These men were bullies, plain and simple. He’d had enough—of being lost, of being worshipped, of this whole stupid day.

He stepped forward, putting himself between the bandits and the villagers. “How about you turn those nags around and ride back to the hole you crawled out of?” he said, his voice deceptively light. “It’s past your bedtime.”

Scar-Lip laughed, a harsh bark. “The tribute has a mouth on him. I’ll enjoy breaking that spirit.”

The bandits dismounted, spreading out. Percy didn’t draw Riptide. They weren’t monsters. He just needed to make a point.

The first man lunged. Percy sidestepped, using the man’s own momentum to send him stumbling into the dust. The second came from the side. Percy grabbed his spear shaft, yanked him forward, and tapped him gently on the temple with his own fist. The man’s eyes rolled up, and he collapsed.

“You fight like my grandma,” Percy commented, ducking a wild sword swing from a third. “And she’s dead.”

He moved among them like the tide—fluid, inevitable, unstoppable. A twist of a wrist here, a pressure-point tap there, a foot hooked behind an ankle. In less than a minute, four men were groaning in the dirt. Only Scar-Lip remained, his face mottled with rage.

“Witchcraft!” he snarled, raising his sword. “You’re using witchcraft!”

“No,” Percy said, his green eyes darkening. “I’m just better.”

Something in his tone, the sheer, unshakable certainty, made the bandit chief hesitate. In that moment, Percy’s anger and frustration—at his situation, at the stupidity of violence, at the whole cosmos for dumping him here—boiled over. He didn’t shout. He didn’t roar.

He sang.

It was barely more than a hum, a melodic sigh of pure, concentrated exasperation that escaped his lips. The tune was an old, half-remembered song his mother used to sing when she was frustrated with Gabe—a bluesy, mournful riff.

The sound hit the air.

It was beauty woven with thorns. It was the sigh of a wave giving up its ship, the crack of a heart breaking, the whisper of truth too sharp to bear. It didn’t echo off the hills; it echoed in the chests of everyone present.

The villagers gasped, tears springing unbidden to their eyes, overwhelmed by a rush of personal longing and sorrow.

Scar-Lip didn’t drop his sword. He froze, his weapon shaking. His eyes lost their malice, filling instead with a childlike, gut-wrenching terror. “The… the well,” he choked out, a sob tearing from his throat. “I pushed my brother… I was eight… he wouldn’t give me his toy cart…” He fell to his knees, weeping great, heaving sobs of decades-old guilt, his crime dragged into the sun by three haunting notes.

Percy stopped, clamping his mouth shut, horrified. The sound cut off, leaving a ringing, emotional silence more profound than any noise.

“What,” he whispered to himself, his own heart hammering, “was that?”

The bandit chief was broken, babbling apologies to the sky and the memory of his brother. His remaining men, shaken and confused, dragged him to his feet and onto his horse, fleeing without a backward glance, their menace utterly dissolved.

Percy stood there, trembling slightly. He looked at his hands as if they belonged to someone else.

The silence stretched. Then, the old man, the village elder, approached. There were still tears on his weathered cheeks, but his eyes held no fear now. Only a profound, solemn gratitude. He placed a hand over his heart and bowed deeply.

“You have saved us,” he said, his voice thick. “With your strength… and with your truth-song. You are not just a daimon. You are a guardian.”

Percy swallowed, the strange power still humming under his skin like a second heartbeat. “I didn’t mean to… I don’t know what that was.”

“A gift,” the old man said simply. “Or a burden. The gods weave as they will. Come.” He gestured towards the largest hut, near the central fire. “You need rest. And food that is not sand.”

The villagers rose, their terror replaced by a bustling, reverent energy. They didn’t crowd him, but their glances were full of awe. The woman who had dropped her jug brought him a cup of cool water from the well. A young boy shyly offered him a strip of dried fish.

Percy, his bravado gone, felt exhaustion crash over him. The fight, the shock of his new power, the sheer reality of his predicament left him hollowed out. “Thank you,” he said, and the words felt inadequate.

They gave him a space in the elder’s own hut, a pallet of clean straw and a woolen blanket. As dusk painted the sky in shades of violet and gold, the village shared a simple meal—barley porridge, olives, goat cheese, and flatbread. They didn’t ask him questions. They simply honored him with their quiet care.

Sitting by the communal fire, the weight of the day pressing down on him, Percy finally voiced the request he’d been holding back.

“I need to find my way,” he said to the elder, who sat beside him. “I don’t belong here. In this… time. This place. I need to get to the sea, to a temple, to anything that might… understand.”

The elder studied him in the firelight. “You seek the gods themselves.”

“I seek a way home,” Percy corrected softly.

The old man nodded slowly. “In three days’ time, men from our village travel to the harbor at Pylos to trade fish and oil. It is a place of many peoples, near a great sanctuary of the Earthshaker. If any path exists for one such as you, it may be found there.”

Three days. It felt like an eternity and a heartbeat. Percy nodded, a fragile hope kindling in his chest. “Thank you.”

“It is we who thank you,” the elder said. He gestured around at the peaceful, secure village. The bandits would not return. The truth-song had seen to that. “You have given us safety. We will give you what guidance we can. Rest now, son of the sea. Your journey has only just drowned, and begun.”

That night, lying under a roof of thatch, Percy stared into the darkness. The strange power—the siren’s truth—sang a soft, silent note in his veins. He didn’t know what it was, only that it had come from a place of deep frustration, a place that felt connected to his mother, to the sea, to the very core of who he was.

Far away, on a sunlit mountain, a god who had heard the faintest, most intriguing ripple of a new melody on the wind plucked a thoughtful chord on his lyre. The hunt was not yet. But the scent of the song was caught.

And in a bronze-walled hall, a god of war heard a different report—not of music, but of a fighter who moved like a storm and broke men not with blades, but with a look and a whisper. His interest, sharp and bloody, was piqued.

But for now, Percy Jackson slept, unaware of the divine eyes turning his way, dreaming of a blue apartment in New York and the sound of his mother’s laugh, which, he now realized, had always held a little magic of its own.

Chapter 2: Finding rhythm

The next morning, Percy woke to the scent of baking bread and the low murmur of the village beginning its day. For a disorienting moment, he expected the groan of a Manhattan garbage truck. Then it all crashed back—the pebble beach, the bandits, the song.

He sat up, running a hand through his hair. The power felt dormant now, a sleeping sea monster in his gut. He shoved the unease aside. Freaking out wouldn’t fix anything. Doing something might.

Stepping out of the elder’s hut, he was met with a scene of quiet industry. Women ground grain at querns, men prepared nets by the boats, children chased chickens. But the moment they saw him, everything stuttered to a halt. Hands stilled. Chatter died. Eyes followed him with a reverence that made his skin crawl.

They were treating him like a porcelain statue on a shelf—beautiful, powerful, and utterly untouchable. The tension was thicker than the morning fog.

“Right,” Percy said to no one in particular, his voice cutting through the silence. “This is not going to work.”

He marched over to where a young man, maybe a few years older than him, was struggling to mend a large fishing net, his fingers clumsy on the cord.

“You’re twisting the line wrong,” Percy said, crouching down. The young man flinched as if struck by lightning. “It’ll just snap again on the next big catch. Here, let me show you.”

Before the stammering fisherman could protest, Percy took the net. His hands, trained by years of celestial bronze maintenance and surviving monster attacks, moved with sure, efficient motions. He demonstrated the proper knot, strong and flexible. “My friend back at camp, she’s a daughter of… a great weaver. She’d have my head if I did a slipshod job.”

He handed the net back. The fisherman stared, then at Percy’s encouraging nod, tried to replicate the knot. He did it perfectly.

A slow smile spread across the man’s face. “It… it is better.”

“Told you,” Percy grinned, clapping him on the shoulder. The man didn’t melt into a puddle of awe. He just grinned back, the fear in his eyes replaced by dawning camaraderie.

That was all the permission Percy needed.

He didn’t ask if he could help. He just saw what needed doing and did it. He hauled water from the well until the cistern was overflowing, the heavy jars feeling like nothing in his arms. He helped patch a leaky roof, his balance perfect on the rickety ladder. He even took a turn at the grinding stone, his powerful shoulders making quick work of the grain, which earned him a few surprised laughs from the women.

But his real focus was the kids. They trailed after him in a silent, wide-eyed pack until he finally rounded on them, hands on his hips.

“Okay, gang. Staring contest is over. You want to learn something useful or just watch me sweat?”

A brave boy, the one who’d given him fish yesterday, piped up. “Can you teach us to fight like you did?”

Percy considered. Teaching demigod-style combat to ancient Greek kids seemed like a recipe for disaster. But teaching them to not be victims…

“Alright. But rule number one,” he said, his tone leaving no room for argument. “We’re not learning to fight to be bullies. We’re learning to protect. Your home, your family, each other. Got it?”

They nodded, solemn.

He found some straight, sturdy sticks. “First, stance. It’s not about being strong; it’s about being rooted. Like a tree in a storm.” He showed them how to stand, how to move their feet. He corrected gently, praised often. He turned it into a game, having them try to push each other over. Laughter, real and unfettered, began to ring out in the square.

Later, as they rested in the shade, a little girl pointed to the markings on an amphora. “What does it say?”

Percy looked at the crude Greek letters. He realized with a jolt that for these village children, reading was as mysterious as his powers. “It says ‘oil’. Here.” He took a stick and drew the letters in the dirt. “Alpha, Rho… that’s ‘ar’. This is ‘elaion’, oil.” He taught them a few basic letters, their names, the sounds they made. Their concentration was absolute, a different kind of battle fought in the dust.

At noon, he sought out the elders, not as a deity, but as a confused traveler. He sat with them by the well, accepting a cup of sour wine.

“Tell me about this place,” he said. “The lands around, the gods here.” He listened, really listened, to their stories of local nymphs, of bad harvests, of offerings made to Poseidon. He asked about the bandits—a recurring problem. He didn’t offer grand solutions, but he nodded, his green eyes serious, making them feel heard in a way a distant god never could.

As the sun began to dip, the evening meal preparations started. Percy watched as a woman prepared the communal pot of porridge, seasoned with a few precious herbs and a bit of salt fish. It was functional. It was bland.

A memory surfaced: his mom, after a long shift at the candy shop, transforming cheap ingredients into something magical. The desire to do something normal, something his, was overwhelming.

“Can I… try something?” he asked the cook, a formidable matron named Elpis.

She looked skeptical. “My lord, the food is humble, not fit for—”

“It’s perfect,” Percy interrupted, already rolling up his sleeves. “I just want to help. I promise I won’t poison anyone. Probably.”

With a hesitant nod, she gave him space. Percy took over. He chopped onions and wild garlic with a speed that made her blink. He knew how to coax flavor from the dried fish, toasting it lightly first. He found a stash of dried lentils and barley and started a second pot, creating a hearty stew with the herbs, adding a surprising splash of the sour wine to cut the richness. He even persuaded a boy to bring him some mussels and clams from the shore, which he steamed open over the fire with a little water and wild thyme, the briny scent mixing deliciously with the stew.

The village gathered, drawn by the unfamiliar, mouth-watering aromas. When the food was served, the first spoonful of stew brought a collective pause, then a murmur of pure delight. It was simple food, but layered, hearty, and full of a care they hadn’t tasted before.

Elpis took a bite, her eyes wide. She looked at Percy, who was nervously wiping his hands on his tunic. “You… you fight like a daimon, sing like a muse, and cook like Hestia’s own handmaiden,” she declared, her voice thick. “What are you?”

Percy, flushed from the fire and the praise, shrugged, his down-to-earth self fully reasserted. “Just a guy who likes to eat well and hates seeing people go hungry.”

That night, by the fire, there was no tense silence. There was chatter, and laughter. Children vied for spots near him. The elders spoke to him like a wise young kinsman, not an oracle. He was no longer a statue on a shelf. He was the strange, capable, surprisingly useful young man who fixed nets, taught their children, and made the best fish stew they’d ever eaten.

As he lay down to sleep, the knot of anxiety in his chest had loosened. He was still lost in time. He still had a terrifying, unknown power inside him. But for now, in this small village by the sea, he had found a foothold. He had helped, and in helping, he had been given a place.

Unseen in the shadows beyond the firelight, a scarred crow observed the scene before taking wing, carrying a report not of a distant, terrifying demigod, but of a compelling, contradictory leader who inspired loyalty with a joke and a bowl of stew. Its message would find a very interested god of war.

And high above, a listener who tracked the melodies of the world noted the new rhythm of this village—the harmonious clatter of a community put at ease. The source of that harmony was a song he was growing increasingly impatient to hear up close.

~~~

 

Two weeks settled into Percy like the rhythm of the sea against the shore. He was no longer a visitor, nor a deity. He was… Percy. The strange, ever-helpful young man from the sea.

His days found a pattern. Mornings were for fishing. He had a knack for finding the schools—a whispered plea to the water, a shared secret from a naiad in a tidal pool, and the village boats would come back groaning with silver-sided catch. Afternoons were for teaching. The “stick lessons” for the kids had evolved into a proper, if chaotic, training ground. He taught them how to fall without breaking bones, how to use their smaller size as an advantage, how to read the intentions in an opponent’s eyes.

“It’s not about winning a fight,” he’d say, parrying a wooden sword thrust from the bravest boy, Lysandros. “It’s about ending it fast so you can go home for dinner.” He’d disarm the boy with a gentle twist and ruffle his hair. “Or in your case, so you can finish your letters.”

The reading lessons in the dirt had moved to charcoal on smoothed shards of pottery. A few of the older children could now spell their names and read simple words. The elders watched this miracle with tears in their eyes, muttering that the son of Poseidon had brought them the wisdom of Athena.

Evenings were for stories. Percy, seated on a worn stone by the central fire, would tell them tales—carefully edited. The Minotaur became a cruel bandit king in a maze-like fortress. The quest for the Golden Fleece was a sea voyage for a prized ram’s pelt. He spoke of loyalty, of cleverness, of friends who were your anchor in a storm. The villagers didn’t hear myths; they heard parables that made their own struggles feel epic.

He was mending a particularly stubborn net one afternoon, the sun warm on his back, when the village dogs set up a frantic barking.

A stranger stumbled into the clearing.

He was a wraith of a man, lean to the point of starvation, his chiton torn and filthy. Dust coated his skin and his eyes held the hollow, skittish look of a hunted animal. He flinched at the sight of the villagers, his hands raised in a universal gesture of helplessness.

“P-please,” he rasped, his voice raw. “A crust. A sip of water. I beg of you.”

The villagers paused, their expressions a mix of pity and wariness. Times were hard; hospitality was sacred, but so was survival. The elder, Leodes, stepped forward, his face grim.

Before he could speak, Percy stood up, dropping the net. The stranger’s eyes snapped to him, and the man recoiled as if struck. Percy, with his powerful build, sea-green eyes, and the unconscious air of command he’d never lost, must have looked like a young warlord or a vengeful spirit.

The man fell to his knees, pressing his forehead to the dust. “M-my lord! I meant no trespass! I’ll go, I’ll—”

“Oh, for Olympus’ sake,” Percy sighed, the sound weary and utterly human. “Get up. You’re not trespassing, you’re just in time for lunch.”

The man peered up, bewildered. Percy had already turned, striding toward the cooking fire where a pot of his fish and lentil stew—now a village staple—simmered. He ladled a generous portion into a wooden bowl, grabbed a hunk of yesterday’s bread, and filled a cup with water.

He walked back and crouched, placing the food and drink on the ground before the trembling man. “Here. Eat slowly, or you’ll get sick.”

The stranger stared at the steam rising from the bowl, his nostrils flaring at the rich, herb-scented aroma. He looked from the food to Percy’s face, searching for mockery, for cruelty. He found only a steady, green-eyed gaze and a faint, impatient frown that said, ‘Just eat the food, man.’

Tentative fingers closed around the bread. He took a small bite, then another, then devoured it. He sipped the water, then attacked the stew with a quiet, desperate intensity. As he ate, color began to seep back into his gaunt face.

When the bowl was empty, he set it down with hands that no longer shook. He looked at Percy, who was now back on his stool, calmly returning to his net mending as if feeding starving travelers was a daily chore.

Tears welled in the man’s eyes. He didn’t bow this time. He placed a hand over his heart, his voice trembling with a different emotion. “I… I have walked from the east. I have seen the cruelty of men and the indifference of the hills. I was told this coast was barren.” He looked around at the peaceful, prosperous village, the well-fed children, the mended roofs. “But here… here is a sanctuary. And you…” His gaze locked on Percy. “You are no mere lord. You are eudaimon—a spirit of good fortune. A blessed one. Your hands mend nets and fill bellies. Your presence brings safety and full fish-nets. May the Fates weave you a long and glorious thread. May the gods themselves sing your generosity.”

He broke into a traditional song of blessing, his voice, though weak, carrying a trained, melodic clarity that hinted he might have been a bard before hardship found him. He sang of hearths that never grew cold and fields that always yielded, his improvised verses clearly painting Percy as the source of this bounty.

Percy shifted uncomfortably, a faint pink tinting his ears. “Yeah, okay, don’t get carried away. It’s just stew.” He pointed a stern finger at the man. “You’re staying put until you’ve got your strength back. Leodes, can we find him a corner to rest in?”

As the traveler was led away, still murmuring praises, the villagers exchanged knowing, proud looks. The stranger’s awe wasn’t the fearful kind they’d first shown Percy. It was the awe given to a true marvel—a force of nature that chose to build rather than break.

That night, as the fire crackled, the traveler, whose name was Phemius, told his tale of woe. Percy listened, but his mind was elsewhere.

The man’s song, his absolute conviction that Percy was some benevolent spirit, settled on him like a new weight. It was one thing for the villagers, who had seen him work and sweat, to accept him. It was another for a complete outsider to take one look and see a legend.

It meant the rumor of him was spreading. The story of the strange, powerful youth by the sea who fed the hungry and taught the young. The story of a new kind of power.

He looked up at the star-dusted sky, so much brighter here without city lights. Somewhere out there, gods were listening. Ares would hear of a warrior who inspired loyalty through stew and spear lessons. Apollo would hear of a mortal whose mere presence inspired spontaneous songs of praise.

His rhythm in the village was peaceful, but it was also a drumbeat, echoing further and further out into the world, calling attention he wasn’t sure he wanted.

Percy poked the fire with a stick, sending up a shower of sparks. Let them listen. Let them come. He had a village to look after, nets to mend, and, as of tomorrow, a very enthusiastic former bard to help find a new trade.

He was Percy Jackson. And he was done being a prize. If the gods wanted to find him, they’d have to get in line behind the breakfast shift.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 3: Proud Cooking

 

The rhythm of the village had a new, unexpected thread woven through it: Phemius, the traveler-turned-bard. The man had sworn a vow of service to his "blessed savior," and no amount of grumbling from Percy could dissuade him. He couldn't fight or fish, but he could carve. Soon, the children had proper wooden practice swords, smoother and better-balanced than their old sticks. He carved bowls and spoons, and even started a simple flute for one of the little girls. Percy had to admit, it was useful.

Three days after Phemius’s arrival, Percy was at the rocky cove where the village harvested mussels. He was alone, prying the blue-black shells from the stone with a practiced twist of his knife, the crash of the surf a comforting roar. It was one of the few places he could just be, without being watched.

A sudden, profound stillness fell. The waves didn't recede; they simply froze mid-crash, like a sculpted emerald curtain. The roaring silence was deafening. The air grew heavy with the scent of deep ocean trenches, brine, and power.

Percy straightened up slowly, his knife held loosely at his side. He didn't need to turn around. The presence behind him was as vast and familiar as the sea itself, but ancient, untamed in a way his future father never was.

"An interesting rumor drifts on the currents to my halls," a voice spoke, resonating not in the air but in the water of Percy's own blood. "A son of mine, they say. A blessing to a forgotten village. Yet I have no memory of your mother, and I know all my children."

Percy turned.

Poseidon stood on the water's surface as if it were polished marble. Not the comfortable, salt-and-pepper-bearded fisherman Percy knew, but a god in his prime. His hair was a wild, dark mane like a storm cloud, his beard threaded with seashells and bits of coral. He wore a simple, draped garment that seemed woven from shifting kelp and seawater. His eyes were the colour of a hurricane-racked sea, and they studied Percy with intense, unnerving curiosity.

The god’s gaze traveled over him, from his windswept hair to his calloused hands. A frown touched his lips. "You bear my mark," he mused, his eyes lingering on Percy's trident scar. "You command my domain with an ease that speaks of deep heritage. And you are... divinely favoured in form. Yet you are a stranger to me. How is this?"

Percy's heart hammered against his ribs. This was it. The moment it all fell apart. But years of facing down immortals with more ego than sense had forged a particular reflex: when in doubt, deploy sass.

He shrugged, trying to look nonchalant as he wiped his knife on his tunic. "Maybe you should get a better filing system for your kids' pictures. Just a suggestion from the one currently covered in mussel goo."

For a long, tense moment, Poseidon just stared. The frozen waves trembled. Then, a sound like the sudden crash of a wave against a cliff erupted from him. He threw his head back and laughed, a booming, joyous noise that made the very pebbles on the beach shiver.

"A filing system!" Poseidon boomed, mirth dancing in his chaotic eyes. "Impudent. Audacious." He wiped a tear of saltwater from his cheek, his gaze now holding a spark of genuine amusement. "They also say your tongue is as sharp as that knife. And that you wield a ladle with equal skill. Tell me, are the tales of your food as miraculous as they claim?"

Percy blinked, thrown off balance. Of all the questions... "Uh. I don't know? It's just food. You take what you have and make it not taste like disappointment."

Poseidon's grin was sharp, reminiscent of a great white shark's. "A humble demigod. A novelty. We shall see. The village sings your praises to the gulls. Do not disappoint them—or me."

With that, the god dissolved into a shower of sea spray and mist. The frozen waves crashed forward with a roar, the world's sound rushing back in. Percy stood alone, soaked and sputtering, clutching his mussels.

"Just once," he muttered to the retreating tide, "I'd like a parental visit that doesn't involve cryptic threats about seasoning."

The day passed in a blur of heightened awareness. Every gust of wind felt like a divine sigh. When he seasoned the evening stew, he found himself second-guessing the amount of thyme. Was it miraculous enough? The pressure was absurd.

That night, exhausted, he retreated to his corner of Leodes' hut. A small oil lamp cast a warm, flickering glow. He had just pulled his blanket over his shoulders when the scent of storm and deep ocean filled the small space.

Poseidon was there, leaning against the wall of sun-dried clay as if it were a pillar of his palace. He looked more solid now, less like a force of nature and more like an imposing, terribly interested uncle.

"You are awake," the god stated, his voice a low rumble.

"You're in my bedroom," Percy pointed out, sitting up. "Kind of creepy, not gonna lie."

Poseidon ignored the jab. His eyes gleamed in the lamplight. "I find myself... curious. The mortals speak of your food with a reverence usually reserved for ambrosia. I have sampled the feast of countless kings. Show me this 'not-disappointment.'"

Percy stared. "You want me to cook for you. Now."

"I am here."

Resigned, Percy sighed the sigh of all long-suffering children everywhere. He got up, padded to the small hearth where embers still glowed, and blew them to life. The villagers had, in their gratitude, started leaving little offerings for him—a bowl of olives here, a wedge of cheese there. He rummaged through his small stash.

He worked in silence, Poseidon's heavy gaze on his back. It wasn't a grand meal. He sliced the last of the day's bread and toasted it over the coals until it was crisp. He crushed a clove of wild garlic with salt and mixed it with olive oil, brushing it over the warm bread. He sliced the salty goat cheese thin, seared a small fillet of the morning's catch quickly in a hot pan with a sprig of rosemary, and arranged it all on a simple wooden platter. The final touch was a handful of the olives and a few dried figs. It was simple, rustic, and made in under ten minutes.

He shoved the platter toward the god. "Here. Don't get used to it."

Poseidon took the platter. He ate with a deliberate slowness, his expression unreadable. He ate the garlic bread, the seared fish, the cheese, the olives, one by one. He finished the last fig and set the platter down.

For a long moment, he said nothing. Then he looked at Percy, and the smug, proud expression on his face was so achingly familiar it made Percy's chest tighten.

"A miracle," Poseidon declared, his voice soft with wonder. "Not of ingredients, but of essence. You take the humble bounty of my sea and my earth and you... you honour it. You transform necessity into a gift. This is a power I have never seen. A different kind of creation."

He stood, looming in the small hut. "My brothers scoff, saying I sire only monsters and tempests." A fierce, possessive pride shone in his eyes. "But you... with a fisherman's knife and a hearth ember, you perform a quiet magic that disarms kings and soothes the Furies themselves." He reached out and clasped Percy's shoulder, his grip like the deep ocean's pressure, solid and inescapable. "Any god—nay, any being in all the realms—would be proud to call you their get."

Percy felt his face grow hot. He wasn't used to this kind of praise, especially not from this primordial version of his dad. He ducked his head, mumbling, "It's just dinner, Dad."

Poseidon's laugh was a quiet rumble. He leaned in, his stormy eyes glinting with mischievous, ancient humour. "With skills like these," he said, his tone light but unmistakable, "you could make a fine wife for a fortunate deity. A thought to consider."

Then, he was gone, leaving behind the scent of salt and a single, perfect seashell on the empty platter.

Percy stood frozen in the flickering lamplight, his entire face burning crimson. His brain short-circuited, caught between profound embarrassment, a strange swell of filial pride, and utter outrage.

"WIFE?!" he finally hissed into the empty hut, his voice a strangled whisper. "I saved the world! I fought Titans! I—I control hurricanes! And he's over here drafting my dowry?!"

He flopped back onto his pallet, yanking the blanket over his head, as if he could hide from the absurdity. But under the embarrassment, a tiny, warm ember glowed. His father, the Earthshaker, was proud of him. Not for his battle prowess, but for his garlic bread.

Outside, the sea chuckled against the shore, a sound of deep, divine amusement. The game, for the Lord of the Seas, had become profoundly entertaining. And he was not the only player now taking a very serious interest in the board.

~~~

The village of Krokyleia had always known peace, but it had been a quiet peace, hard-won and edged with the ever-present fear of bandits, bad harvests, and the whims of distant gods. Now, they knew a different peace—a vibrant, secure, and strangely musical one. And at the center of it all was Percy.

To Leodes, the elder, Percy was a blessed paradox. He had the power to shatter cliffs with a thought, yet he spent his mornings patiently untangling a child’s knotted fishing line. He commanded the sea like a king, yet he took direction from old Elpis on how she preferred her herbs chopped.

"He is a gift not of conquest, but of care," Leodes would murmur to the other elders as they watched Percy from the shade of the communal fig tree. "The Earthshaker did not send us a weapon. He sent us a hearth-keeper with the strength of a typhoon."

To the children, especially Lysandros and little Agape, Percy was the Sun that played. He wasn't a distant, shiny god to be feared. He was the brother who let you hang off his arm in a test of strength, who turned spear drills into hilarious games of tag, who drew letters in the dirt with a focused frown before breaking into a grin when you got it right. His laughter was their favorite sound, and the surety in his green eyes made them believe no monster under the bed stood a chance.

To the adults—the fishermen, the weavers, the builders—Percy was the tide that raised all boats. His presence meant full nets, mended roofs, and a sense of safety so profound it felt like a physical warmth. They didn't worship him; they relied on him, trusted him in a way they’d never trusted anything except the sunrise. When he worked alongside them, hauling a boat onto the sand or hefting a roof beam, there was no deity and mortal. There was just shared effort and mutual respect.

But it was among the young men and women of the village that a particular, hushed fascination hummed. It was a topic discussed in whispers by the well at dusk, in giggles shared while spinning wool.

He was, quite simply, the most beautiful being any of them had ever seen.

It wasn't the polished, statue-like beauty of the gods in the tales. It was a living, breathing, disarming beauty. It was in the way his sea-green eyes crinkled when he laughed, holding a universe of mischief and kindness. It was the effortless grace of his movements, whether wielding a practice sword or flipping a fish in a pan—a lean, powerful strength that promised both protection and passion. It was the unruly black hair that always looked windswept, as if he’d just stepped off a thrilling adventure. His smile was a reward, his focused frown a captivating mystery.

“He moves like the sea itself,” sighed Daphne, the potter’s daughter, as she watched him demonstrate a disarming move to Lysandros, his tunic pulling taut across his shoulders.

“And his voice,” breathed Nikias, a young fisherman who had found himself staring more often than was perhaps wise. “When he is not being sarcastic, it is like… like dark honey and deep water. And when he sang that once…” He shivered, not from fear, but from the remembered, exquisite ache of it.

They had all heard Phemius’s new song, the one that spread like wildfire:

“The Blessed One of the Salt and Hearth, whose hands mend wounds and bring forth worth. With storm’s own grace and mercy mild, he looks upon us and he smiles.”

It was this combination—the devastating beauty, the immense power, and the profound, gentle kindness—that sparked a universal, whispered hope in Krokyleia’s heart.

Surely, the whispers went, such a being was meant for love. And such love could not be contained by one.

“He would need a companion worthy of that spirit,” old Elpis would say, not unkindly, while kneading dough. “A strong heart to match his.”

“Or several,” young Daphne would whisper later to her friends, her cheeks flushed. “To appreciate all the facets of him. A warrior to admire his strength, a bard to capture his spirit, a cook to share his hearth… How could one person hold all of that?”

The idea wasn't born of lust, but of a kind of awed, pragmatic reverence. He was so far beyond them, so clearly more, that the logic of mortals stumbled. If one precious artifact was a blessing, a temple full was a sanctuary. To them, Percy was a walking sanctuary. The concept of a singular, exclusive romance seemed almost… miserly for a being of his generosity.

They had, of course, heard him. When playful teasing from a bold young woman named Callidora had ventured too close to flirtation, Percy had gently, firmly shut it down with a kind but unmissable finality.

“My heart’s a little busy,” he’d said, his gaze drifting for a moment to the distant, endless sea, a shadow of an unimaginable homesickness in his eyes. “And my hands are full with all of you lot. No romance for me, thanks. Too complicated.”

He’d said it with a smile, but the message was clear as spring water. The village had respected it immediately. Their hopes were not expectations; they were daydreams, harmless and heartfelt, like wishing for an extra-long summer.

They saw how he softened when teaching the children, how his eyes lit with true joy when a new recipe worked. They saw the sheer, breathtaking capacity for love in him, in every repaired net and every shared meal. It seemed a cosmic waste for such a heart to remain unattended.

So they dreamed their quiet dreams. They hoped that someday, perhaps, a love—or loves—mighty enough and vast enough would find their way to their Blessed One’s shore. Someone who could make that distant look in his eyes fade, someone who could match the vast ocean of his spirit, and give back a fraction of the warmth he poured so freely into their small, pebbled beach of a world.

Until then, they would simply love him as they could: with loyalty, with laughter, and with an endless supply of olives for his next simple, miraculous meal.

 

 

 

 

Chapter 4: Poseidon’s verdict

Notes:

Heyaaaaa. How’s everyone? I hope y’all are doing good. Tell me how you feel about this.

The halls of Poseidon’s palace were never silent. There was always the groan of tectonic plates settling, the chorus of whalesong from the abyssal plains, the ceaseless swirl of currents against coral columns. But today, the Lord of the Seas heard none of it. His entire being was focused on a single, brilliant, and terrifying point of light in the mortal world.

From his throne of living pearl and basalt, Poseidon gazed into a shifting scrying pool. Not with water, but with intention. The image was clear: his son. Percy.

The boy—no, the young man—was repairing a stone wall at the edge of the village, his movements efficient and strong. A human child, Lysandros, chattered at his side, handing him rocks. Percy said something, and the boy laughed, the sound a bright, mortal bell against the deep drone of Poseidon’s own realm.

His son.

The words echoed in Poseidon’s divine consciousness, a truth that was both an absolute joy and a profound mystery. Percy was undeniably his. The mark, the power, the very salinity of his blood sang to the deep. Yet, he was an enigma. No mother Poseidon could recall. A past shrouded in a mist even he could not pierce. And a future that shimmered with terrifying potential.

Poseidon watched as Percy, finished with the wall, wiped his hands on his tunic and accepted a cup of water from an old woman. His thanks were genuine, his smile easy. There was no arrogance in him, no divine posturing. He moved among them not as a god, but as a particularly capable neighbor. It was this, perhaps, that was most disconcerting.

For Poseidon could see the power in him.

It wasn’t just the mastery over water, which was instinctive and deep as a trench. It was the aura that clung to him—a magnetism that was part siren’s call, part heroic arete, and something else entirely new. It was the echo of that truth-song Percy had unleashed, a ripple of power that had vibrated the very fabric of the Moirai’s threads. Poseidon had felt it in his bones, a melody that could, if wielded with intent, unmake oaths and lay hearts bare before the throne of Zeus itself.

A cold tremor, ancient and unfamiliar, went through the god.

Usurpation.

The thought rose unbidden, and Poseidon did not dismiss it. He knew the scent of ambition. He had breathed it in the air of Olympus since Kronos was cast down. He saw it in Zeus’s wary eyes, in Athena’s calculating strategies. If this son of his, with his effortless power, his unnerving humility, and that soul-piercing song, ever grew weary of mortals and mending walls…

If he ever looked at the throne of heaven and found it wanting…

The seas would rise. The earth would crack. And Poseidon, God of Earthquakes, Lord of the Deep, knew with chilling certainty whose side he would be on.

Not out of paternal love alone, though that was a tempest newly born in his chest. But because Percy represented something raw and real that Olympus had forgotten. He was power without pomp. Strength that served. A sovereignty born not of dominion, but of care. To stand against him would be to stand against the tide itself—futile and ultimately destructive.

“He is mine,” Poseidon rumbled to the empty hall, the walls trembling in response. “My treasure. My most unexpected wonder.”

And he would protect him. The veil he had cast around that stretch of coast and the village of Krokyleia was not a simple mist. It was a geas woven from the primal depths, a barrier that whispered nothing to see here to the senses of gods and titans alike. It blurred Percy’s dazzling divine signature into the background noise of a thousand sea-washed rocks. Let Apollo chase faint echoes of song. Let Ares sniff at rumors of battle-joy. They would find only coastline and the simple prayers of fishermen.

But it was a temporary measure. A god’s direct, persistent gaze could eventually pierce it. Hera’s suspicion was a slow, poison-tipped vine. Zeus’s curiosity, once piqued, was a lightning bolt seeking a rod. They were already stirring. He could feel their subtle probes, like fingers testing the surface tension of his veil.

They would try to “see.” To assess. To judge.

A low growl emanated from Poseidon’s throne, a sound that sent eels burrowing into sand and caused nervous dolphins to leap. The thought of any of them—pompous Zeus, jealous Hera, even wise Athena—looking upon Percy and seeing a mere demigod, a fascinating pawn, a threat to be managed… it ignited a rage more profound than any he’d felt for centuries.

Beneath them. The insult was cosmic. His son, who could cook a meal that tasted of devotion and fight with the seasoned grace of a war-god’s dream, was worth more than all their shining arrogance combined. Percy had known war. Poseidon could see it in the way he scanned a horizon, in the economical violence of his movements when provoked, in the shadows that sometimes flickered behind his eyes when he thought no one was looking. He had seen and done things that would break lesser spirits. The thought filled Poseidon not with pride, but with a fierce, aching sorrow.

He did not want a warrior for a son. Not anymore. He had sired many of those, and their fates were written in tragedy and blood. He wanted this. The boy laughing with mortal children. The youth who seasoned a stew with a careful, focused frown. The unexpected miracle of his presence.

He wanted to bring him home. Not to this sunless palace, but to the warm, sun-dappled shallows of his private domains. To where Triton could be baffled by a brother who preferred mussels to politics, where Amphitrite could perhaps be won over by his honest eyes and startling culinary skill. He wanted Percy safe in the heart of his power, where no Olympian gaze could fall upon him without Poseidon’s knowledge and consent. He wanted to bask in the wonder of him, this son who was a mystery and a masterpiece.

But he knew, with the grim certainty of one who understands the nature of both storms and sons, that Percy would not come. Not yet. The boy was rooted in that village, bound by a loyalty so fierce it was itself a kind of power. To drag him away would be to break the very thing that made him shine.

So Poseidon would wait. And guard. The veil would hold. Let the others scheme on their mountain. His son was under the sea’s protection. Every whisper of wave on that particular shore was his ears. Every crab in the cove was his sentinel.

He watched as Percy, now surrounded by the village for the evening meal, told a story, his hands painting pictures in the air. The mortals were enthralled, their faces bathed in firelight and adoration.

A profound, possessive tenderness swelled in the god’s chest, vast as the ocean floor. Let them try. Let any power in heaven, earth, or the abyss below try to take this from him, try to harm a single hair on his son’s head.

The seas would rise. The earth would shatter.

And the Earthshaker would remind them why some treasures are best left undisturbed in the deep.

~~~

The air on Olympus was thin, perfumed with ambrosia and the cold scent of eternity. Sunlight, forever at a perfect golden hour, glinted off marble colonnades and gilded roofs. In the grand megaron, where the Olympians convened, the usual tableau of divine ennui was broken by a current of something novel: a shared, prickling curiosity.

Zeus leaned back on his throne of storm-cloud and platinum, a bolt of masterfully contained lightning crackling idly in his palm. His brow was furrowed, not with anger, but with the irritation of an incomplete puzzle. "A son of Poseidon," he rumbled, the sound echoing like distant thunder. "A powerful one, by all accounts. And yet, he appears as if from the very foam, unknown and unheralded. My brother grows ever more secretive."

Hera, seated beside him with the rigid poise of a marble queen, let a thin, cold smile touch her lips. "Or careless. To sow such potent seed and forget the harvest? It reeks of a plot. This... Percy. A name without history. A power without provenance. It is an imbalance."

Athena, her grey eyes sharp as owl's talons, steepled her fingers. "The reports are contradictory, and thus, intriguing. He is said to fight with the instinctive, brutal grace of a natural force—Ares’s domain. He teaches letters and strategy to mortals—my own. He commands the sea with a familiarity that speaks of deep heritage—Poseidon’s, unquestionably. And now, there are whispers of a... vocal power. A song that compels not obedience, but truth. That touches no domain cleanly. It is an anomaly." Her tone was analytical, but a spark of intense interest lit her gaze. A new variable in the cosmic equation.

Apollo, lounging artfully against a pillar with his lyre silent for once, couldn't suppress a radiant grin. "Oh, but the song! Have you heard the whispers of it? They say it's not music as we know it. It's not my perfect, structured harmony. It's... raw emotion given sound. It's the crack in a heart, the sigh before a storm. I've caught only the faintest echo, like a melody heard through a thick fog, but it's thrilling." He plucked a single, yearning chord. "I must hear it clearly. I must know its source."

Artemis, standing apart with her hunters a silent, silver-clad backdrop, rolled her eyes. "A boy who sings and cooks and plays with mortal children. He sounds like a distraction. My woods are silent on him; he does not trespass on my domains. I see no threat, only another of my uncle's messy, noisy offspring."

"Plays with children?" Ares’s voice was a grind of stone on bronze. He leaned forward on his war-worn throne, his expression one of avid interest. "He shattered a band of seasoned raiders without drawing a blade. He didn't just defeat them; he broke their spirit with a look and a whisper. That is not 'playing.' That is the pure, potent essence of conflict—breaking an enemy's will is the highest victory. I don't care about his lullabies. I want to see this power in the heat of a real war. I want to taste the battle-joy rolling off him."

Dionysus, swirling a goblet of wine that darkened from violet to deep crimson, snorted. "Oh, please. He sounds dreadfully responsible. Mending nets? Teaching? He'd be a bore at a symposium. Probably water down the wine and lecture about hydration." But even his disinterest seemed performative; his eyes, deep and ancient, held a flicker of assessment. A being who compelled truth could be very inconvenient—or very entertaining.

Hermes, who had been zipping from one side of the hall to the other in a blur of motion, finally skidded to a halt. "The mortal gossip is fantastic," he reported, his cadence rapid-fire. "They call him 'the Blessed One,' 'the Keeper of the Hearth and Sea.' They say he makes food that tastes like a memory of home. They're half in love with him, and the other half want to build him a shrine next to the chicken coop. The interesting part? Poseidon has the whole area locked down tighter than Tartarus. There's a veil—a serious, deep-ocean-grade obscurement. My messages bounce right off. It's not just hiding the boy; it's screaming 'KEEP OUT' in the language of tidal forces."

A ripple of displeasure went through the council. A veil from Poseidon was not a simple concealment; it was a statement of sovereignty, a challenge.

"He hides him as one hides a treasure," Hera said icily. "Or a weapon."

"He fears our judgment," Zeus concluded, his grip tightening on the lightning bolt, making it sizzle.

"Or," Aphrodite purred, speaking for the first time from her couch of rose and dove feathers, a secret smile playing on her lips, "he fears our... appreciation." She examined the sheen of her nails. "A demigod of such perplexing allure? Powerful yet gentle, fierce yet kind? Wrapped in mortality yet shining with a light that makes mortals compose hymns and gods lean in to listen? That is not just power, darlings. That is charisma. That is the stuff of which legends that last are made. And love... well." Her smile deepened, enigmatic. "Love is the most disruptive force of all. Poseidon may be right to be afraid."

A thoughtful silence fell, broken only by the idle crackle of Zeus's bolt. The disregard some had voiced was paper-thin, undercut by a humming curiosity in the divine air. He was a novelty, a disruption in their eternal, static drama.

"He cannot remain veiled forever," Zeus declared, his voice final. "A power of this potential does not belong hidden in a fishing village. He will be brought to Olympus. He will be seen. And he will be... assessed."

The decree hung in the perfumed air. It was not a question of if, but when and how. Apollo's fingers itched for his lyre. Ares's blood thrummed with anticipation. Athena's mind spun with strategic permutations. Hera's eyes glittered with cold scrutiny.

On his sunless throne in the deep, Poseidon felt the shift in the celestial currents, a pressure building against his veil. He bared his teeth in a silent, submarine snarl.

The hunt was formally declared.

And in a village by the sea, utterly unaware that his name had just been uttered in the halls of heaven, Percy Jackson was teaching a little girl how to flip a flatbread without burning it, his laughter mingling with the woodsmoke, a simple, luminous soul in the gathering divine storm.

Chapter 5: A song for home

Notes:

Hey darlings, this chapter is from the gods POV.
Hope y’all like it

A month in Krokyleia had woven Percy into the village’s fabric as seamlessly as a thread in one of Elpis’s tapestries. He was their fixed point, their gentle storm, their miracle. But the villagers, who had learned to read the subtle tides of his moods, noticed a change.

The sass was still there, the ready smile for the children, the strong hands that never stopped working. But in quiet moments, when he thought no one was looking, Percy’s gaze would drift north and west, over the endless wine-dark sea, towards a horizon that held nothing but more water. A profound loneliness settled in his green eyes, a homesickness so deep it seemed to echo in the space around him, making the air itself feel wistful.

He missed his mom’s blue chocolate-chip cookies, the stale smell of the bus to school, the raucous noise of the campfire at Camp Half-Blood. He missed Annabeth’s stormy grey eyes and her impossible plans, Grover’s nervous bleating and his unwavering loyalty. He even missed the petty squabbles of the gods he knew—his dad’s grudging, modern-day affection, Dionysus’s perpetual annoyance. This ancient, brutal, beautiful world was not his. He was a sun-dial in a digital age, functioning but fundamentally misplaced.

The villagers saw the shadow in his light and ached for him. They tried to offer comfort in their ways—extra honey in his wine, the best cuts of fish, their quiet, steadfast company. But the sorrow was a knot they could not untie.

It was young Agape, only six, with eyes as big as moons, who finally gave it a voice. Climbing into his lap one evening as the community fire was lit, she tugged on his tunic. “Percy,” she whispered, the name now familiar on all their tongues. “Tell us a story from your home. A happy one.”

The request, so simple and earnest, struck him right in the heart. The villagers stilled, their faces soft with hope and sympathy in the flickering light.

Percy took a slow breath. “Okay, kiddo. A happy story.” He leaned back, Agape a warm weight against his chest, and began. He filtered carefully, turning Manhattan into a “great city of towering stone,” the Minotaur into a “bull-headed beast of terrible strength,” the Lotus Casino into a “palace of forgetful delights.”

But as he spoke, he wasn’t just narrating. He was remembering. He spoke of his mother, Sally Jackson, and her fierce, loving laugh. He described his friend Grover, a “satyr of great heart and clumsy hooves,” and their desperate flight to safety. He painted a picture of Camp Half-Blood—a “sanctuary for the lost,” where a grumpy wine-maker oversaw games of capture-the-flag that were literal wars, and a forge-god’s son fixed broken swords with a scowl and a hidden kindness.

The love in his voice was palpable, a tangible warmth that pushed back the night’s chill. The villagers listened, enchanted, seeing a whole new world in his words.

“And my other friend,” Percy said, a soft, private smile touching his lips as he thought of Annabeth. “She was… she is… the wisest person I’ve ever known. She saw a way through when all I saw were walls. She had hair like the sunlight on a wheat field and a mind that could out-plan the Fates themselves. We fought a lot,” he chuckled, the sound thick with affection. “But she always had my back. Always.”

The yearning swelled then, too big for words. It filled his chest, a tidal wave of loss and love for a time and people impossibly far away. The story faded. The words stopped.

And the song began.

It started as a hum, low and resonant in his chest, vibrating against Agape’s small back. Then it slipped past his lips, unbidden, a melody woven from longing. It was not the truth-song that compelled confession. This was the yearning-song.

It was the sound of a door closing for the last time. The taste of a favorite meal you can never have again. The echo of a laugh in an empty room. It was the sigh of the sea for the shore it can never truly leave, the cry of a bird for a nest a thousand miles gone. It was Percy’s soul, stripped bare and set to a tune of devastating beauty.

It floated on the smoke of the fire, twined with the sparks rising to the stars. It soaked into the earth of Krokyleia, and every villager felt their own private losses rise to the surface—not with pain, but with a sweet, aching catharsis. Old Leodes wept silently for a brother lost at sea decades ago. Elpis hummed along, thinking of her own mother. They were not compelled; they were joined. They shared his homesickness in a profound, silent communion.

And the song did not stop at the village borders.

It rode the night wind. It skimmed the waves. It climbed the very slopes of Olympus itself, piercing the eternal twilight of the divine realm as the gods sat at their evening feast.

---

On Olympus, the scene was one of decadent immortality. Nectar flowed. Ambrosia shifted shape to suit each god’s desire. Laughter and petty debates filled the air.

Then, the song reached them.

It washed over the feast like a sudden, cool tide.

Conversations died mid-sentence. Hands holding goblets froze. Zeus’s latest thunderous pronouncement hung unfinished in the suddenly still air.

Every god heard it. And every god felt it.

For a moment, there was only the haunting, mortal melody and the shared, shocking vulnerability it evoked.

Poseidon was the first to move. His golden goblet crumpled in his fist, seawater and nectar spilling over his fingers like tears. Pride, sharp and fierce, lanced through him—his son’s voice had silenced Olympus! But it was instantly drowned by a tsunami of dread. This was no controlled truth-song. This was an unconscious, soul-deep broadcast of the most powerful emotion in the universe: longing. No veil could hide this. The cat was not just out of the bag; it was singing an aria on the dinner table.

His eyes, storm-dark, swept the hall. He saw the shock, the fascination, the hunger on their faces. The secret was over.

Ares felt the song like a physical blow to the chest. It wasn’t about battle, yet it spoke of a loyalty worth dying for. It wasn’t about rage, yet it carried the weight of a pain so deep it forged unbreakable strength. He didn’t just hear the homesickness; he heard the heart of the warrior who endured it. A possessiveness, raw and primal, ignited in his gut. This one was not a brute to be wielded. This was a spirit to be conquered, a fierce loyalty to be won and owned. He wanted to be the reason that yearning stopped. He wanted to be the home that warrior returned to. The desire was a fire in his blood.

Apollo simply stopped breathing. His perfect, divine music was about order, beauty, and light. This… this was chaos and depth. It was the beautiful, terrible sound of a soul missing. It was art born of pure, unfiltered experience. It was the most exquisite thing he had ever heard. The lust it sparked in him was not merely physical (though the voice itself was an instrument of devastating allure). It was a creative lust, a possessive yearning to have that voice, that soul, as his ultimate muse. To duet with that raw power, to weave his own golden light with that deep blue longing—the thought was an obsession taking root. He would have the singer. He would claim that song and make it his own.

The other gods reeled.

Zeus’s brow was thunderous, but his eyes held a reluctant, stunned awe. Such power to evoke feeling in the immortal heart…

Hera listened, her face a mask, but her knuckles were white on her throne. This was no mere demigod. This was a disturbance.

Athena analyzed the song’s structure—there was none. It was pure emotional data, a vulnerability that was also a terrifying strength. The strategic implications were staggering.

Aphrodite let out a soft, shuddering gasp, a single tear of pure aesthetic and emotional pleasure tracing down her cheek. “Oh,” she breathed. “Oh, it’s true. It’s all true. That… that is the sound of a love that transcends time. Who does he miss like that?”

Hephaestus stopped tinkering with a tiny automaton. The song spoke of something broken and cherished—a feeling he understood all too well.

Even Artemis, who disdained the affairs of men, felt a strange pull in her immortal core, a recognition of a pure, steadfast heart.

The song faded, as gently as it had come, leaving a ringing silence in the heavenly hall that was louder than any noise.

Then, chaos of a different kind erupted.

“He is found!” Apollo declared, his voice vibrating with excitement, his lyre appearing in his hands as if by instinct.

“That,” Ares growled, standing up, his armor clinking, “is the sound of a soldier without a battalion. He needs a war. He needs a purpose.” His purpose, his eyes screamed.

“Enough!” Poseidon’s voice shook the foundations of the mountain, a real earthquake rumbling in the mortal world below. He rose, a towering figure of wrath and protective fury. “You heard nothing but a mortal’s fleeting dream! You will not touch him!”

But the command fell on deaf ears. The veil was shattered by the song itself. The curiosity had been transformed into a burning, possessive fascination.

Zeus regained his composure, his expression settling into one of imperial decision. “The time for hiding is past, brother. This… Percy… has announced himself to all Olympus. He will be summoned. We will look upon this son of yours who sings of other worlds and moves the hearts of gods.”

Poseidon met his brother’s gaze, a silent war raging between them. He saw Apollo’s artistic hunger, Ares’s possessive fire, the general, gleaming interest of the entire pantheon. His son was no longer his secret treasure. He was the prize of Olympus.

In the village, the last note of Percy’s song faded into the crackle of the fire. He blinked, as if waking from a dream, realizing what he had done. Agape was asleep in his arms, a peaceful smile on her face. The villagers looked at him with tear-streaked faces, not with awe, but with a shared, deep understanding.

He felt exposed. He felt seen in a way that had nothing to do with divinity.

And high above, two gods, one of war and one of light, stared down at the mortal world, their divine wills converging on a single, shining point on the coast. The hunt was over. The wooing was about to begin. And a storm was brewing that not even the Earthshaker might be able to calm.

———

The silence in the Olympian megaron was a fragile, brittle thing after Percy’s song faded. All eyes, gleaming with divine interest, suspicion, and hunger, were fixed on Poseidon. The Lord of the Seas stood before his brother’s throne, not as a supplicant, but as a defiant bulwark. The air crackled with the remnants of the song and the rising tide of divine pressure.

Zeus leaned forward, his expression a careful blend of brotherly ire and kingly command. “Explain yourself, brother. This… yearning that just caressed our very essence. This son you have secreted away like a pearl in a locked coffer. Who is he? What is he? And why have the Fates kept his thread hidden from us?”

Poseidon’s jaw was a line of granite. “He is my son,” he said, the words a low rumble of tectonic certainty. “That is all you need to know. His past is his own. His power is under my protection.”

Hera’s laugh was the sound of ice cracking. “Your protection? Or your ambition? A demigod who sings a lament that makes us pause? That is not a simple hero. That is a weapon. Or a catalyst.”

“He is no weapon!” Poseidon’s voice shook a column, sending a fine dust of marble sifting down. The possessive fury in his voice was palpable. “He is a boy. A young man. He mends fishing nets and teaches children their letters. He wants no throne, no war!”

Ares barked a laugh, stepping into the circle of confrontation. “A boy? A boy who breaks seasoned warriors with his eyes and a whisper? A boy whose homesickness feels like a spear to the gut? That is no simple boy, Uncle. That is a prize. A companion for the ages. I have felt his battle-spirit in the rumors. I would have him by my side.”

Apollo, unable to stay silent, swept forward, his lyre glowing. “His spirit is not for the battlefield alone! It is for the song! That voice… it is a new form of truth, a new kind of beauty. It is raw, it is real. He belongs with the Muses, with me! To cage such a voice in a village is a crime against creation itself.”

The competing claims—war and art, possession and inspiration—hung in the air, inflaming the tension. Poseidon saw the avarice in their eyes, the way they now saw Percy not as a potential threat, but as a coveted wonder. It terrified him more than their suspicion.

Athena, ever the strategist, spoke calmly. “Your defensiveness reveals his value, Uncle. You speak of nets and letters, yet you veil him with a power that could hide a Titan. What are his skills? His true nature? If he is as harmless as you claim, let us hear it from your own lips.”

It was a trap, and Poseidon knew it. But the combined pressure, the blatant desire from Ares and Apollo, and his own, overwhelming pride in his extraordinary son, created a volatile mix. The need to protect warred with the deep-seated godly urge to boast of one’s superior progeny.

“Harmless?” Poseidon scoffed, his chest swelling with paternal indignation. “You think my son is harmless? You, who value only cunning and thunder?” He took a step forward, his stormy eyes blazing. “Very well. You wish to know his skills? His value?”

He began to pace, each word a growing tide.

“He fights,” Poseidon stated, shooting a glare at Ares. “Not with the blind rage of a berserker, but with the grace of a hurricane—controlled, inevitable, devastating. He disarms and defeats without killing, a mercy you would not understand. He has known war, deeper and stranger than any you have witnessed. He bears its scars and its wisdom, not its cruelty.”

He turned to Apollo, his voice softening with a pride he could no longer contain. “He sings, yes. But he also cooks. He takes the humblest fare—a fish, a handful of grain, a wild herb—and transforms it into a feast that nourishes the soul as well as the body. It is a quiet magic, a creation that speaks of a heart that nurtures and heals.”

He faced the council, his voice rising to a roar that echoed in the vaulted ceiling. “He builds and he mends! He teaches mortal children not just to fight, but to read, to think, to be brave and kind! He commands loyalty not through fear, but through unwavering care! He is strength and gentleness woven together! He is a leader who serves, a power that protects!”

He stopped before Zeus, his final words dropping into a hushed, intense whisper that carried to every corner. “And if you have eyes beneath those thunderclouds, you have seen it. His form… it is not merely handsome. It is a divine artistry. The sea’s wildness and the hearth’s warmth made flesh. To look upon him is to see a new standard of beauty, one that disarms and commands in the same breath.”

A hushed, shocked silence followed the outburst. Poseidon had done exactly what he’d sworn not to do: he had laid Percy’s worth bare before the most covetous beings in existence.

Then, almost as if the final dam of his paternal pride had burst, he added, his tone shifting to one of fierce, challenging boasting, “And if any of you speak of claiming him, of wooing him, know this: his hand would be the greatest prize in any realm. A consort with the heart of a lion, the soul of a poet, the hands of a healer and a warrior? A spouse who could calm your fury with a word and inspire your people with a song? Who could stand beside you, not behind you? My son would be the best of husbands, a partner beyond any god or goddess’s wildest dreams. But he is not a bauble to be won. He chooses. And he would choose wisely.”

The statement hung in the air, shocking in its implication. Poseidon wasn’t just protecting a son; he was advertising his unparalleled suitability as a divine consort.

Aphrodite let out a delighted, breathy sigh, her eyes sparkling. “Oh, Poseidon… you have painted the most irresistible portrait.”

Ares and Apollo, far from being deterred, looked at each other, and for a fleeting second, a spark of understanding passed between them—a recognition of a worthy rival. The challenge had been issued by the father himself. The prize was not just a powerful demigod or a beautiful muse. It was, as Poseidon had so foolishly, proudly declared, the potential for the greatest partnership in eternity.

Zeus stroked his beard, all earlier ire replaced by a calculating, intrigued light. “A paragon, you say. A demigod who embodies the virtues of half our pantheon. Such a being cannot remain in a fishing village. He belongs where he can be… appreciated. Observed.”

Poseidon’s triumphant pride curdled instantly into cold, hard fear. He had played right into their hands. In his desire to proclaim Percy’s worth, to shield him from being seen as ‘less than,’ he had instead painted the brightest target imaginable on his back.

“He is mine,” Poseidon growled, the last bastion of his defense.

“He is Olympus’s concern now,” Zeus decreed, his voice final. “We will meet this paragon. We will… assess this value for ourselves.”

As the council began to buzz with plans and speculation, Poseidon stood rigid, a tempest contained in a god’s form. He had sought to protect his treasure by building a wall. Instead, in a fit of pride, he had crafted the most exquisite display case, and now every collector in the universe wanted to smash the glass and take what was inside.

———

The air in the throne room was thick with tension, a palpable hum of divine will pressing against Poseidon’s defiance. Athena’s request had been a quiet blade, slicing through the posturing.

“Words are but wind and foam, Uncle,” she said, her grey eyes cool and unrelenting. “You paint a portrait with boasts. Let us see the canvas itself. Show us this paragon. Let Olympus judge the truth of your… admiration.”

Poseidon’s teeth ground together. To refuse would be seen as confirmation of a lie or a weakness. To agree felt like the ultimate betrayal. Ares was leaning forward, a hunter scenting blood. Apollo’s fingers were poised over his lyre strings, poised to capture an image in sound the moment he saw it. Even Hera watched with icy, analytical interest.

“You have no right,” Poseidon growled, the sea’s fury in his voice.

“We have every right,” Zeus intoned, the final arbiter. “He has touched us with his power. He is a matter for the pantheon. Show us the son you claim is beyond compare.”

The pressure was a tsunami against his will. To continue to hide now, after his own boasting, would only guarantee they descended upon the village in force, a terrifying divine stampede. A controlled reveal, on his terms… perhaps it could still be managed. Perhaps seeing Percy in his simplicity would dampen their fever.

With a sound like a distant, reluctant wave crashing, Poseidon relented. He raised a hand, fingers splaying. From the air itself, from the moisture in the breath of the gods, from the very essence of his domain, water coalesced. It shimmered, flattened, and resolved not into a simple scrying pool, but into a clear, panoramic window hanging in the center of the megaron, as vivid as life.

The image focused on the sun-drenched cove of Krokyleia.

And there he was.

Percy.

He stood knee-deep in the shimmering surf, helping a group of fishermen haul a new, half-built wooden boat skeleton into position. He had stripped off his tunic, which lay discarded on a dry rock. The afternoon sun, Apollo’s own light, gilded him as if claiming him already.

The gods saw, and for a moment, the very machinery of Olympus seemed to pause.

He was sculpted not by a chisel, but by conflict and care. His shoulders were broad, the muscles of his back and arms flowing with a powerful, liquid grace as he strained against the weight of the wood. His skin was sun-kissed olive, gleaming with seawater and effort. Water droplets traced paths down the profound, defined planes of his bare chest, catching in the faint dusting of dark hair, before sliding over the hard ridges of his abdomen.

The narrow taper of his hips led to powerful thighs, corded with strength that spoke of running, fighting, surviving. He was lean, but there was no fragility in it; it was the leanness of a shark or a storm-wind, all potent, coiled energy.

But it was his face that truly stole the breath from the divine hall.

He was laughing at something a fisherman said, his head thrown back. His features were a breathtaking harmony of strength and beauty. The jaw was strong, but the lips were surprisingly full, curved in a smile of genuine, unguarded joy. His nose was straight, perhaps once broken and stubbornly reset. And his eyes… even through the water-image, they shone a startling, sea-green, lit from within by a brilliant, magnetic mischief. It was the look of someone who knew the world was ridiculous and dangerous and loved it anyway. Sunlight caught in his tousled, ink-black hair, wind-tangled and wild, a crown of chaos.

Then, they saw the power.

As the fishermen struggled to brace the boat against the incoming swell, Percy didn’t shout or gesture. He simply glanced at the water. The wave that should have crashed into them, soaking the wood and knocking them off balance, simply parted. It smoothed into a gentle, supportive swell that lifted the boat hull perfectly into place before receding as calmly as a breath. He wielded the sea with a thought, an effortless, unconscious sovereignty that was more awe-inspiring than any thunderclap.

He was a living contradiction: a being of immense, untamed power performing a humble act of community with joyful ease. The sweat, the sun, the sea, the strength, the smile—it was an utterly disarming, devastatingly alluring combination.

The reaction in the throne room was instantaneous and profound.

Ares felt a jolt go through him, sharp as a spearpoint. This was no painted vase hero. This was vitality incarnate. The play of muscle under sun-drenched skin, the effortless power, the confident joy—it was a different kind of warfare, a seduction of the senses. His possessiveness morphed into a raw, visceral want. He didn’t just want the warrior; he wanted the man laughing in the surf. The desire to have that strength under him, that loyalty focused solely on him, became a pounding need.

Apollo’s lyre slipped from his numb fingers, clattering to the marble floor unheard. His artistic soul was simultaneously ravished and ignited. Percy was a living masterpiece more dynamic than any statue, a symphony more moving than any he’d composed. The play of light on his skin was a song; his easy laugh was a melody Apollo ached to harmonize with. The possessiveness that seized him was an all-consuming fire. He must have him, not just to hear him sing, but to be the subject of his smile, to capture that light and call it his own.

But it did not stop with them.

Zeus’s eyebrows rose, his earlier calculation replaced by frank, stunned appreciation. Here was a demigod whose very presence commanded a room, even a room of gods.

Hera’s lips pursed, not in disapproval, but in reassessment. This was no clumsy, provocative hero. This was… something else. A threat of a more subtle, dangerous kind.

Aphrodite let out a soft, shuddering moan of pure aesthetic and romantic ecstasy. “The form… the spirit… the ease,” she whispered. “He is Eros and Ares and Apollo blended into one breathtaking mortal shell. No wonder my uncle is frantic.”

Hephaestus grunted, appreciating the functional, powerful build—a body that was a perfect tool, beautifully maintained.

Even Artemis, for a fleeting second, saw not a man, but a force of nature as primal and worthy of respect as one of her sacred beasts—beautiful, powerful, and utterly itself.

Dionysus actually stopped swirling his wine. “Well,” he muttered, a flicker of interest in his weary eyes. “He certainly doesn’t look like he’d water down the wine.”

Athena was silent, her mind racing. The intelligence in those green eyes was unmistakable, the strategic use of power, effortless. He was a puzzle with infinite, fascinating solutions.

Poseidon watched their faces, and his heart sank like a stone in a deep trench. His pride was there, burning fiercely—see? See what I have made?—but it was drowned in the cold, terrifying knowledge. He had not quelled their interest. He had poured nectar on a fire.

Ares broke the silence, his voice a husky growl that held no mockery, only stark desire. “Mine.”

Apollo recovered, snatching his lyre from the floor. His voice was not its usual golden cadence, but thrummed with intense fervor. “You have no claim, Brother. That beauty, that song… he is the muse I have waited eons for. He belongs to the light, to creation.”

Other mutterings began, a low hum of covetousness that filled the hall.

Poseidon slashed his hand through the air. The water-window exploded into a mist that vanished instantly, leaving only the memory of the sun-kissed demigod imprinted on every divine retina.

“ENOUGH!” he roared, the palace trembling. “You have seen. He is not a prize to be squabbled over! He is a person. My son. You will keep your distance.”

But his command rang hollow. The genie was out of the bottle. The image of Percy Jackson—powerful, beautiful, joyful, and profound—was seared into the consciousness of Olympus.

Ares and Apollo exchanged a look that was no longer just rivalry, but a mutual, grim understanding. The contest was officially begun. The object of their desire was now vividly, undeniably real. And both knew they would move heaven and earth to claim him.

Poseidon turned and strode from the hall, his rage a cold, building storm cloud trailing behind him. He had to reach Percy first. The wolves were not just at the door. They had seen the lamb, and they had found him to be a lion. And now, they were desperate to tame him.

Chapter 6: Hera tries to kill me but fail

Percy felt good. The kind of good that came from honest work, salt-crusted skin, and the easy rhythm of Krokyleia. The boat was taking shape, a skeletal promise of future catches. The admiration in the villagers’ eyes had settled into something warm and familiar, not the overwhelming awe of his first days. He had found a pocket of peace in this impossible time.

He was showing young Nikias how to properly seal a hull seam with pitch, the boy watching his hands with intense focus. “See, you don’t just slap it on. You coax it in. Like… like convincing a wave not to crash.”

Nikias nodded solemnly, as if Percy had just revealed a mystery of the cosmos.

That’s when the first tremor hit.

It was a subtle shiver, a deep groan from the bones of the world. The water in the cove didn’t just ripple; it vibrated, humming a dissonant note that set Percy’s teeth on edge. The villagers froze, tools slipping from their hands, their eyes wide with a fear older than any bandit. This was not mortal trouble.

The earth heaved. A great fissure tore open at the tree line, spewing dust and the smell of ancient, rotten soil. From the wound in the world, it emerged.

It was a Teumessian Vrox, a monster so rare it was nearly myth even in Percy’s time. It had the body of a colossal, emaciated lion, but its pelt was not fur—it was shifting, jagged shale, grinding together with each movement. Its tail was a spiked chain of granite links, whipping and cracking the air. Its face was a nightmare parody of a lion’s, with glowing magma for eyes and a maw that dripped not saliva, but steaming, corrosive earth-blood. It was a creature of pure, seismic malice.

“Back to the village! Now!” Percy’s voice cut through the paralyzing terror. He didn’t shout. It was a command, cold and clear as winter tide. He shoved Nikias towards the others, his eyes never leaving the monster.

The Vrox saw him. Its magma eyes fixed on the demigod standing alone before the sea. It roared, and the sound was the crack of continents splitting. It charged, each footfall causing the ground to buck and shudder, sending villagers sprawling.

Percy didn’t draw Riptide. This thing was too big, too much of the earth. Water was his ally, but the sea was yards away. He needed a different strategy.

He ran. Not away, but parallel to the shore, leading the monster away from the fleeing villagers. The Vrox pivoted, its stone claws tearing great furrows in the earth. It lunged, a landslide given hunger.

Percy dove, the spike-tail whistling over his head. He rolled to his feet, and for the first time, he reached for the sea with more than a gentle request. He yanked.

A wall of water, twenty feet high, ripped itself from the cove and slammed into the Vrox’s side. The force would have pulverized a mountain, but the monster, born of the deep earth, only staggered, the shale of its body shedding water with a sound like collapsing cliffs.

It was furious now. It belched a stream of molten earth-blood. Percy dodged, the liquid stone sizzling where it hit the sand, turning it to glass. The heat was immense, searing the air.

Panic tried to rise. He was outmatched. This wasn’t a minotaur or an empousa. This was a force of nature.

Then, a strange calm descended. The same calm that had settled over him in the depths of Tartarus, in the heart of countless battles. Think like the water. Adapt. Find the weakness.

The Vrox was earth. Its blood was fire. Its eyes were magma.

Water. But not to smash. To cool.

As the monster prepared another belch of liquid stone, Percy didn’t summon a wave. He focused on the seawater soaking the beast’s rocky pelt, on the humidity in the scorched air. He focused on the concept of abrupt, absolute cold.

He sang.

It wasn’t the yearning song or the truth song. It was a single, sharp, piercing note—the sound of the deepest ocean trench, of pressure that turned water to ice in an instant, of a winter that stops a heart.

The note hit the steaming Vrox. The seawater on its body didn’t just freeze; it shattered the shale plates with explosive force. The magma in its eyes and maw met that focused cryogenic will.

CRACK.

A sound like a glacier calving. The monster’s roar cut off into a choked, grinding gurgle. The molten light in its eyes winked out, replaced by dull, black obsidian. Its maw, still open in fury, was now a cavern of rapidly cooling, cracking rock. The heat died, replaced by a wave of frigid air that rolled off the petrifying beast.

The Vrox took one final, shuddering step, its granite tail falling limp. Then it stopped, a grotesque, magnificent statue of stone and frozen fury, steaming gently in the sun.

Silence, broken only by the gasp of the sea and the ragged breaths of the watching villagers.

Percy stood panting, his hands trembling slightly from the effort. He was covered in dust and seawater. The sight was terrifying—the colossal, now-dead monster. But it was also, in a stark and brutal way, beautiful. The symmetry of its final, petrified rage, the contrast of warm sun on cold stone, the sheer, audacious fact of its ending. He had turned a volcano into a cairn.

He felt no triumph. Only a weary, hollow dread. This was not a random encounter. This was a message. A very expensive, very deadly message. Someone had sent this.

---

On Olympus, the scene was one of stunned silence, quickly shattered.

They had watched the entire encounter through various means—scrying pools, far-sight, the vibrations in the divine ether.

Hera’s face was a mask of cold fury. Her gambit had failed. Worse, it had backfired spectacularly.

A sudden, booming laugh erupted from Ares. “HA! Did you see that? He didn’t just fight it! He out-thought it! He sang it a lullaby and put it to sleep—permanently! A lion of stone! That’s not just power, that’s artistry in destruction!” His admiration was feverish, his desire now laced with a warrior’s ultimate respect.

Apollo was staring, his usual golden composure utterly shattered. “The note… did you hear the note? It was the perfect counterpoint! Not a song of creation, but of cessation! A melody of absolute zero! It was… it was devastatingly brilliant!” The creative lust in his eyes was now a burning inferno. To have that voice, that mind, that could devise such a solution…

“You sent a Teumessian Vrox, Hera?” Dionysus drawled, shaking his head with a smirk. “To kill a kid who cooks fish stew? That’s like using a typhoon to blow out a candle. Overkill, much? And he turned your typhoon into an ice sculpture. Bad form.”

Even Zeus looked at his wife with a mixture of reproach and dawning, uncomfortable realization. “You sought to kill a demigod who has done nothing but help mortals and sing of missing his mother? Because he garners… attention?” The pettiness of it, contrasted with the breathtaking display of power and courage they had just witnessed, made her actions seem small and vile.

Athena was nodding slowly, a spark of genuine, unadulterated appreciation in her eyes. “A flawless tactical response. He used the monster’s own nature against it. Hydro-thermal shock on a geologic scale. Inspired.”

Hera stood, her dignity in tatters, surrounded by the laughter and scorn of her family. “He is a disruption! An unknown! He must be—”

“He must be met,” Ares interrupted, his voice leaving no room for argument. He shot a look at Apollo, a fierce, competitive understanding passing between them. The time for watching was over. Hera’s clumsy attack had proven Percy wasn’t just a pretty face with a nice voice. He was a survivor, a thinker, a force to be reckoned with. And that made him infinitely more desirable.

“Indeed,” Apollo said, his voice regaining its musicality, but now edged with a possessive determination. “It is clear he is not safe from… misguided threats,” he added, with a pointed glance at Hera. “He requires proper appreciation. Proper guardianship.”

Zeus, seeing the direction of the wind, sighed. “Enough. Hera, your actions were unbecoming. The matter of this demigod will be dealt with, but not through assassination.” He looked at his two most obviously captivated sons. “If you are so… eager to make his acquaintance, you may do so. But with discretion. We do not need a war with Poseidon because you two cannot mind your manners.”

It was all the permission they needed. As the council broke into chatter, dissecting Percy’s every move, Ares and Apollo shared one last look before turning away, minds already racing with plans for a suitably dramatic, impressive introduction to the remarkable son of Poseidon.

In the cove, Percy placed a hand on the cold, dead stone of the Vrox. “Who sent you?” he whispered. But the monster was just rock now.

He looked up at the perfectly blue, indifferent sky, a chill that had nothing to do with his powers settling in his gut. The peace was over. The message was received.

Someone on Olympus wanted him dead. And from the feeling of unseen eyes suddenly pressing upon him with new, intense focus, he had a terrible feeling others had just decided they very much wanted him alive.

———

 

The hearth-fire in Leodes’ hut crackled, casting dancing shadows on the walls. Percy was focused on the pot before him, a rich fish broth simmering with leeks and wild thyme. Cooking had become his meditation, the one act that felt entirely his in this strange world. He was seasoning it with a critical frown, trying to block out the memory of the petrified monster looming on the beach like a grotesque monument.

The air in the hut grew heavy, thick with the scent of deep ocean trenches and ozone. The hairs on the back of Percy’s neck stood up.

“We need to talk.”

Percy didn’t jump. He just sighed, a long-suffering sound, and gave the broth one more stir before turning. Poseidon stood in the small space, looking even more massive and out of place. His stormy eyes were serious, etched with a paternal concern that was new.

“Let me guess,” Percy said, wiping his hands on a cloth. “Family drama. Upstairs style.”

Poseidon’s brow furrowed. “The attack today was not random. It was sent.”

“Duh,” Percy said, turning back to his pot to grab a wooden spoon for a taste test. “A Teumessian Rock-Lion doesn’t just pop out for a seaside stroll. Had Hera written all over it. Smelled like jealousy and bad decisions.”

Poseidon stared, momentarily thrown. His son’s casual, accurate deduction, the utter lack of fear or surprise, was disorienting. “You… know of Hera’s nature?”

Percy snorted, blowing on a spoonful of broth. “Lady’s got a few screws loose when it comes to her husband’s side projects. Classic move. Can’t handle the attention shifting, so she tries to smash the new toy.” He took a sip, nodded in satisfaction, and shot his father a wry look. “Don’t worry, Dad. I’m used to it. She tried to kill me when I was a baby too, according to the stories. Guess some things are timeless.”

The casual reference to his own attempted infanticide, delivered with the tone of someone discussing a annoying weather pattern, left Poseidon speechless. His son’s nonchalance in the face of divine malice was more terrifying than any cowering fear.

“It is not just Hera,” Poseidon managed, his voice grave. “Your display… your existence… has drawn other eyes. Hungrier ones.”

Percy’s shoulders slumped. He put the spoon down with a soft clack. “Let me guess. War Boy and Choir Practice?”

“Ares and Apollo,” Poseidon confirmed, a growl edging into his voice. “They see you as a prize. A fascination. They will come. They will try to… woo you.”

The word ‘woo’ hung in the air, absurd and terrifying.

Percy closed his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Oh, for the love of— I don’t have time for this. I’m trying to figure out how to get home. I’m trying to keep a village from starving. I do not need a divine dating show crashing my shoreline.” He began to mutter under his breath, a rapid, irritated stream. “Gods, they’re all the same. No sense of timing. No sense of personal space. Just ‘ooh, shiny, mine.’ Thousands of years and they never learn. Do I look like I want to be ‘wooed’? I want a cheeseburger and a bus pass.”

Poseidon listened to this incredible, blasphemous tirade with a mixture of awe and exasperation. His son was standing in a Bronze Age hut, complaining about the romantic attentions of Olympians as if they were pesky telemarketers.

“You do not understand the danger,” Poseidon insisted, stepping closer. “They are not mortal suitors. They are persistent, powerful, and possessive. They will not take no for an answer.”

“They’ll learn,” Percy said darkly, his sea-green eyes flashing with a familiar, stormy defiance. “I’ve said no to gods before. Usually right before I kick their teeth in. Metaphorically. Sometimes literally.”

He turned back to the fire, his movements brisk. He ladled a generous portion of the fragrant broth into a sturdy clay bowl, added a hunk of the day’s bread on the side, and thrust it toward his father. “Here. Eat. You look stressed. Probably from dealing with your idiot relatives all day.”

Poseidon, the Earthshaker, who had come to deliver a grave warning and perhaps spirit his son away to safety, found himself automatically accepting the bowl. The aroma was soothing, the gesture so mundanely, profoundly caring that it disarmed him completely. He sat on a low stool, the furniture groaning under his divine weight, and ate.

The broth was a miracle of simplicity—the essence of the sea, tempered with earth-born herbs and the unmistakable touch of his son’s care. Each sip seemed to fortify him, not physically, but in his spirit. As he ate, watching Percy move around the small hearth—checking the fire, cleaning the spoon, his brow furrowed in thought—a powerful, swelling conviction grew in Poseidon’s chest.

This is my son.

Not a weapon. Not a prize. A prince.

Look at him. He faced down the machinations of the Queen of Heaven with sarcasm and a soup ladle. He analyzed divine motivations with the weary expertise of a seasoned general. He wielded power that could petrify primordial monsters and used it to season a stew.

He was formidable. Not just in battle, but in will, in heart, in his unshakeable, grounding self.

The desire to protect him morphed into a fiercer, more urgent need: to claim him, officially, completely. To bring him into the deep, to have him by his side in the sunlit halls of his palace, where the politics of Olympus could not reach him. To give him a crown of coral and a title that would make even Ares and Apollo think twice. Percy Jackson, Prince of the Seas, Heir to the Earthshaker’s Dominion. The thought sent a thrill of possessive pride through him.

He finished the broth, the bowl empty. “This is… remarkable,” he said, his voice softer.

“It’s soup, Dad,” Percy said, but a faint, pleased flush touched his cheeks. He took the empty bowl. “Look, I get it. You’re worried. Thanks. But I’ve handled worse. If War and Music want to make fools of themselves, let them try. I’ve got nets to mend and a seven-year-old who’s about to master the letter ‘theta’. I don’t have time for their nonsense.”

Poseidon stood, looking down at his son. The fear was still there, a cold undercurrent. But it was now overlaid with a blazing certainty. This could not continue. This village was no longer a sanctuary; it was a spotlight.

“Be careful, my son,” Poseidon said, placing a heavy hand on Percy’s shoulder. “Their nonsense can become your reality all too quickly. I will not let them have you.”

There was a finality in his tone that Percy didn’t miss. He looked up, meeting his father’s ancient, stormy eyes. “I can handle myself.”

“I know,” Poseidon said, and the pride in it was undeniable. “That is what frightens me, and what makes you priceless.”

With a last, lingering look, and the scent of a coming storm, Poseidon dissolved into sea mist, leaving Percy alone with the crackling fire and the looming, unspoken promise: his father’s protection would now be as active and potentially smothering as the threats he faced.

Percy sighed, running a hand through his hair. He looked at the empty space where the god had been, then at his simple pot of soup.

“Prince of the Sea,” he muttered to himself, the words tasting strange. He shook his head, a small, defiant smile touching his lips. “Yeah, right. More like ‘Head Chef and Monster Repellent.’” But the smile didn’t reach his eyes, which were shadowed with a new kind of dread. The gods weren’t just watching anymore. They were making their move. And his dad was making plans of his own.

The peaceful rhythm of Krokyleia was about to be drowned by a divine tide.

———

 

The hut was dark, the coals of the hearth breathing a faint, red pulse into the room. Percy lay on his pallet of straw and wool, staring at the thatched ceiling. The scent of thyme and sea still clung to him, but it was smothered now by the heavy perfume of divine warning.

Sleep was a traitor, dancing just out of reach.

Every time he closed his eyes, he saw his father’s grim face. They will try to woo you.

“Ughhhhhhhh.”

The groan was muffled by the wool blanket he yanked over his face. He could still hear it, Poseidon’s voice, all doom-and-gloom. Like Percy hadn’t spent the better part of his life dealing with godly tantrums and their utterly messed-up family tree.

But this… this was new.

Woo.

The word echoed in his skull, ridiculous and horrifying. It conjured images so bizarre his brain stuttered trying to process them.

Ares. God of War. Bloodstained armor, that permanent sneer, smelling of sweat and bronze. What did “wooing” even look like for him? Showing up with the freshly severed head of a rival as a gift? Challenging him to a duel to the death as a first date? Taking him to tour the battlefield of Marathon like it was a scenic overlook? Percy imagined Ares trying to be “charming,” his smile a grimace, offering him a cursed sword as a corsage. “This blade has slain a thousand men. Its song is the last gasp of the weak. Do you… like it?”

Percy shuddered, pulling the blanket tighter. No. Nope. Absolutely not.

Apollo. God of the Sun, Music, and, apparently, Massive Ego. Golden boy. Perfect hair, perfect smile, perfect everything. His wooing would be a performance. A private concert on a sunbeam, probably a ballad he’d composed five minutes ago titled “Ode to Your Sea-Green Eyes (And My Own Brilliance).” He’d probably try to impress him with poetry, or by literally pulling the sun chariot around for a joyride. He’d gift him a lyre that played itself and never shut up. He’d talk about “harmonizing their essences” or some other pretentious garbage.

“Dates,” Percy muttered into the darkness, the word tasting foul. “What does a god even consider a date? Throwing lightning bolts at mountains? Turning mortals into dolphins for fun? A picnic on a cloud that’s really just Zeus’s irritable back?”

His brain hurt. It was a physical, throbbing pain behind his eyes. It was the sheer, unadulterated absurdity of it all. He was stranded millennia from home, trying to survive and help people who needed him, and the cosmic powers-that-be had decided to turn his life into some kind of twisted, divine romance novel.

He wasn’t a prize. He was a person. A tired, confused, homesick person who just wanted to know if his mom was okay, if his friends were alive, if there was a way back to a world that made a shred of sense.

The thought of either Ares or Apollo—or Zeus forbid, both—descending on Krokyleia with their idea of courtship made him want to dive into the sea and not come up until the Bronze Age was over.

He could just see it now. Ares crashing into the village square, scaring the kids and knocking over the water jars, all in the name of “showing his strength.” Apollo materializing in a beam of light, serenading him at dawn and disrupting the entire village’s sleep schedule.

“They’d probably start competing,” Percy groaned, rolling onto his stomach and pressing his face into the pallet. “Ares would kill a sea monster and dump it at my feet. Apollo would write an epic play about it and perform it right there, using the monster’s corpse as a stage prop.”

The mental image was so vividly awful he almost laughed. Almost. It was drowned out by the sheer, monumental annoyance of it all.

“Why can’t they just LEAVE ME ALONE?” he whispered fiercely to the indifferent night. “I’m not interested. In war, in songs, in… in any of it. Go bother someone else. Find a nymph. Write a war epic. Start a plague. I don’t care. Just. Go. Away.”

But he knew, with a sinking certainty, they wouldn’t. His father’s warning was proof. They’d seen him. They’d decided. And gods, in his experience, were the most persistent, entitled, oblivious creatures in the universe when they wanted something.

A fierce, protective anger bubbled up, burning away some of the dread. Fine. Let them try. Let Ares bring his battle trophies. Let Apollo serenade him until his golden vocal cords gave out.

He’d meet Ares’s “strength” with a well-placed wave to the face and a sarcastic comment about his form. He’d respond to Apollo’s ballads with a off-key rendition of the Camp Half-Blood sing-along classic, “This Pizza is On Fire.”

If they wanted to “woo” him, they’d have to get through a wall of sass, eye-rolls, and if necessary, a good old-fashioned demigod beatdown.

The thought was marginally comforting. He was Percy Jackson. He’d faced worse than unwanted divine attention. He’d looked Chaos in the face (sort of). He could handle a lovesick war god and a preening sun god.

Probably.

Maybe.

He groaned one last time, a long, weary sound that held all the exhaustion of the ages. “If they show up,” he vowed to the empty hut, “I’m kicking their shiny divine asses all the way back to Olympus.”

With that final, futile threat hanging in the air, he finally surrendered to an uneasy sleep, his dreams haunted by visions of Ares trying to hold his hand with a gauntlet and Apollo attempting to feed him ambrosia with a painfully sincere look in his eyes. It was, without a doubt, the most terrifying nightmare he’d had since arriving in Ancient Greece.

 

Chapter 7: The storm is still water

Notes:

Huhuhuhu finally some spice

The rhythm of Krokyleia was soft, woven from the scrape of nets, the laughter of children, and the scent of baking bread. For a few fragile days after the monster’s death, Percy had dared to hope the message had been received—by Hera, by anyone. He’d focused on teaching Agape more letters, on helping Elpis perfect a new way to smoke fish, on losing a very serious stick-sword tournament to Lysandros.

Peace. It was a flimsy thing, but he clung to it.

It shattered with the clatter of bronze and the grim cadence of marching feet.

Ten soldiers appeared on the ridge road. They were not bandits. These were professionals, their armor dented but serviceable, their spears held with weary competence. They carried the dust of long roads and the grim aura of a war looking for more kindling.

Leodes and the elders met them at the village edge, postures tense. Percy lingered near the well, a sense of cold inevitability settling in his gut.

The captain, a man with a tired face and a scar across his knuckles, spoke without preamble. “Men of fighting age. King Menestheus of Athens calls for levies. The rumblings in the east grow louder. Troy gathers her allies. Glory and spoils await those who answer the call. You will be fed, armed, and share in the plunder of a rich city.”

His eyes scanned the villagers—the fishermen, the shepherds. They were strong, but they were not soldiers. His gaze, dismissive at first, swept past the well and locked onto Percy.

The captain stopped. His eyes widened, taking in the powerful build, the easy, watchful stance, the sea-green eyes that held no fear, only a flat, assessing chill. Here was no simple farmer.

A slow, calculating smile spread across the captain’s face. He took a step toward Percy, his voice shifting from a general announcement to a personal pitch. “You. A man of your bearing… you were born for the front lines. With King Menestheus, a man of your… evident gifts would not remain a foot soldier for long. Command of a unit. A share of the choicest treasure. The favor of a king and the gods of victory. Your name sung in the halls of heroes.” He listed the benefits like a merchant hawging wares, his soldiers nodding along.

Percy said nothing. He just looked at the man. The hope and peace of the last few days curdled into something dark and heavy in his chest. Another war. Always another war. Troy. The name echoed in the hollow places of his memory, a story of pointless, decade-long slaughter.

The captain mistook his silence for interest. “Think of the honor! The tales they will tell of your strength!”

Percy’s voice, when it came, was quiet, but it carried like the first drop of rain before a deluge. It wasn’t loud. It was final.

“No.”

The captain blinked. “The spoils alone—”

“I said no.” Percy took a single step forward. He didn’t posture, didn’t clench his fists. But the air around him seemed to grow heavier, charged with the promise of a storm. The sea behind him, calm a moment before, began to whisper a little louder against the shore. “I’m not interested in your glory. I’m not interested in your spoils. I’m not interested in helping you burn a city and drag its women away in chains.”

The soldier’s face hardened. “It is the duty of men to fight when called! To defy a king’s call is—”

“To tell you to fuck off,” Percy finished, his voice dropping into a low, icy register that made the villagers behind him shiver. His eyes, usually bright with mischief or warmth, were the color of a churning, storm-ridden sea. “Take your war and march it somewhere else. This village is under my protection. You won’t be taking anyone from here. Not today. Not ever for your stupid, greedy war.”

The defiance, the sheer contempt in the demigod’s tone, was like a physical blow. The captain, used to obedience or desperate bargaining, was utterly disarmed. He looked into Percy’s eyes and did not see a hopeful recruit or a coward. He saw something ancient and unyielding. He saw the deep, cold patience of the ocean floor, and he knew, with a soldier’s instinct, that this was a fight he would not win.

He took a step back, his face pale. He gave a curt, sharp nod to his men. Without another word, they turned and marched back the way they had come, their earlier swagger gone, replaced by a confused, hurried retreat.

The village exhaled a collective breath they hadn’t realized they were holding. Relief flooded them, followed by a deeper, more fervent awe. He had turned away a king’s levy with a look and a few words.

But Percy felt no victory. He felt only a profound weariness, bone-deep and sour. He turned and walked away from the cheering villagers, back toward the empty cove. Troy. The pieces were clicking into place in this terrible timeline, and he was stuck in the middle of it. He wanted no part of it. The very thought of that bloody, famous stalemate made him sick.

---

The report that reached King Menestheus in Athens was a strange one. A captain, shaken, speaking of a village protected not by walls, but by a single man. A man of terrifying presence who commanded the very air and sea, who spoke of their glorious war with disgust, and whose “no” had felt like a natural law.

Menestheus, a shrewd and politically ambitious king, was intrigued. Rumors of a “Blessed One” on the coast had trickled in, tales he’d dismissed as peasant superstition. But this? A man who could deter seasoned soldiers? That was a resource. Or a threat.

He was not the only king hearing whispers.

In the well-ordered, strong-walled city of Troy, Prince Hector, the steadfast pillar of his people, also heard the filtered rumors. A divine stranger on the Achaean coast, who turned away armies and slew earth-monsters. A neutral power. A wild card. In the delicate, escalating tensions, such a figure was of intense interest. Could he be swayed? Could his strange power be turned to Troy’s defense?

And in sandy Pylos, the aged and wise King Nestor, a man who prized cleverness and new advantage, heard the tales from his traders. A demigod who taught children and cooked. A warrior who refused war. It was a paradox that fascinated him. Perhaps this one could be reasoned with, where force had failed.

One of them, driven by need, curiosity, or opportunism, would decide the rumors demanded a personal audience. A king’s persuasion, they believed, was greater than a captain’s. Gold, promises, flattery—these were tools that had moved mountains and men.

They did not yet understand that the stormy-eyed young man by the sea could not be moved by the things that moved kings. He had seen the end of their story, and he wanted no role in the telling. Their journey to recruit him would not be a negotiation.

It would be a lesson. And it would end in failure.

———

It was Nestor, King of Pylos, who came. Age had not dimmed his cunning, only given it a sharper, more polished edge. He arrived not with a military column, but with a small, dignified entourage: a herald bearing a gilded staff, two advisors in fine wool, and a cart laden with gifts—polished bronze tripods, bolts of richly dyed cloth, amphorae of the finest oil and wine. The message was clear: this was not a demand, but an invitation from a civilized power to a man of evident worth.

The villagers watched, awed and terrified, as the king’s party approached the central square where Percy stood, having been fetched from the shoreline. Percy wasn’t cleaning fish or mending nets. He was just… standing there, arms crossed over his chest, watching them come. He wore a simple, sun-bleached tunic, his feet bare on the packed earth. He looked less like a receiving dignitary and more like a bored sentinel about to order trespassers off his lawn.

Nestor, old but still sharp-eyed, took in the scene: the simple, prosperous village, the reverent, fearful looks the people gave the young man, and the young man himself. The rumors did not do him justice. Even in stillness, he was a vortex of contained energy. The king’s practiced, diplomatic smile widened.

“Hail, son of Poseidon!” the herald announced, his voice ringing. “Nestor, revered king of sandy Pylos, shepherd of his people and wise counselor to kings, greets you. He comes not with demands, but with respect, bearing gifts and an offer of friendship between a great king and a rising power.”

Percy’s face remained utterly blank. Not hostile. Just… blank. As if the herald had announced the weather in a language he only half-understood.

Nestor stepped forward, his manner avuncular, wise. “Young man, your fame spreads. To turn away a war-levy with a word? A remarkable thing. It speaks of a strength that should not be wasted on… fishing nets.” He gestured gracefully to the cart of treasures. “These are but tokens. Come to Pylos. Sit in my hall. Your wisdom and your power would be of immense value in the troubling times ahead. You could have a lordship, lands, honors beyond counting. Why linger here, when you could shape the fate of nations?”

Percy didn’t look at the gifts. He didn’t look at the king’s wise, expectant face. He looked past him, to the sea. His expression was one of profound, exhausted annoyance. It was the look of someone who’d been repeatedly woken up from a nap by a buzzing fly.

He let the king’s words hang in the warm air for a long, uncomfortable moment. The herald shifted. The advisors exchanged glances.

Finally, Percy spoke. His voice was flat, devoid of any inflection, any respect, any interest. “No.”

Nestor’s smile faltered, just a fraction. “My son, perhaps you do not understand the opportunity. The war coming… it will be the song of our age. To stand aside is to be forgotten by history.”

“I don’t want your history,” Percy said, his gaze snapping back to the king. The sea-green eyes were no longer blank. They were churning. “I don’t want your lands, your tripsods, or your war. I told the last guys. I’m telling you. Leave. Me. Alone.”

The finality was absolute. It was a wall.

Nestor’s diplomatic composure finally cracked, revealing the iron will of a king beneath. No one, demigod or not, spoke to him like this. “You are a power in this land. With power comes responsibility! You cannot simply hide!”

“Watch me,” Percy said, a spark of his old, defiant sasmoking back to life, edged with razor-sharp irritation.

The king drew himself up. “You will listen to reason. For your own good, and the good of all Hellas.”

That did it. The last thread of Percy’s patience, already frayed by divine suitors, prophetic warnings, and now this pompous, persistent mortal king, snapped.

His annoyed expression didn’t change. He didn’t snarl. He didn’t shout.

He just lifted his hand, palm out, toward the sea in a lazy, dismissive gesture, as if swatting the entire royal entourage away like the buzzing flies they were.

There was no roar, no grand incantation.

The sea simply answered.

A hundred yards offshore, the water bulged. Not a wave that built and crested, but a sheer, liquid wall that erupted vertically from a calm surface, as tall as three men. It hung for a split second, a shimmering, green-blue cliff, reflecting the sun and the stunned faces on the beach.

Then it fell.

It didn’t break. It smashed.

With the sound of a mountain collapsing, the wall of water descended directly onto the king’s entourage and the cart of glittering gifts. There was no time to scream, to run. One moment they were there—the herald with his staff, the wise advisors, the proud king, the symbols of mortal wealth and power.

The next, there was only a roaring, churning surge of white water rushing up the beach, soaking the square, and then receding as fast as it came.

Where the delegation had stood, there was nothing. No men. No cart. No gifts. Just wet, smooth sand, littered with a few bits of splintered wood and a single, dented bronze tripod being dragged back out by the frothy surf.

The villagers stood in stunned, dripping silence.

Percy lowered his hand. He looked at the empty, washed-clean sand, his expression unchanged—just that same deep, tired annoyance. He hadn’t killed them. He wasn’t a murderer. But he had, with a flick of his will, given them the most forceful, unequivocal “no” possible. They were likely half-drowned, battered, and deposited miles down the coast, their pride and their presents utterly destroyed.

He turned to Leodes, who was staring with his mouth open. “If any other kings, generals, or salesmen show up,” Percy said, his voice weary, “tell them the beach is closed.”

He walked away, back toward his hut, leaving the village to process the fact that their Blessed One had just dismissed a legendary king and his entire offer of glory with the same effort it took to shoo a goat.

Word of this encounter would spread differently. Not as a refusal, but as a cataclysm. A king had been turned away not with words, but with a casual, terrifying act of nature.

In his sunless hall, Poseidon would feel the surge of his son’s power and laugh, a sound of pure, proud thunder. In the war camps and palaces, the rumors would harden into a fearful, awe-struck fact: the demigod of the coast did not negotiate. He issued edicts with the tide.

And on Olympus, two watching gods would feel a fresh, violent thrill. Ares would see the brutal, effortless dominance and his desire would burn hotter. Apollo would see the breathtaking, casual artistry of the water-sculpture and his obsession would deepen. The challenge had just been magnified.

Percy just wanted to be left in peace. But with every lazy, world-altering gesture, he made that impossibility more and more remote.

———

The silence after the king’s watery dismissal was thick enough to taste. The villagers stood, dripping and shivering, not from the cold sea spray, but from a profound, collective awe that edged into fear. Not for themselves. They had long passed the point of fearing what Percy could do to them.

They feared what it was doing to him.

They watched him walk away, his shoulders set in a line of weary tension no one but them could see. He didn’t look triumphant. He looked drained. The lazy, cataclysmic gesture had not been an act of anger, but of final, exasperated punctuation. It had cost him something.

Old Elpis was the first to move. She wiped seawater from her face with a corner of her shawl and marched after him, her jaw set with a mother’s determination. Leodes and a few others followed, a silent, worried procession.

They found Percy not in his hut, but on the far side of the cove, sitting on a flat rock, staring at the now-placid sea as if demanding an explanation from it. He didn’t turn as they approached.

Elpis didn’t speak. She simply sat beside him on the rock, close enough that their shoulders almost touched. She pulled a round of fresh, soft cheese wrapped in cloth from her belt and placed it silently next to him. Leodes stood nearby, his wise old eyes clouded.

It was young Lysandros, brave and blunt, who finally gave voice to the question humming in all of them. He crept forward, his usual boisterous energy subdued. “Percy?” he asked, his voice small. “Are you… are you okay?”

Percy didn’t answer for a long moment. He picked up the cheese, but just held it, his gaze still fixed on the horizon. “I’m tired, kid,” he said finally, the words quiet and rough.

“Was it… hard?” Lysandros pressed. “Making the big wave?”

A humorless, soft chuckle escaped Percy. “No. That’s the problem. It wasn’t hard at all.” He finally looked at them, and the expression in his sea-green eyes made Elpis’s heart clench. It was a look of lonely burden. “It’s too easy. The water… it just listens. It wants to help. And sometimes, ‘helping’ looks like washing a bunch of stubborn, gold-laden idiots out to sea.”

Leodes stepped closer, his voice gentle. “They would have taken our sons. You protected us. Again.”

“I know,” Percy said, and there was no satisfaction in it. “And I’d do it again. But…” He gestured vaguely at the vast, powerful sea. “It’s a lot. It’s always there. And now everyone—kings, gods, monsters—they all see it. They see the big wave, the scary power. They don’t see…” He trailed off, looking down at the cheese in his hands.

“They don’t see the man who taught my grandson to write his name,” Leodes said softly. “Or who fixes my aching back by carrying the water jugs. Or who sits by our fire and tells stories that make us forget our fears.”

Elpis nodded fiercely, reaching out to pat his arm, a gesture so familiarly maternal it made Percy’s throat tighten. “You carry the weight of the deep in your soul, boy. We see it. We see how it pulls at you. You try to hide it with jokes and cooking, but we see the tide in your eyes when you think no one is looking.”

Percy was silent, stunned. He’d thought he’d been protecting them from the truth of his power, from the cosmic target on his back. He never realized they’d been watching him, reading the strain he tried so hard to conceal.

“We are not afraid of your power,” Lysandros declared, puffing out his small chest. “We’re afraid for you. Because… because it seems heavy.”

The simple, profound truth of it, coming from a child, broke through the last of Percy’s defenses. He let out a long, slow breath, the kind that carried true exhaustion.

“It is,” he admitted, the confession quiet in the salt air. “Sometimes it feels like I’m holding back the whole ocean all the time. And I’m so tired of people trying to poke the dam. Your king with his bribes. Other… beings with their… attentions.” He shuddered slightly.

Elpis’s eyes narrowed with protective ferocity. “Let them try. We may be mortals, but this is our home. Your home. They will have to go through us to add to your burden.”

It was a ridiculous, beautiful, hopeless sentiment. A handful of fishermen and weavers against gods and kings. But the sheer, unwavering loyalty in her voice, echoed in the firm nods of Leodes and the determined set of Lysandros’s small jaw, was a different kind of warmth. It wasn’t the flashy heat of divine obsession or the cold glitter of royal ambition. It was the steady, grounding heat of a hearth.

It didn’t lift the weight of the ocean. But for a moment, it felt like they were helping him carry it.

He managed a small, genuine smile, the first since the soldiers had arrived. “Thanks, guys. But let’s not pick any fights with sun gods, okay? I’ve got enough drama.”

He broke off a piece of the cheese and ate it. It was simple, sharp, and good. A real thing, in a world that kept trying to turn him into a symbol.

That night, as the village slept, Percy lay awake. The fear in their eyes earlier hadn’t been terror, but concern. They saw the cost. His father saw a treasure to be secured. Ares saw a weapon to be claimed. Apollo saw a muse to be possessed.

But the villagers saw him. A young man who was too powerful for his own good, who just wanted to go home, and who was trying his best not to drown under the expectations of eternity.

Their quiet solidarity didn’t solve anything. The kings would still covet. The gods would still descend. The weight of the sea would still be his to bear.

But as he listened to the gentle, familiar rhythm of the village at night—the soft snore from Leodes’ corner, the cry of a night bird—the loneliness that had been his constant companion since washing ashore receded, just a little.

He wasn’t alone. And for now, in the dark, that was enough to let him finally close his eyes and sleep.

Chapter 8: A little fantasy

Notes:

Just some thoughts from Ares and Apollo 😁

The forge of Ares was no place for patience or delicacy. It was a cavern of raw intent carved beneath a dead Thracian mountain, its ceiling lost in smoke and heat shimmer, its floor veined with molten slag that pulsed like an exposed artery. Celestial bronze screamed as it was quenched, not in water, but in the bound howls of fallen warriors, their souls stretched thin and sharp, wrung of their last defiance. The air was thick with sulfur and scorched iron, with the intimate, copper-sweet scent of blood that had soaked into stone over millennia. This was not a workshop. It was a body in constant violence with itself. This was where war dreamed.

 

Ares usually thrived here. The forge fed him. Conflict was his true art, and the world beyond the mountain provided endless inspiration. Siege designs. Collapsing alliances. Mortal tensions tightening like drawn bowstrings. Yet today, the obsidian war-table before him might as well have been blank.He paced, heavy boots ringing like distant thunder, crimson eyes fixed not on the glowing maps of the mortal world but on a single, radiant point along an Achaean coast. One presence burned brighter than any warfront.

 

Percy.

 

The name struck through him like a drumbeat against bone. It was not the idle want of a god bored with eternity. It was focused. Strategic. Devouring. Percy was not a passing indulgence or a beautiful distraction. He was a campaign worth planning, worth bleeding for.

 

Since that first vision on Olympus, Ares had not known stillness. He saw him everywhere: sea spray clinging to sun-warmed skin, salt tracing the lines of muscle earned through survival rather than vanity. Strength without display. Power without ceremony. A laugh that carried challenge in it, a mouth that spoke defiance as easily as humor. The ocean did not obey Percy because he commanded it. It followed because it recognized him.

 

That recognition gnawed at Ares in a way nothing had since the dawn of gods.

 

He stopped, fists flexing at his sides, nails biting into his palms as he stared into empty air and saw Percy instead. Saw the way the sea curved toward him, how waves softened when he stood in them, how destruction bent instinctively around his presence. That lazy, annihilating wave that had brushed aside a king like driftwood replayed itself in Ares’s mind until want coiled tight and hot in his chest.This was not lust in the small, mortal sense. This was a primordial pull. The desire of one force of nature recognizing another and refusing to let it remain untouched.

 

His mind, ever the tactician, began to shape the inevitable.

 

The Approach would be precise. No thunderous arrival. No rattling armor or banners snapping in the wind. Percy despised spectacle born of insecurity. Ares would come stripped down to his essence, contained but unmistakable. Dawn, perhaps. A solitary stretch of cliff where sea met stone and the world felt unfinished. He would let his presence seep into the air like pressure before a storm, sharp and electric. Not fear. Recognition. The awareness of being seen by something that understood exactly what he was.

 

Not prey.

Never prey.

 

Then the Offering. Not riches. Not titles. Percy had turned away from crowns before. No, Ares would give him something far more intimate. Truth. He would bring him to the edge of a war still young enough to be honest. No tangled politics. No hollow rhetoric. Just strength colliding with strength. He would let Percy feel it, taste it in the air. The brutal grace of a spear thrown perfectly. The sacred rhythm of shields meeting shields. The moment where life burned brightest precisely because it was being spent.Ares imagined standing beside him on a ridge above the chaos, close enough to feel the heat of Percy’s body, the way his power stirred when surrounded by violence. He would not ask him to fight. He would simply watch. Watch the tension coil in Percy’s frame, the way his gaze sharpened, the way the sea-green in his eyes darkened with understanding.

 

Because Percy already knew this truth, even if he denied it. Conflict was as honest as the tide. And like the sea, it answered him. When the battle reached its peak, when the air itself sang with impact and blood, Ares would turn to him. Not towering. Not commanding. Meeting him eye to eye. “You feel it,” he would say, voice low and grinding, intimate as a confession. “This is what you are. Not meant to stand apart. Meant to stand where the world breaks.”

 

He could already see Percy’s reaction. The sharp retort on his tongue. The defiance. But beneath it, that unmistakable pull. That fierce, wild recognition of something ancient and shared.

 

And then the Claim.

 

Ares would close the distance, not rushing, letting the moment stretch until tension hummed between them like a drawn blade. His power would unfurl, not crushing, but enclosing. Heat. Drive. Relentless purpose wrapping around Percy like a second skin. He would let him feel the forge, the war-drum pulse of his heart, the promise of endless forward motion.The kiss would not be gentle. It would be a challenge, mouth to mouth, breath to breath, carrying heat and salt and storm. A declaration rather than a question. He would taste the sea on Percy’s lips and something sharper beneath it, a power still caged, still mortal. And he would know, with absolute certainty, that it would not remain so. Because Percy was never meant to stay human.

 

Once claimed, once bound not by chains but by choice, Ares would see to the rest. Zeus could thunder all he liked. This demigod burned too brightly to be extinguished by time. Percy would be remade, not diminished. A god of something fierce and unyielding. The Roaring Shore. The Storm of Will. A power that stood where battle met tide.Together, they would be unstoppable. Two forces locked in perpetual motion. Not domination.

 

Symbiosis.

The forge shuddered as a low growl rolled from Ares’s chest, chains of captive spirits rattling in response. Apollo’s pretty songs and golden promises barely registered. Percy did not need serenading. He needed to be met, matched, taken seriously.

 

The God of War turned from his table, vision narrowed to a single, inevitable future.

Percy, son of Poseidon. Marked by battle and salt. Standing at his side. Powerful. Divine.

And irrevocably his.

———

High on Olympus, where the light was forever perfect and the air hummed with the latent music of the spheres, Apollo stood on his eastern balcony. Below him, the world was a tapestry of dawn’s gentle touch, but his brilliant blue eyes were not on the waking mortals or the rosy-fingered horizon. They were turned inward, fixed on a memory more vivid than any sunrise: the sea-green eyes of a demigod, brimming with a light no sun could replicate.

Since the moment Percy’s yearning song had pierced the halls of heaven, Apollo had been haunted. Not by a ghost, but by a living antithesis. Percy was not a creature of Apollo’s domain—not of ordered light, or measured poetry, or harmonic theory. He was chaos given benevolent form, a storm with a moral compass, a song that broke every rule of composition to reveal a deeper truth.

And Apollo, God of Truth, hungered for it with a desperation that was entirely new.

He retreated to his most sacred space: the silent, marble-walled chamber where he composed not for mortals or for praise, but for the cosmos itself. His lyre, the one strung with filaments of captured starlight, lay untouched. The parchments were blank. The melodies that usually flowed through him like a second heartbeat were stilled, drowned out by the echoing, haunting memory of Percy’s voice.

He did not just want to hear Percy sing again. He wanted to understand the source of that song. He wanted to crawl inside the storm of his soul and map its lightning.

His desire was not the brute, possessive campaign of Ares. It was an artist’s obsession, a scholar’s fixation, a lover’s desperate need to comprehend.

He saw Percy as Light itself, but not Apollo’s own clean, illuminating rays. Percy was the light that filtered through storm clouds—dappled, mysterious, charged with potential energy. He was the phosphorescence in the midnight sea—a cool, deep, self-generated glow from within the darkness. He was the first spark of life in primordial clay—a fragile, defiant illumination against the void. This was a light that did not banish shadow, but danced with it, defined by it, made more beautiful for the contrast.

And Apollo, who had thought he knew every spectrum of brilliance, was utterly captivated by this new, untamed wavelength.

His plan for wooing was not a strategy of force, but of revelation.

He would not crash onto the beach like a wave of war. He would arrive with the dawn, materializing from the sun’s own ascent, his form not blindingly glorious, but softened, gilded by the morning. He would find Percy not in battle or in a crowd, but in a moment of quiet creation—perhaps humming as he shaped clay for a pot, or with his eyes closed, listening to the wind in the olives.

Apollo’s first offering would be silence. Not the empty silence of absence, but the profound, listening silence of a master musician before a new, unknown instrument. He would simply be present, allowing Percy to feel the quality of his attention—not greedy or demanding, but rapt, reverent. He would let Percy see that he was not being assessed as a weapon or a prize, but witnessed as a phenomenon.

Then, he would speak. Not of glory or power, but of perception. “I have heard the music of spinning galaxies and the lament of dying stars,” he would say, his voice the soft, resonant hum of a perfectly tuned string. “But I have never heard a sound like the one your soul makes. It is not a melody I can write. It is a truth I can only yearn to hear again.”

He would offer not tripsods or kingdoms, but collaboration. He would bring forth his lyre and, instead of playing a composed piece, he would ask to listen. To truly listen. To Percy’s stories, to his frustrations, to the half-remembered songs of his mother. Apollo would then, with infinite care, attempt to weave those fragments into music—not to overshadow or appropriate them, but to reflect them back, to show Percy his own essence transformed into art. “This,” he would say, playing a few notes born from Percy’s description of a New York rainstorm, “is how your memory sounds to me.” It would be an act of profound intimacy, making the intangible tangible.

He imagined Percy’s face then—the guarded annoyance melting into surprise, then into a wary, fascinated curiosity. He would see the intelligence in those eyes, appreciating the complexity of the gesture. Apollo would hunger to trace the lines of that thoughtful face, to see if his skin was as warm as his spirit seemed, to learn if his laughter had a harmonic key.

But more than his body, Apollo hungered for his company. To have Percy beside him in this sunlit chamber. To have that chaotic, truthful energy as a counterpoint to his own perfected order. They would be the ultimate creative dyad: Apollo, the god of form and light, and Percy, the demigod of raw essence and depth. Together, they wouldn’t just make music; they would redefine it. They could compose paeans that could heal plagues, dirges that could calm earthquakes, love songs that could make mortals believe in divinity again.

The thought sent a shiver through him, a vibration along his divine core. To claim Percy would not be to cage him, but to provide the brightest possible stage for his brilliance. He would give him a place in the sun, a celestial platform from which his unique, storm-born light could shine for all eternity. He would make him a god, yes—but a god of what? The Compelling Heart? The Unvarnished Truth? The Keeper of Tides and Hearth? The domain would be forged from who Percy was, not what Apollo wanted him to be.

He looked at his silent lyre, his fingers itching. Ares saw a companion for slaughter. Apollo saw a muse for a new genesis.

A slow, radiant, and utterly determined smile spread across Apollo’s face. The hunger was a sweet, aching void in his chest, a space only that particular, storm-lit soul could fill.

He would go to the coast. He would approach with patience and artistry. He would listen, and he would create. And he would prove, through beauty and understanding, that he was the only one worthy of harnessing, of partnering with, of loving, such a rare and devastating light.

Chapter 9: Men have come

The peace of Krokyleia, already frayed by kings and monsters, was severed by the rhythmic, ominous beat of oars on water. This wasn't a handful of soldiers on foot. This was a fleet. Five sleek, black-hulled Trojan galleys, their sails emblazoned with the red stallion of Troy, sliced through the calm morning sea and glided to a halt just beyond the surf. They did not land with violence, but with a disciplined, solemn purpose that was somehow more intimidating than a raid.

From the lead ship, a ramp was laid. The men who disembarked were not the lean, desperate levy-soldiers of Athens. These were the professional infantry of Troy's standing army, their bronze breastplates gleaming, their spears held in perfect, unwavering unison. And at their head walked a man who needed no introduction.

Hector, Prince of Troy, was like a mountain given human form. He was not overly tall, but built with a dense, formidable strength that spoke of unshakeable foundations. His face was handsome, but its beauty was in its solemnity and weary intelligence, not in the dazzling perfection of a god. His eyes, dark and grave, scanned the village and its gathered, terrified people, before coming to rest on the lone figure who had not retreated, who stood between the village and the sea.

Percy watched them come, his arms crossed. No sigh, no groan this time. Just a flat, observational calm. He’d run out of emotional energy for royal entrances. He recognized Hector instantly. The steady pillar, the doomed hero. A flicker of pity, unwanted and sharp, cut through his annoyance. This man was walking a path to a funeral pyre Percy had already read about.

Hector stopped a respectful distance away, his soldiers forming a silent, gleaming semicircle behind him. He raised a hand in a gesture of peace. "I am Hector, son of Priam, of Troy," he said, his voice deep and measured, carrying easily over the gentle shush of the waves. "I come not for conscripts or for war against this place. I come for you."

Percy raised an eyebrow. "Join the club. Seems to be the popular trip this season."

A faint, grim smile touched Hector's lips. "The rumors are true, then. You have no love for the gathering storm."

"I have no love for storms that get people killed for no good reason," Percy corrected, his voice quiet but clear.

Hector nodded, as if this confirmed a hypothesis. "You turned away Menestheus's men. You… discouraged Nestor of Pylos. Your power is real. And you wish to remain neutral." He took a step closer, his expression intensifying. "Neutrality is a luxury the coming war will not allow. Troy will fight for its existence. A power such as yours, standing aside, is a wound to our cause. Come to Troy. Not as a soldier, but as an honored guest. As a guardian. Use your power to protect the innocent within our walls—the children, the elderly. Help us ensure our cause is just, not merely desperate. Your strength could be a shield for mercy."

It was the best pitch yet. No talk of glory or spoils. An appeal to protection, to guarding the helpless. It was shrewd. It was almost tempting in its moral clarity. It was also, Percy knew, a one-way ticket into the heart of a meat grinder.

He met Hector's earnest, dark eyes. "I'm sorry, Prince Hector," he said, and he genuinely meant it. "But my answer is the same. No. I won't be a weapon or a shield for any city. This village is under my protection. That's the extent of my campaign."

Hector's shoulders, usually so square, slumped a fraction. Not in defeat, but in resigned understanding. He had seen something in Percy's eyes—not defiance of him, but a defiance of fate itself. "Then you leave us to our doom," he said, not as an accusation, but a statement of bleak fact.

Percy almost said, "Your doom was written long before I got here." He bit it back. Instead, he glanced at the sky, judging the sun. His stomach gave a traitorous rumble. The soldiers looked tense, weary from their voyage.

A bizarre impulse took hold. Maybe it was the pity. Maybe it was the sheer, exhausting absurdity of it all. Maybe he was just hungry and wanted to cook for more than five people.

"You and your men," Percy said, gesturing towards the galleys. "You've been rowing. You're probably hungry. The village has food. You can stay for a meal before you row back to your war."

The offer was so utterly unexpected, so disarming in its mundane hospitality, that even the disciplined Trojan soldiers blinked in confusion. Hector stared, nonplussed. "You would… feed the army you just refused?"

Percy shrugged. "Refusing to die for you isn't the same as wanting you to starve. It's just food. Simple stuff. Take it or leave it."

Hector, a man of duty and deep courtesy, was caught off guard. To refuse such a plain, peaceable offer after being denied a military alliance would be churlish. He gave a slow, bemused nod. "We… would be grateful."

What followed was the most surreal afternoon in Krokyleia's history. Fifty Trojan soldiers sat awkwardly on the beach, their spears stacked, while the village women, under Percy's direction, brought out baskets of flatbread, bowls of olives, and wheels of cheese. Percy himself took over the main fire pit. He had the fishermen bring the morning's catch. With a focused, effortless efficiency that was its own kind of magic, he filleted fish, seasoned them with wild herbs and crushed sea salt, and grilled them over the coals. He stirred a vast pot of lentil and barley stew, enriching it with dried fish and the last of the spring onions. The air filled with smells that made stomachs growl on both sides of the cultural divide.

When the food was served, the Trojans ate with the solemn reverence of men tasting something beyond their experience. The flavors were clean, profound, perfectly balanced—the sea, the earth, the fire, all harmonized. It was food that tasted of care, of peace, of home. For soldiers on the brink of a decade-long war, it was a bittersouth ache.

Hector ate beside Percy, away from the men. He said little, but his eyes spoke volumes as he tasted the stew, then the perfectly grilled fish. "This is… not simple," he said finally, his voice low.

"It's just what was available," Percy said, wiping his hands on a cloth.

"No," Hector countered, his dark eyes sharp. "It is a quiet power. A different kind of sovereignty. I understand now why they call you 'Blessed.'"

After the meal, as the Trojans prepared to embark, Hector approached Percy one last time. The formality was gone, replaced by a somber, man-to-man gravity.

"You have shown my men more kindness than any king has today," Hector said. "For that, you have my thanks. But a warning, in return for the meal. You have drawn eyes far higher than those of mortal kings. My father consults with priests, and they say the air around your name is thick with divine interest. They are not as… courteous as I have tried to be. When they come for you, they will not ask. They will take."

Percy looked past him, to where the endless sea met the endless sky. He thought of his father's worry, of the possessive heat in Ares's imagined gaze, the hungry light in Apollo's. He thought of Hera's pet monster turned to stone.

He felt no fear. Only a vast, tidal weariness, and beneath it, the unyielding bedrock of his own will.

He met Hector's worried gaze and gave a small, resigned shrug.

"Let them come."

———

The last of the Trojan ships had melted into the twilight, leaving behind the scent of salt, woodsmoke, and the faint, lingering ghost of grilled fish. The village of Krokyleia, exhausted by the day's surreal events, had retreated into a deep, grateful slumber.

Percy was alone by the central hearth, the only sounds the crackle of dying embers and the rhythmic slosh of water in a clay basin. He was washing the last of the shared meal’s dishes, his movements methodical and tired. The warm, soapy water was a grounding reality, a simple task in a world determined to be anything but simple.

That’s when he felt it.

A power, pressing against the quiet night. Not the brute, tectonic force of his father, or the seething, metallic anticipation of Ares. This was different. It was like the air itself had begun to hum, to resonate with a silent, golden frequency. It was warmth without heat, light without glare. Familiar in its divinity, yet strange in its specific, melodic signature.

He didn't look up. He scrubbed a stubborn bit of lentil from a wooden bowl. "You know," he said to the empty air, his voice flat with exhaustion. "Knocking is considered polite in most centuries."

A soft, delighted laugh shimmered into being behind him. "Most centuries don't have a demigod who turns away princes and feeds armies with a flick of his wrist."

Percy finally turned, drying his hands on a rough cloth.

Apollo stood there, and for a moment, the humble village square seemed to reshape itself around him. He wasn't in full radiance; that would have been an assault. He was toned down, as if filtered through a summer haze. He wore a simple, impeccably white chiton that seemed to hold the memory of sunlight. His golden hair was artfully tousled, his face a masterpiece of amused, benevolent curiosity. And his eyes—a bright, knowing blue—held a sparkle of pure, undiluted fascination as they drank in the sight of Percy, sleeves rolled up, surrounded by clean and dirty dishes.

He gave a slow, deliberate wink.

Percy stared back, his expression not one of awe, fear, or even annoyance. It was the utterly blank, unimpressed look of a night-shift diner cook facing a particularly flashy, overly confident health inspector.

He pointed a soapy finger at the basin, then at the stack of unwashed cups beside it. "You're blocking my light. Either help me clean up," he said, his tone leaving absolutely no room for debate, "or I will kick your shiny, golden ass and send you flying back to Olympus so fast you'll leave a skid mark on the constellation of Lyra."

The words hung in the warm, humming air.

Apollo's perfectly composed smile froze. The sparkling amusement in his eyes flickered, replaced by a split-second of genuine, profound shock. No one, in all his eternal existence, had ever greeted him with a threat of violence over dish duty. Prophets fell to their knees. Muses sighed in longing. Kings offered their finest treasures. This son of Poseidon offered him a dishrag and a promise of celestial battery.

Then, the shock shattered, and Apollo threw his head back and laughed. It wasn't his usual polished, performative laugh. This was a real, startled, booming sound of pure, incredulous delight that echoed off the silent huts. It was the sound of a god encountering something genuinely, breathtakingly new.

"Help you… clean up?" Apollo managed, wiping a non-existent tear from his eye, his gaze raking over Percy with renewed, intense hunger. The defiance was more intoxicating than any hymn.

"You heard me," Percy said, turning back to the basin and picking up a cup. "You showed up uninvited during my chores. You can pitch in or piss off. Divine prerogative doesn't get you out of KP duty."

Still chuckling, Apollo, the God of the Sun, Light, and Music, moved forward. He eyed the basin of soapy water with the analytical curiosity of an astronomer viewing a new planet. He then, with a graceful flourish of his hand, summoned a soft, glowing warmth that enveloped the remaining dishes. In an instant, they were not just clean, but dry, sparkling, and stacked in a perfect, gleaming pyramid.

Percy glanced at the magically cleaned dishes, then back at Apollo. "Show-off," he muttered, but there was no real heat in it. He finished the cup in his hand, dried it, and set it down. "Fine. That works."

Apollo leaned against the hearth's stone rim, his arms crossed, his expression one of rapt entertainment. "You are… entirely unprecedented," he mused. "You threaten a god, then put him to work. Why not simply call for your father? One word, and Poseidon would rise to defend you."

Percy shrugged, emptying the basin of water onto the stones where it steamed and vanished. "Yeah. He would." He met Apollo's brilliant blue eyes, his own sea-green gaze steady and serious. "And then he'd spend the next six months turning the Aegean into a boiling, impassable maelstrom hunting for pieces of you. He'd probably drag your chariot from the sky and beat you to death with your own sun-horses. It'd be a whole thing." He shook his head, as if weary of the very thought. "Way too much drama. Tartarus is a mess to clean up. Sending you home with a sore rear end is more efficient."

The blunt, casual assessment of his own potential annihilation at the hands of an enraged Poseidon, delivered with the tone of someone discussing clogged plumbing, left Apollo speechless for the second time in five minutes. The god wasn't offended; he was awestruck. This demigod saw the full, catastrophic consequences of divine conflict and found them… tacky. An unnecessary hassle.

Percy didn't fear the gods. He was unimpressed by them. And in that moment, Apollo's hunger transformed. It was no longer just a desire to possess a beautiful, powerful muse. It was a desperate need to be impressive to this singular, confounding mortal. To earn a look from those eyes that wasn't blank annoyance or weary tolerance.

"Efficient," Apollo repeated, the word tasting strange and wonderful. He pushed off the hearth, taking a step closer. The air hummed again, but softer now, like the vibration after a perfectly struck chord. "You see the world in such… practical terms. It is…"

"Exhausting?" Percy supplied, rolling his shoulders. "Yeah, tell me about it. Look, it's been a long day. I fed an army, did the dishes, and now I'm talking to the literal sun. I'm going to bed. The beach is that way." He jerked a thumb towards the darkness.

Apollo's smile was soft, genuine, and utterly fascinated. "Until next time, Son of the Sea."

"Make an appointment," Percy grumbled, turning towards his hut.

As he walked away, he felt Apollo's gaze on his back, not as a weight, but as a warm, persistent spotlight. He didn't look back. He knew, with a sinking certainty, that this wouldn't be the last time. The God of Sunlight had just been handed a dishrag and a threat, and he'd found it more compelling than any ode ever written in his honor.

The game had changed. And Percy, desperately wanting only to sleep, had just become the most intriguing puzzle in the universe.

———

Ares had watched the entire exchange from the thin place between moments, unseen but very much present, and by the gods, it had been exquisite. The Sun’s laughter still echoed faintly in the stones, that bright, ingratiating sound that always made Ares’s jaw tighten. Apollo flirted like he performed—loud, polished, desperate to be adored. And Percy… Percy had swatted him away with dishwater indifference and raw nerve. It set something feral loose in Ares’s chest. Not jealousy, exactly. No. Possession was quieter than that. He felt it settle in his bones like a truth long overdue. When Percy turned from the hearth and stepped into the shadowed edge of the square, Ares finally let the world feel him.

Not a divine arrival. No fire, no armor, no thunder. Just pressure. The kind that made lungs work harder and instincts sharpen. Percy stopped mid-step. His shoulders went rigid, every muscle aligning, not in fear but readiness. Ares smiled.

“Sunshine didn’t even make you flinch,” Ares said, his voice rolling out of the dark like distant war drums. “But you feel me.” Percy turned slowly. His eyes found Ares instantly, sea-green locking onto red with the steady focus of someone who knew exactly what stood in front of him and refused to look away. “Yeah,” he said. “You’re loud.”

Ares stepped closer. The air thickened, heat bleeding in without flame. He could see it now, the aftermath of the day etched into Percy’s body: the faint bruise blooming at his collarbone, the salt drying on his skin, the way his shirt clung damply to his back. Mortal fabric. Inadequate. Temporary.

“You let him talk to you,” Ares said, circling just enough to make his presence unavoidable. “You laugh at him. Threaten him. But you don’t dismiss him the way you do me.”

Percy snorted. “You’re not exactly subtle.”

“No,” Ares agreed, stopping in front of him. “I’m honest.”

The silence stretched, tight and vibrating. Ares reached out—not to touch Percy, not yet—but to the edge of his power, letting it brush against him like the first clash of shields. Percy inhaled sharply. His stance shifted, bracing, feet planting as if against a tide.

“See?” Ares murmured. “You answer me.”

Percy’s jaw set. “Don’t flatter yourself.”

Ares laughed, low and rough, and stepped in. Close enough now that Percy had to tilt his head back just slightly. Close enough to feel the heat rolling off him, the relentless forward pull of a god who did not ask permission. His hand came up—not gentle, not cruel—and caught the front of Percy’s shirt, fingers curling into the fabric.

“You wear too many layers,” Ares said.

He yanked.

The sound of tearing cloth cut clean through the night. The shirt gave way under divine strength, fabric ripping open and sliding uselessly down Percy’s arms. Bare skin met war-warmed air. Percy sucked in a breath, more startled than hurt, muscles instinctively flexing as he shoved the ruined shirt off completely.

For a heartbeat, neither of them moved. Ares’s gaze dragged over Percy’s exposed chest with open, unapologetic intent, like a general assessing a battlefield he already knew would be his. Sweat, salt, scars earned honestly. Strength that hadn’t been forged for display, only survival.

“Yes,” Ares said softly, reverently. “That’s better.”

Percy’s pulse thundered visibly in his throat, but his chin stayed lifted, defiant as ever. “You rip my clothes,” he said, voice steady, “you’re buying me new ones.”

Ares’s grin was all teeth and promise.

“Oh,” he said. “I intend to give you far more than that.”

Notes:

Kyaaaaa Percy has finally met the two suitorsssss

Chapter 10: A talk with dad

 

Ares did not touch him again. That, more than the torn shirt or the heat still licking the air, was what unsettled him. Percy stood bare-chested in the dim square, night wind brushing over skin still warm from work and gods alike. The village slept on, oblivious, while two forces that should never have been left unsupervised regarded each other in silence. Ares let it stretch. Let Percy feel the absence where pressure had been. War was not only the clash. It was the pause before the blow, the moment where breath was held and fate decided whether to move or break.

“You’re tired,” Ares said at last.

Percy barked a short laugh. “That’s your big insight?”

Ares stepped aside, breaking the direct line between them, and gestured toward the low stone bench near the extinguished hearth. It was an invitation, not an order. Percy eyed him suspiciously, then the bench, then rolled his shoulders with a quiet wince he probably thought went unnoticed.

He sat.

Ares followed, close but not crowding. The heat of him lingered regardless, a constant presence like banked coals. From this angle, Percy could see him more clearly without the weight of confrontation pressing in. No armor. No spectacle. Just a god built like conflict given flesh, scars etched into him like history that refused to fade.

“You fed an army,” Ares said. “You cleaned their mess. You sent the Sun packing. And you’re still thinking about sleep instead of triumph.”

Percy leaned forward, forearms on his knees. “Someone had to make sure they didn’t starve. And dishes don’t clean themselves.”

Ares watched the muscles in Percy’s back shift with the movement, strong and unguarded. He felt something unfamiliar tighten low in his chest. Not hunger. Not anger.

Respect, sharp and dangerous.

“Do you know why that bothers gods?” Ares asked.

Percy glanced sideways. “Because it’s boring?”

“Because it’s final,” Ares replied. “You don’t wait for songs. You don’t wait for permission. You finish things.”

Silence settled again, heavier now, threaded with understanding Percy didn’t quite want but wasn’t pushing away either. The sea murmured distantly, waves breaking in a steady rhythm that echoed Percy’s breathing.

“You ripped my shirt,” Percy said after a moment, clearly changing the subject. “That’s still rude.”

Ares huffed a laugh. “It offended me.”

“My shirt offended you.” Said Percy, deadpan. 

“Mortal fabric trying to pretend it can contain you?” Ares shrugged. “Yes.”

Percy shook his head, lips twitching despite himself. “You’re unbelievable.”

“And yet,” Ares said, leaning back slightly, giving him space while never truly retreating, “you didn’t tell me to leave.”

Percy opened his mouth, then paused. The truth hovered there, inconvenient and undeniable. He exhaled slowly. “You didn’t lie. Or threaten. Or try to impress me.”

Ares turned his head, eyes catching the firelight, softer now but no less intense. “Those are tools for men who need them.”

The quiet stretched again, but it was different this time. Not tense. Weighted. Like the stillness before dawn. Ares stood, the movement unhurried. He reached down, not to grab, not to claim, but to hook a finger briefly under the strap of Percy’s discarded shirt where it lay crumpled on the stones. He lifted it, examined the torn fabric with something like disdain, and let it drop again.

“Rest,” he said. “I won’t take what’s already worn thin.”

Percy looked up at him, startled despite himself. “That’s it?”

“For tonight,” Ares said, gaze lingering one last time on bare skin, on the steady heart beneath it. “War does not rush what is inevitable.”

The pressure lifted. The night loosened its grip. When Percy blinked, Ares was already gone, leaving only warmth in the air and the unmistakable sense that something had shifted—quietly, irrevocably.

Percy sat there a long moment before standing. He picked up the ruined shirt, snorted softly, and draped it over his shoulder.

“Figures,” he muttered, heading for his hut. “I finally get peace and quiet, and it comes with emotional warfare.”

Behind him, unseen, the sea laughed.

———

Percy slept, but it was not rest.

His dreams were usually fragments—a flash of his mom’s smile, the taste of a blue cookie, the feeling of wind over water as he rode a pegasus. Tonight, the dream had a texture, a pressure, a scent of deep ocean trenches.

He stood on the sea floor, yet he could breathe. Around him stretched an endless, silent forest of black coral and glowing anemones. In the distance, the Leviathan moved, a shadow against darker depths.

Before him, on a throne of living pearl and basalt, sat Poseidon. Not the version who visited his hut, but the God-King in his full, ancient aspect. His beard was threaded with the bones of sea dragons, his eyes held the chill of the abyssal plain. The weight of his regard was a physical force, pressing the water around Percy into something as solid as glass.

“You are making a habit of entertaining unworthy guests, my son.”

Percy, even in the dream, crossed his arms. The water didn’t hinder the motion. “You mean the ones who aren’t you? Yeah, well, they don’t take ‘go away’ for an answer. Must run in the family.”

A flicker of something like amusement passed through the god’s stormy eyes, but it was swallowed by a deeper, more turbulent concern. “Ares came to you. Touched you.”

It wasn’t a question. Percy felt a flush of irritation—and something else, a prickle of defensiveness he didn’t want to examine. “He ripped my shirt. Big dramatic statement. I’ve had worse from laundry machines.”

“Do not be flippant,” Poseidon’s voice boomed, a sound that vibrated in Percy’s bones. “He marked you with his attention. In the old ways, that is a claim as sure as a brand. Apollo lingers in your air like perfume. They circle you as sharks circle a beacon in the deep.”

“Let them circle,” Percy shot back, the dream-water churning with his frustration. “I’m not a beacon. I’m a person. I said no.”

“Your ‘no’ is a challenge to them!” Poseidon rose from his throne, and the entire seabed trembled. “You stand still in the current, Percy. You believe your refusal is a wall. To gods like them, to forces like us, it is not a wall. It is the eye of the storm. The most compelling thing in existence is a power that refuses to be moved. You are not just saying no to their advances. You are proving you have a will that might withstand theirs. There is no greater aphrodisiac to the divine than potential conquest.”

The words landed like depth charges. Percy wanted to argue, to scoff, but the terrible truth of them seeped into the dream. His stubbornness, his exhaustion, his very refusal to play their games… it was all part of what made him irresistible. He was the unbreakable wave. And every god with a taste for dominion wanted to be the one to finally make him break.

“It is not just the two of them,” Poseidon continued, his voice dropping to a grave, grating whisper. The water grew colder. “Athena dissects your every action in her mind, turning your kindness into strategy, your resilience into a fascinating new theorem of power. Aphrodite weaves your name into the gossamer of mortal longing, making the very idea of you a symbol of ultimate romance. Even Zeus watches, measuring your strength against his throne. Hera’s jealousy is a poison, but the curiosity of the others… it is a slow fire. They will all want a piece of the mystery. A taste of the demigod who told Apollo to do the dishes and made Ares rilled in his hunger.”

Percy felt a cold that had nothing to do with the dream-sea. It was the chill of inevitability. He was a rock in a stream, and the entire pantheon was the coming flood.

“I can bring you home,” Poseidon said, and for the first time, his voice was not a command, but an offer, layered with a desperate paternal need. “To my palace. The waters there are under my complete dominion. No god may enter uninvited. You would be safe. You could have anything you desire. Libraries of lost knowledge. Gardens of bioluminescent coral. You could rule as a true Prince of the Seas, and never again be troubled by the petty, hungry eyes of Olympus.”

The image was seductive. Safety. Privacy. An end to the endless pressure. He could almost feel the quiet of those sun-dappled underwater halls.

But then he saw other images. The villagers of Krokyleia waking to find him gone. Lysandros’s confused face. Elpis’s worry. The simple, solid weight of a well-mended net in his hands. The taste of bread he’d baked himself, shared.

He wasn’t just a prize or a prince. He was Percy. And Percy didn’t run and hide while people who counted on him were left wondering.

He looked up at his father, the god who offered him a gilded cage at the bottom of the sea. “No.”

Poseidon’s face darkened like a squall line. “You would choose a mortal village over your own safety? Over your rightful place?”

“I’m choosing to finish what I started,” Percy said, his voice firm in the watery dream. “I’m not leaving them to wonder where I went. I’m not trading one set of expectations for another, even if yours come with a fancier address.” He met the god’s turbulent gaze. “They’re my people now. And I don’t abandon my people.”

For a long, suspended moment, Poseidon simply stared. The pressure in the dream built to an almost unbearable intensity. Percy braced for an earthquake, a tidal wave of divine displeasure.

Then, slowly, the pressure eased. The God-King’s expression shifted from anger to something vastly more complex—a grudging, awe-struck, terrifying pride.

“You truly are my son,” Poseidon murmured, the words resonating with a note of fatalistic wonder. “Stubborn as the bedrock, loyal as the tide. You will not be moved. Not by fear. Not by flattery. Not even by me.” He shook his head, a massive, slow motion. “Then you must understand the consequence. By standing still, you make yourself the axis on which their world now turns. The suitors will come. The games will escalate. You have told the storm to come. And it will.”

The dream began to dissolve, the coral forest fading. Poseidon’s form grew translucent.

“Be ready, Percy Jackson,” his voice echoed, fading into the sigh of the deep. “You have chosen the weight of the world. Now you must learn to bear it.”

Percy woke with a gasp, not in panic, but as if surfacing from a great depth. Dawn was just a grey suggestion at the mouth of his hut. The weight of the dream—the warning, the pride, the terrible, freeing choice—settled onto his shoulders, heavier than any monster.

He had drawn a line. Not just for Ares and Apollo, but for all of them. For his father. For himself.

He was staying.

Let the gods come. Let them try their tricks, their threats, their grand romantic gestures.

He was Percy Jackson. He had faced Titans. He had turned down godhood. He had made a sun god do dishes.

And he was not moving.

 

Notes:

How’s the story progressing for you all? Good? Bad?
Tell meeee

Chapter 11: Getting back to the old route

Notes:

HELLOOO MY LOVELIES🥹🥹
First of all, Merry Christmas to all of you that are celebrating and Happy Early New Year’s 🥰
I just want to say thank you so much for loving this story of mine and your words gave me so much motivation!!!
Here’s the newest chapterrrr

 

The dream with his father left a sediment of unease in Percy’s gut, but the dawn brought its usual demands. There were nets to be inspected for the morning catch, a crack in the communal oven’s clay dome to patch, and young Agape was vibrating with excitement to show him she could write her entire name without help.

As he moved through the familiar tasks, his hands working on autopilot, his mind churned in a quieter, deeper current.

Home.

The word was a talisman, a dull ache, a fading photograph. For weeks, it had been his only compass point. Get back to his mom. Get back to Annabeth and Grover. Get back to a world where pizza existed and gods were, if not less annoying, at least filtered through the familiarity of his own century.

But now, when he tried to focus on that magnetic pull, the image wavered.

It was replaced by the feel of coarse salt between his fingers as he mended a net with old Leodes, the man’s quiet stories of his youth on the water weaving a new kind of history around him. It was the triumphant, gap-toothed grin on Lysandros’s face when he finally landed a solid hit during stick-fighting practice. It was the weight of a sleeping child trusting enough to doze off in his lap by the fire. It was the simple, profound satisfaction in Elpis’s eyes when he’d improved her fish-curing method.

He was building something here. Not a legend, not a throne. A place.

The conflict was a silent storm inside him. To want to go home was a fundamental part of who he was—the son who loved his mother, the friend who missed his partners in saving the world. That desire was an anchor, keeping him from dissolving entirely into this strange, ancient sea.

But the anchor was also holding him here. He had responsibilities. He had… people.

He sat on a sun-warmed rock at the edge of the cove, watching the fishermen haul in the first catch. The net was heavy and silver with life. They laughed, a rough, joyous sound. A month ago, their laughter had been tinged with a fear of bandits and empty bellies. Now, it was full-throated and free. He had done that.

If I find a way back, the thought came, unbidden and cruel, what happens to them?

Would the bandits return the moment he vanished? Would a less scrupulous king simply conquer the now-prosperous village? Would the fragile peace he’d helped build wash away like a sandcastle in the tide of this brutal age?

The selfish part of him screamed that it wasn’t his problem. He was a castaway, not a founding father. His duty was to his own time, his own loved ones.

But the louder part, the part that felt more like Percy, whispered that duty wasn’t something you could segment so neatly. He had stepped into their lives. He had become part of their story. To leave now would feel less like a rescue and more like a betrayal.

He thought of Annabeth. She of all people would understand. She’d talk about the architect’s responsibility to the structure once the first stone was laid. She’d call it a “loaded choice” and then give him that look that saw right through his bravado. You love them, she’d say, matter-of-factly. It’s okay to love more than one place.

But Annabeth wasn’t here. He was alone with the salt air and the weight of a decision he wasn’t ready to make.

The horizon, where the sky met the wine-dark sea, was a line of infinite possibility. Somewhere beyond it was Manhattan, Camp Half-Blood, his old life. It was also the direction from which gods and kings would inevitably sail, bringing their chaos with them.

He was attached. Profoundly, inconveniently attached. To the smell of thyme on the hillside. To the stubborn resilience of these people. To the way the light hit the water here, different from Long Island Sound, but beautiful in its own ancient way.

He couldn’t abandon the search for a way home. The pull was still there, a hook in his heart. But the thought of leaving now, of turning this village back into a memory for himself and a vulnerability for them, twisted something tight in his chest.

“Percy!” Lysandros’s voice broke his reverie. The boy was running toward him, holding a piece of broken pottery with shaky charcoal letters. “Look! I wrote ‘fish’! For the catch!”

Percy took the shard. The letters were wobbly, but they were there. A simple, mortal miracle. He looked from the boy’s proud, shining face to the vast, unknowable sea.

The anchor held fast. The horizon beckoned.

And Percy Jackson, for the first time, truly understood that no matter which direction he chose, a part of him would forever be left behind, yearning for the other shore. He was no longer just lost in time.

He was torn.

~~~

The rhythm of the village was a balm. Percy fell into it with a determined focus, as if by sealing every crack in every pot, by hauling every net, he could outrun the silent conflict churning within him. He was sweating under the midday sun, helping to reinforce the supports for a new storage hut, when a shadow fell across his work.

It was old Theron, not Leodes the head elder, but his quieter counterpart, a man whose face was a map of sun and sea etched with deep, kind lines. He leaned on his walking stick, watching Percy’s efficient, powerful movements for a moment.

“The work goes well,” Theron observed, his voice a soft rasp.

“Should hold through the winter,” Percy grunted, securing a leather tie with a firm yank.

Theron nodded. There was a comfortable silence, filled only with the distant cries of gulls and the tap of his stick on the hard ground. Then, he spoke again, his tone gentle, devoid of any pressure. “Young one… have your thoughts found a path? A way back to the home you speak of in your stories?”

Percy’s hands stilled on the wooden beam. The question, asked so simply, so kindly, felt like a sudden gust of wind stripping away all his busywork. He straightened up, wiping sweat from his brow with the back of his arm. He couldn’t meet Theron’s eyes.

“I, uh…” he started, his voice uncharacteristically hesitant. The sass, the defiance, the confident bluster—it all evaporated under the elder’s gentle gaze. “I’ve been… a little sidetracked.”

The admission was soft, almost sheepish. He gestured vaguely around them—at the half-built hut, at the village buzzing with peaceful industry, at the children playing a complicated game involving a ball of rags and a lot of shouting. “There’s just… always something that needs doing.”

He expected disappointment. A reminder of his duty to his own people. A nudge to focus on his own destiny.

Theron’s response was a slow, warm smile that crinkled the corners of his eyes into a thousand more kindly lines. He reached out a gnarled hand and placed it on Percy’s sun-warmed forearm, a touch as light and grounding as a butterfly.

“A blessing,” the old man said, his voice firm with conviction, “is not a loan to be repaid on a schedule. It is a gift that settles where it will and grows roots. You have been sidetracked by life, Percy. By the needs of the day. By the hearts of those around you. There is no shame in that. There is only honor.”

Percy felt a lump form in his throat. He stared at the weathered hand on his arm.

“We are simple people,” Theron continued. “We do not understand the machinations of kings or the hungers of gods. But we understand a good heart. We understand strong hands that build instead of break. If your path leads you home across the stars or the sea, we will send you with our thanks and our love, and we will tell your stories until the stones of our huts crumble to sand.”

He paused, his dark eyes holding Percy’s with an intensity that saw everything. “And if your path… if your heart… finds that it has already grown roots in this rocky, salty soil, then here you will stay. Not as a guest, not as a protector, but as one of us. Our home will be your home. Always. You are our blessing. But you are also your own man. We will support you in whatever you choose.”

The words were a release of pressure Percy hadn’t even fully acknowledged. The weight of their dependence, the fear of abandoning them, the guilt of wanting to stay—Theron took it all, acknowledged it, and gave him permission. Permission to choose. Without conditions.

Percy couldn’t speak. He just nodded, a quick, tight movement, and squeezed the old man’s hand once before turning back to the beam, his vision suspiciously blurry.

He worked in a daze for another hour, Theron’s words echoing in the spaces between the hammer blows. Sidetracked by life. Was that it? Was choosing a present, tangible good over a distant, uncertain return not a failure, but a different kind of journey?

Exhaustion, deeper than physical, settled into his bones. It was the fatigue of emotional whiplash—godly confrontations, royal demands, paternal warnings, and now this profound, unconditional acceptance.

He found Leodes and muttered something about checking the tidal pools. Instead, he retreated to the quiet dimness of his hut. The pallet of straw and wool, which had once felt like a temporary camp, now held the familiar indent of his body, the scent of sun and sea that was becoming his own.

He lay down, the echoes of the village softening into a distant hum. Theron’s words played on a loop in his mind, a soothing counter-melody to the drumbeat of home-home-home.

You are our blessing. But you are also your own man.

The conflict didn’t vanish, but it quieted. For the first time, it felt less like a war inside him and more like two truths that could, perhaps, coexist.

As sleep pulled him under, the dream that came was not of deep ocean thrones or stormy gods.

It was of his mother’s apartment. The specific, comforting smell of it—lemon polish, old books, and something uniquely Sally—filled his senses. He saw the blue blanket on the couch, the faint water stain on the ceiling he’d always meant to fix. He heard the muffled sound of traffic from the street below, a sound he’d hated but now yearned for with a physical ache.

He saw his mom at the stove, her back to him, humming as she stirred a pot. She turned, and her smile was exactly as he remembered—warm, a little tired, and holding the entire universe of her love for him.

“Hey, sweetie,” she said, as if he’d just come home from school. “You look like you’ve had a day. Hungry?”

He tried to answer, to run to her, but his feet were rooted to the spot. He could only watch, drinking in the details: the chipped blue mug by the sink, the lopsided clay ashtray he’d made in third grade that she still used for paperclips.

Then, the dream shifted subtly. He wasn’t in the apartment anymore, but the feeling of it lingered. He was in a place of soft, golden light that felt like his mother’s hug. And a voice, not his mother’s, but familiar in its gentle wisdom, seemed to whisper on the edges of the light.

“The heart is not a place, my son. It is the capacity to make one. You can build a home wherever you are brave enough to love.”

Percy slept on, tears drying on his cheeks in the dim hut, suspended perfectly between the ache of one home and the burgeoning love for another, cradled for a moment in a dream that offered no answers, only the profound reassurance that he was, and would always be, loved.

Chapter 12: Farewell

The air in Krokyleia hummed with a different energy. It wasn’t the tense buzz of impending threat, nor the quiet murmur of daily toil. It was the warm, fragrant, bittersweet hum of a feast. Percy had commandeered the central fire pit and every available hearth. For hours, he’d worked in focused, silent intensity, a one-man kitchen battalion.

He’d smoked whole sides of the morning’s largest catch with wild rosemary and thyme until the flesh was tender and flaky. He’d simmered a vast cauldron of barley and lentil stew, enriching it with every last precious vegetable from the village plots and a startlingly good fish stock he’d made from the bones. Flatbreads, brushed with garlic-infused oil, baked on hot stones until they were golden and crisp. He even produced a kind of rough, sweet paste from mashed dried figs and the last of the season’s honey, a dessert that made the children’s eyes go wide.

It was a meal of gratitude, of surplus, of love. And everyone knew it.

As the sun began to sink, painting the sky in shades of flame and violet, the entire village gathered. They ate in a silence that was not awkward, but profound, savoring each flavor as if committing it to memory. Percy moved among them, refilling bowls, accepting quiet thanks with a nod, but his usual easy smile was tempered by a gravity that stilled the usual laughter.

When the last bit of fig paste was scraped from the communal bowl and the fire burned down to a bed of glowing coals, Percy stood. He didn’t need to call for attention. Every eye was already on him, reflecting the firelight.

He looked at them—at Elpis with her strong, flour-dusted hands, at Leodes and Theron with their wise, weathered faces, at Lysandros trying to look brave, at little Agape clutching her mother’s skirt.

“I… made all this because I had to say thank you,” he began, his voice rough. He cleared his throat. “When I washed up here, I was lost. In every way. You didn’t have to take me in. You didn’t have to trust me. But you did. You gave me a place. You became my people.”

He paused, gathering the words. The villagers leaned forward, their faces soft with dread and understanding.

“My home… the one I came from… it’s still out there,” he said, his gaze drifting to the star-dusted horizon. “I have people there I love, who are probably worried sick. A mom who…” His voice hitched. He pushed on. “I can’t stop looking for a way back to them. It’s a part of me.”

A soft murmur of sorrow rippled through the crowd. Elpis wiped her eyes with a corner of her shawl.

“So, I’m going to leave,” Percy said, the words finally out, hanging in the smoky air. “Not tonight. But soon. I need to go to a city—Pylos, maybe, or somewhere with traders, scholars, anyone who might know about… about paths between worlds. I have to try.”

He looked back at them, his sea-green eyes glowing with an emotion so fierce it was almost palpable. “I don’t know if I’ll find a way. But I have to look. And I wanted you to know. I wanted to say thank you, for everything. For showing me that home isn’t just a place you’re from. It’s a place you make. And you… you all helped me make one here, when I needed it most.”

As he spoke, something happened. It wasn’t a trick of the firelight. The villagers saw it, a collective intake of breath held behind tearful eyes.

Percy seemed to glow.

Not with divine radiance, but with the profound, aching beauty of a soul fully realized. It was in the set of his shoulders, bearing the weight of a painful choice with honor. It was in the clarity of his eyes, no longer clouded by confusion, but shining with resolved purpose. It was the raw, vulnerable truth of his love for them and his duty to others, woven together in his expression. The power in him, the siren’s truth, the storm’s grace—it all seemed to harmonize in that moment into something heartbreakingly luminous. He was more beautiful than they had ever seen him, because he was most truly, heartbreakingly himself.

They saw it. But not a single person spoke of it. To remark on it would have broken the sacredness of the moment. This was his truth, his farewell, and they would hold it in their hearts, unspoiled.

Tears flowed freely now. Lysandros sniffled loudly, trying to be a man. Agape began to cry quietly. The elders nodded, their own eyes bright.

Leodes stood, slowly, leaning on his staff. He walked to Percy and placed both hands on his shoulders. “You have given us more than safety, Percy Jackson,” he said, his voice thick. “You have given us hope. You have shown us a different kind of strength. Go. Seek your first home. And know this: a place is always waiting for you here. You will always have a hearth, a net to mend, and a family in Krokyleia. You are not leaving us. You are giving us a reason to watch the horizon.”

It was the perfect thing to say. It didn’t chain him with guilt. It set him free with love.

One by one, the villagers came forward. Not to beg him to stay, but to touch his arm, to clasp his hand, to offer a whispered blessing. They pressed small gifts into his hands—a carved wooden hook from Phemius the bard, a pouch of precious salt from Elpis, a perfectly smooth skipping stone from Lysandros.

Percy accepted them all, his throat too tight for words.

Later, as the village settled into a somber, loving quiet, Percy stood once more at the edge of the cove. The moon painted a silver path on the water, a path that led away.

He felt the conflict still, the ache of impending separation. But it was clean now. Honored. He had made a choice, and he had been given the incredible gift of being understood.

He wasn’t running from Krokyleia. He was carrying it with him. And with its love as his compass, he would try to find his way back to another shore, holding both homes in his newly vast and aching heart.

~~~

The moon-path on the water shuddered, then dissolved into a frenzy of silver foam. The gentle lap of waves against the shore stilled, replaced by a profound, pressurized silence. The air grew dense with the scent of cold abyss and agitated ozone.

Percy didn't turn. He knew the feel of this particular storm before it broke.

"You are leaving."

Poseidon's voice wasn't a question. It was a judgment issued from the deep, vibrating up through the sand into the bones of Percy's feet. The god didn't emerge in glory. He coalesced from the darkened sea, water streaming from his form like a cloak of liquid night. He stood on the surf, his expression unreadable in the moonlight, but his eyes were two points of churning, storm-lit fury.

Percy kept his gaze on the now-choppy horizon. "I'm looking for a way home. Yeah."

A low growl, like continents grinding, emanated from the god.

"This is your home! I have felt you put down roots here! You have a place here! A people who revere you! Why would you abandon the sanctuary you have built for the uncertainty of a past that may not even exist for you anymore?"

Finally, Percy turned to face him. There was no defiance in his posture, only a weary resolve that seemed to infuriate Poseidon more than any rebellion. "It's not an abandonment. They understand that."

"They are mortals! They understand nothing of the currents of fate!" Poseidon took a heavy step forward, the water recoiling from him as if afraid. "I have been lurking, as you so quaintly put it, in these waters for weeks. Guarding. Waiting. Ensuring no further… nonsense… reached these shores. And I have felt you settle. I have felt your power calm, like the sea after a tempest. It was… good."

The admission was raw, almost bewildered. The God of the Sea was confessing to a sense of paternal peace.

"And now you would rip that root up? Throw yourself back into the chaos of searching, making yourself a beacon again for every power that seeks to use you?" Poseidon's voice rose to a crashing timbre. "The moment you step onto a road, Ares will find you. Apollo will serenade you at every crossroads. Hera may send more than monsters! Here, you are protected."

"I'm know," Percy shot back, the word quiet but sharp as a harpoon tip. "Here, I'm waiting. For them to come, for the next crisis, for my life to be decided by who shows up on the beach. I can't just… hide forever, Dad. Not even in a place I love. I have to move. I have to try."

He called him ‘Dad’. Not ‘Father’ or ‘Lord Poseidon’. In the midst of the refusal, it was an affirmation of the bond, even as he rejected the terms.

Poseidon stared at him. The fury drained away, replaced by a look of such profound, bewildered respect it was staggering. His son was choosing the uncertain journey over the gilded cage. Choosing active, risky hope over passive, secure sorrow. It was the choice of a true hero. The choice Poseidon, in his divine scheming, had not truly anticipated.

"To what end?" Poseidon boomed. "To return to a time that has forgotten you? To a mother who has likely mourned and moved on? You speak of duty to them, but what of your duty to yourself? To the power you are? You could be a prince here! A power in this age! You could carve a kingdom from the sea and shore that would make Troy and Mycenae look like sandcastles!"

Percy stared at his father, at the ancient, possessive love and towering frustration in his face. He understood it. For the first time, he saw the god not as an obstacle or a cryptic ally, but as a father who saw his son choosing a path of pain and was trying, in his own disastrous way, to bar the gate.

Percy's voice softened. "That's not who I am. I'm not a kingdom-carver. I'm… I'm a guy who tries to fix things. Who tries to get back to the people he promised he'd see again. Maybe it's impossible. Maybe my mom is ninety years old now, or maybe time doesn't work like that. But if I stay here, safe and still, because I'm afraid of the searching… then I'm not the person any of you think I am. Not the person they love." He nodded back toward the silent village. "Not the son you're… proud of."

Poseidon flinched as if struck. The storm in his eyes faltered, revealing a yawning, vulnerable depth beneath.

"I have sat in the deep and listened to your laughter with them," the god said, his voice suddenly quieter, the crash of waves fading to a murmur. "I have felt the truth in your song. It is a new thing in this world. A gentle strength. I do not want it… lost. Or worse, tainted by the petty schemes of my family."

"It won't be," Percy said, with a conviction he didn't entirely feel. "Because it's mine. And I'm taking it with me."

The silence that followed was vast, filled only with the sigh of the deep. Poseidon looked at his son—really looked—at the resolve etched in his young face, at the shoulders that had carried monsters and kings and now bore the weight of this impossible choice.

The god’s shoulders, usually a range of tectonic power, slumped a fraction. The fight drained out of him, replaced by a resigned, fearful pride that was infinitely more powerful.

"Then you will not go alone into the wilderness of men and gods," Poseidon stated, his tone leaving no room for argument. "You will have a guide from the sea. A companion who knows the coasts and currents of this age, who can navigate you to those who might have the knowledge you seek."

Percy blinked. "A guide? Like… a dolphin?"

A ghost of Poseidon's usual smugness touched his lips. "Something more substantial. And less chatty." He lifted a hand, and the sea a hundred yards out began to swirl, a vortex forming in the moonlit water. "I have lurked. I have also prepared."

From the swirling depths, a shape rose. It was a boat, but unlike any Percy had seen in the village. It was long, sleek, and carved from a dark, iridescent wood that seemed to drink the moonlight. Its single sail was furled, but the fabric shimmered with a faint, internal phosphorescence. It looked fast, silent, and utterly otherworldly.

"A gift," Poseidon said. "It will answer your will on the water as easily as you answer mine. It needs no crew. It will take you where you need to go." He fixed Percy with a final, intense stare. "And it is bound to me. Wherever it sails, I will know. If the need is great… I will come."

It wasn't a offer of control. It was a lifeline. An acknowledgment that Percy's path was his own, but he would not be cut adrift.

Percy looked from the miraculous ship to his father's worried, proud, furious face. The last of his resistance crumbled. He nodded, a single, tight dip of his chin. "Thank you."

Poseidon stepped back, dissolving into sea spray and mist. His final words whispered on the salt breeze, a mixture of a blessing and a threat, a father's love in its rawest, most turbulent form:

"Find your way, my son. And then… find your way back."

The mysterious boat bobbed gently on the calm water, waiting. Percy stood on the shore, caught between the sleeping village at his back and the vast, unknown journey ahead, held in the precarious, loving grasp of the deep.

Notes:

Too many chapters have been stuck in my notes app, sooo I’m going full swing in updating y’all 🤗

Chapter 13: Goddesses thoughts

Notes:

I’ve always wanted to add the goddesses POV in my stories so here it issss.
Tell me how you guys feel about this chapter?

 

Hera’s sanctum on Olympus was not a place of light and music. It was a hall of perfect, cold order. Marble floors gleamed with a sterile sheen, not a speck of dust daring to trespass. Looms of gold and silver stood idle, for the fabrics woven here were of abstract concepts—marital fidelity, the unbroken line of succession—not mere cloth. The air smelled of citrus and cold stone, and the silence was absolute, a weapon she honed daily.

Yet, within that flawless silence, the Queen of the Gods seethed.

Perched on a throne of ivory and platinum, her face was a mask of regal composure. But her knuckles, where they rested on the armrests, were bone-white. In her mind’s eye, she replayed the failures.

The bandits, scattered like chaff. The Teumessian Vrox, a rare and terrible weapon from the earth’s dark belly, turned into a grotesque seaside monument. Each attempt had not just failed; it had been met with a casual, almost bored efficacy that was its own form of insult. He hadn’t even seemed surprised.

Worse than the failures were the echoes. The reports from her spies, the whispers in the wind that carried snippets of the demigod’s speech.

“She tried to kill me when I was a baby too, according to the stories.”

The words rattled in the perfect chamber of her mind. He had said it to Poseidon, with the air of someone stating a well-known, mildly annoying fact. Like commenting on a chronic toothache.

But Hera had no memory of it.

She, who remembered every slight, every infidelity, every moment of disrespect since the dawn of creation, had no recollection of targeting an infant son of Poseidon. She would have. She made a point of it. The offspring of her husband’s dalliances were blights to be scrubbed from the tapestry of fate, their names and faces etched into her wrath. She could recall the attempted smothering of Dionysus, the serpents sent for infant Heracles… but this Percy? Nothing.

And yet, he spoke of it with such certainty. Not as a guess, but as history.

“Guess some things are timeless.”

That was the other phrase that needled her. His tone had been weary, almost… familiar. As if he had dealt with her particular brand of jealousy not as a divine force of nature, but as a recurring, predictable nuisance. Like a leak in a roof that always drips in the same spot during a storm.

It was infuriating. It was illogical.

She rose from her throne, her peplos of starched, celestial white whispering against the marble as she paced. Her reflection in a vast, polished bronze mirror was flawless: the severe beauty, the coiled power. The perfect Queen.

But the demigod’s words suggested a crack in that perfection. A history where she had acted, and he had survived, and she had… forgotten?

Impossible.

Unless…

Her pacing stopped. Her eyes, the color of a winter sky, hardened.

There were powers older than the Titans. There were currents in the cosmos even the Fates did not fully control. Prophecies could be murky, timelines could fray. What if this boy was not just from another place, but from… another thread?

A strand of reality where her actions against him had occurred, woven into his past, but not into hers?

The theory was preposterous. Dangerous. It implied a fragility in her own reality, a version of herself she could not remember and thus could not control.

If that were true, then this demigod was more than a disruption. He was a contradiction. A living, breathing anomaly that proved her wrath was not absolute, her memory not infallible.

He was proof that a version of Hera could fail, and that failure could be so insignificant to the cosmos that she herself would not recall it.

That was a poison far more deadly than any demigod’s power. It undermined the very foundation of her being: her eternal, perfect, unforgiving consistency.

A cold, calculating hatred, purer and more focused than her earlier jealous rage, crystallized within her. He could not be allowed to wander the world, a walking testament to her possible imperfection. He could not be allowed to become the cherished consort of Ares or the muse of Apollo, his story sung for eons, always containing that offhanded, damning line about her.

Killing him outright was proving difficult. Poseidon’s protection was now overt, a declared edict. An open attack would mean war with the Earthshaker, and Zeus would not tolerate that, not over a demigod.

But there were other ways to erase a contradiction.

She could not kill the boy. Not directly.

But she could make him unreal.

She could weave a prison not of walls, but of obscurity.

A place outside of stories, outside of time’s steady flow, where he would fade into a forgotten footnote, and with him, any memory of a Hera who failed. She could hand him over to a power that specialized in such eternal, quiet annihilations. A power that owed her a favor.

A slow, icy smile touched Hera’s perfect lips. She turned from the mirror, her plan forming with the cold precision of a diamond taking shape under pressure.

Let Poseidon guard the physical coasts. Let Ares and Apollo dream of their conquests.

She would target something far more fundamental: Percy’s place in the story itself. She would send him to be forgotten, and in his forgetting, the unsettling echo of her own forgotten failure would be silenced forever.

The Queen of Heaven returned to her throne, the sterile silence of her sanctum now humming with a new, malicious purpose. The game was no longer about jealousy. It was about existential erasure.

~~~

 

The clearing was silver and still, a pocket of eternal twilight in the deep woods of Arcadia. Here, the air was clean, sharp with the scent of pine, damp earth, and cold starlight. No birdcall, no rustle of a careless beast disturbed the sacred quiet.

Artemis, Goddess of the Hunt, sat on a moss-covered log, a whetstone in one hand, a silver hunting knife in the other. The rhythmic shhhk-shhhk-shhhk of stone on celestial bronze was the only sound, a metronome for her thoughts.

Around her, in disciplined silence, her Hunters tended to their gear or rested, a constellation of vigilant, immortal girls.

Her brothers’ newest obsession was a persistent gnawing at the edge of her awareness, like the distant, irritating buzz of a mosquito.

Ares, all brute heat and possessive bluster. Apollo, with his golden vanity and artistic hunger. Both fixated on a single demigod boy. It was absurd. A waste of divine energy that could be spent tracking the great stag of Ceryneia or cleansing a grove of defiling spirits.

Percy, The Blessed One.

The name meant nothing to her woods. The boars did not scent him. The wolves did not howl his name. He was a rumor from the world of men and the petty dramas of the coastal gods.

She dragged the stone along the blade’s edge, her movements precise, automatic. A flicker of the recent Olympian council played behind her silver eyes: Apollo’s rapt description of a ‘truth-song,’ Ares’s growled assessment of battle-spirit. Her lip had curled then. So the boy could fight and sing. So could many mortals, before they died.

And yet.

Her sharp mind, as adept at dissection as her blade, could not entirely dismiss the evidence. Nestor of Pylos, turned away not by force of arms, but by a wave summoned with a lazy hand. A Teumessian Vrox, a creature of primal earth, frozen into submission not by ice, but by a note.

These were not the acts of a typical hero blundering through on luck and divine favor. There was… familiarity to it. An efficiency that appealed to the hunter in her.

She paused, holding the knife up to a shaft of moonlight filtering through the branches. The edge gleamed, perfect and deadly.

If only he was a girl.

The thought came unbidden, a quiet, pragmatic sigh in her mind. A demigod of that power, that compelling strangeness… if he were female, he would have been a prime candidate for her Hunt. She could see it: the strength in his limbs translated to drawing a bow, the fierce loyalty he showed his village turned to the sacred sisterhood of the Hunt. That stubborn refusal to be claimed by kings or gods? That was the independence she cultivated in her followers.

He would have been magnificent. A huntress without equal, a daughter of the moon in truth.

But he was not. He was a boy. And boys brought complication, division, and eventually, betrayal. They were distractions her Hunt did not need.

Still, the curiosity remained, a burr caught in the pelt of her disdain. What was the source of his power? Not just his father’s gift, but the other thing—the compelling aura, the voice that laid truth bare. It was an ability that felt… adjacent to her own domains. The hunt was about seeing the true nature of the prey, stripping away concealment. His song seemed to do that to hearts. It was a power of revelation, in its own chaotic way.

One of her lieutenants, a lean, dark-haired girl named Cyrene, approached silently. “My Lady,” she murmured, her voice barely a whisper. “The scouts report the Nemean lion has been sighted to the east. Its trail is fresh.”

Artemis nodded, her primary focus instantly locking onto the tangible threat, the clear mission. “Gather the others. We move at moonset.”

Cyrene bowed her head and melted back into the shadows.

The goddess stood, sheathing her newly sharpened knife. The matter of the godling was a diversion, a subplot in the grand, wild narrative of the world she governed. Let her brothers make fools of themselves over him. Let Hera scheme in her cold halls. Let Poseidon puff up with paternal pride.

Her world was here. In the tracking of the great beast, in the loyalty of her sisters, in the clean, simple code of the wild.

Yet, as she moved to join her Hunters, a final, clinical thought passed through her mind, a hunter’s assessment filed away for potential future reference:

The boy is a power. Unaligned. Uncontrolled. In a world of shifting allegiances, such a wild card is a variable. And a hunter must always account for variables.

She would not seek him out. She would not dream of him as her brothers did.

But she would watch. From the shadows of the deep wood, from the cold light of the moon. And if his path ever, foolishly, crossed the sacred trails of her domain, she would be ready to judge him not as a prize or a muse, but as she judged all things: as either prey, predator, or an obstacle to be cleanly, silently circumvented.

With that, Artemis dissolved into the silver gloom, leaving the clearing emptier and colder than before, her fleeting curiosity sealed away beneath the imperative of the hunt.

~~~

The endless, golden fields of Demeter’s personal realm rippled in a warm, eternal breeze. Here, the air was thick with the perfume of a thousand simultaneous harvests: the dusty sweetness of ripe wheat, the pungent earthiness of turned soil, the sharp tang of grapes ready for crushing. It was a symphony of growth, decay, and rebirth, conducted by the steady, ancient heartbeat of the Goddess of the Harvest.

Demeter moved through her fields not as a queen, but as a loving custodian. Her strong, sun-browned hands brushed over heads of grain, her touch ensuring perfect plumpness. Her hair, the color of ripe barley, was braided with stalks of living wheat and late-summer poppies. Her face, usually etched with the deep, calm lines of seasons turning, today held a pensive, curious light.

Her thoughts were not on the coming of autumn, but on a coastal village and the impossible young man at its heart.

The rumors had reached even her fertile, insulated realm. Not the grandiose tales of monster-slaying or king-defying, though those were impressive enough. No, what had truly captured Demeter’s attention were the whispers carried by dryads of the laurel groves and naiads from freshwater springs.

He cooks.

Not as a duty, but as an art. He took the humble bounty of sea and soil and transformed it. The reports were specific: a stew that tasted of profound comfort, fish that seemed to capture the very essence of the ocean’s generosity, bread that was not just sustenance, but a celebration of the grain itself.

Demeter felt a deep, professional respect. This was no mere sustenance. This was honor. He treated her gifts—the barley, the lentils, the herbs, the olives—with a reverence that rivaled her own priests. He didn’t just consume; he elevated. To a goddess whose entire being was tied to the sacred cycle of sowing and reaping, this was the highest form of praise.

She paused by a fig tree, her fingers gently tracing the smooth bark. A smile, rare and uncomplicated, touched her lips. She wished to taste it. Not the ambrosia of Olympus, which was static perfection, but his food—dynamic, mortal, heartfelt. To taste the care in his hands, the respect in his seasoning. It would be a communion of a different kind.

Then, her thoughts drifted to the other rumors. Aphrodite’s delighted sighs, her pronouncements that the son of Poseidon was “the stuff of which legends that last are made.” Demeter, usually at odds with the flighty Goddess of Love, found herself in quiet agreement.

Aphrodite saw romance, passion, the ultimate trophy. Demeter saw something more practical, and thus, more appealing.

She saw a provider. A nurturer. A being of immense power who chose to channel it into healing, teaching, and feeding. He wasn’t just a warrior or a singer; he was a homemaker. In the oldest, most sacred sense of the word. He mended walls and nets. He taught children. He fostered community. These were the virtues that built civilizations, that ensured the harvest was not just eaten, but shared, and that the hearth-fire never went cold.

To have such a being as a spouse… for a god?

It was an unprecedented thought. Gods took consorts for beauty, for political alliance, for passion, for the children they might bear. But for domestic excellence? For the profound, grounding skill of creating a haven?

Demeter’s practical mind saw the immense value. A consort like that would not bring drama or strife to a divine household. He would bring order, warmth, resilience. He would be a stabilizing force, a center of gravity. The home—be it a palace on Olympus, a hall in the deep sea, or a sunlit bower—would be a true sanctuary, a place of genuine nourishment for both body and spirit. He would be not an ornament, but a cornerstone.

She thought of her daughter, Persephone, and the complex, painful cycle of their lives. What would it have been like to have such a steady, nurturing presence in their midst? One who could perhaps bridge the divides, not with power, but with understanding and a good meal?

The appeal was profound. It was an appeal not to her vanity or her passions, but to her deepest nature as the life-giver, the sustainer.

Aphrodite was right, in her way. Percy would be the greatest of spouses. Not because he was the most beautiful or the most powerful (though Demeter’s earthy appreciation acknowledged he was both), but because he possessed the rarest divine quality of all: the ability to create home.

She plucked a perfect, sun-warmed fig and ate it thoughtfully. The sweetness burst on her tongue, a simple, perfect joy.

She would not compete with her nephews. She had no desire for a romantic entanglement. But her respect was given, fully and without reservation. And in the secret, fertile chambers of her heart, the Goddess of the Harvest allowed herself a private, maternal hope: that whoever eventually won the heart of this remarkable demigod would be worthy of the profound, quiet magic he carried. The world, she knew, needed more hearth-keepers and fewer warriors. And this son of Poseidon, against all odds, was both.

Chapter 14: ASKING FOR HELP

Hello everyone!!! I’m sorry but this isn’t a new chapter. 

I want your help to help me add tags to this fic because I seriously don’t know what else to tag. So, my fam, please help me 🥹🥹

 

Just comment down below 

Chapter 15: The Road’s Beckoning

Notes:

HELLOOOO MY WONDERFUL READERSSSS
IT IS FINALLY 2026!!!
HOW Y’ALL FEELING?

Dawn in Krokyleia was a symphony of grey and gold, but today the melody was muted, underscored with the soft, sorrowful notes of farewell. Percy stood in the village square, a solitary figure amidst a quiet bustle. His pack, a gift from Elpis made of sturdy, oiled hide, lay at his feet. It was already heavier than he’d intended.

The villagers had not let him leave empty-handed.

Old Theron had pressed a small, smooth stone into his palm—a piece of the local beach, veined with quartz. “So you remember the color of our shore,” he’d murmured. Leodes had given him a beautifully carved wooden staff, its head shaped like a curling wave, “for the long road ahead.” Elpis had packed enough travel bread, dried fish, and cheese to feed him for a week, her eyes bright with unshed tears. Lysandros had presented him with a crudely woven leather bracelet, his face a mask of fierce, boyish pride. Even little Agape had shyly offered him a perfect, sun-bleached seashell.

His pack held these treasures, along with a water skin, a warm cloak, and the simple bronze dagger Leodes insisted he take. Riptide, ever-present, was a reassuring weight in his pocket.

He had done everything he could to ensure their safety in his absence. He’d spent the last two days reinforcing the palisade at the village’s most vulnerable points, using his power to fuse stones at their base so they stood like teeth of the earth itself. He’d shown the most capable adults and older children a few more defensive moves, his instructions sharp and clear.

Now, as the village gathered to see him off, he felt the weight of their silent, trusting gazes. He had saved them, taught them, fed them. He had become their myth. And he was walking away.

He couldn’t leave it to chance.

Swallowing a lump in his throat, Percy stepped forward to the central well, the heart of the village. He placed both hands on its sun-warmed stone lip. He wasn’t good at prayers. They felt like begging, and Percy Jackson didn’t beg. But this wasn’t for him.

He closed his eyes, shutting out the faces of his friends.

“Dad,” he whispered, the word barely audible. He poured his will into it, not as a command, but as a fervent, heartfelt request. He thought of the laughter by this well, the shared meals, the children’s games. He thought of their courage and their simplicity. He pushed all that feeling outwards, a silent, potent offering on the altar of his affection.

Keep them safe. Please. Let the fish be plentiful in their nets. Let the rain come to their fields but not flood them. Let sickness pass them by. Let anyone who comes here with greed or malice in their heart find the sea restless and the land unyielding. Watch over them. They’re… they’re good people.

He didn’t know if it worked like that. He didn’t know if Poseidon cared about barley yields or children’s sniffles. But he poured every ounce of his love for Krokyleia into that silent plea, a final, powerful blessing anchored in the village’s own wellstone.

A faint, deep hum seemed to vibrate up from the earth through the stone, a subtle acknowledgment that resonated in his bones. The air around the well seemed to grow momentarily clearer, sharper, as if washed with an invisible, protective tide.

Percy opened his eyes, giving a small, tight nod. It was done.

He shouldered his pack, the weight of it and his emotions settling into a familiar, bearable ache. He turned to face them all—Leodes, Theron, Elpis, the children, every face he now knew by name.

“I’ll be back,” he said, and it was a promise, not a platitude. “One way or another.”

There were no grand speeches. Just a sea of nods, of tearful smiles, of hands pressed over hearts. Elpis rushed forward for one last, fierce hug that smelled of flour and herbs. Lysandros stood ramrod straight, saluting with his practice spear.

With a final wave, Percy turned and walked down the path that led away from the sea, toward the inland hills and the road to Pylos. He didn’t look back. If he looked back, he might never leave.

The morning sun warmed his back. The sounds of the village—the last calls of goodbye, the bleat of a goat—faded behind him, replaced by the chirp of cicadas and the rustle of wild grasses.

He was on the road. Alone. The vast, unknown landscape of Bronze Age Greece stretched before him. The freedom was terrifying and exhilarating.

Then, as he crested the first hill, leaving the sight of the sea entirely, he felt it.

A sudden, warm tingle at the nape of his neck. It was not the sun. It was a sensation like the ghost of fingertips trailing lightly over his skin, possessive and admiring. It carried a scent not of the earth or sea, but of something darker, more metallic—the clean, dangerous scent of ozone and honed bronze. It was a caress that promised violence and devotion in the same breath.

A shiver, wholly unwelcome and deeply pleasurable, raced down his spine. His shoulders relaxed for a fraction of a second, a low, almost inaudible sound of contentment rising in his throat—a near-purr.

Horrified at his own reaction, Percy physically shook himself, as if dislodging a crawling insect. He growled a low, frustrated huff into the empty air.

“Oh, for the love of— Get a grip,” he snarled, to himself or to the unseen presence, he wasn’t sure. “I’m not a cat.”

The tingling sensation vanished, but the echo of it lingered in the quiet of the hills, a silent, laughing promise that his journey would not be as solitary as he’d hoped. The gods were not done with him. And one god in particular had just made his ongoing interest, and his unsettling claim, undeniably clear.

———

The world beyond Krokyleia was a tapestry of wild, rugged beauty that made Camp Half-Blood’s woods look like a carefully managed park. Towering oaks and ancient pines cast deep, shifting shadows. The hills rolled in endless shades of olive green and dusty gold, dotted with thorny shrubs and sudden, breathtaking cliffs. The silence was immense, broken only by the wind and the distant cry of a hawk.

Percy walked. The rhythm of it—the steady crunch of his sandals on the dirt track, the swing of the pack on his back—was meditative. It beat back the echoes of the village’s farewell and the phantom touch on his neck.

He’d expected hardship. Thirst, hunger, getting hopelessly lost. That was the standard demigod travel package.

It didn’t arrive.

When his water skin ran low mid-afternoon, he stumbled—almost literally—upon a clear, cold spring bubbling up between the roots of a giant plane tree. It wasn’t on any map in his head; it was just… there. The water tasted cleaner than anything he’d had since leaving his father’s palace.

An hour later, his stomach growled. As if on cue, a fat, stupid rabbit chose that moment to freeze in the path not ten feet ahead, staring at him with wide, unblinking eyes. It was practically holding a sign that said ‘EAT ME.’ Percy sighed, feeling a twinge of guilt, but practicality won out. A quick, merciful twist of his will summoned a thin jet of water from his skin that knocked the rabbit senseless. He’d never been a hunter, but even he couldn’t miss that.

Finding firewood was laughably easy. Dry, perfect kindling seemed to gather itself at the base of a lightning-struck pine. As he focused on sparking a flame with flint and steel (a skill Leodes had drilled into him), the first spark caught immediately, the tinder igniting with a cheerful whump as if doused in gasoline.

He roasted the rabbit on a sharpened stick, the smell making his mouth water. As he ate, he watched the sky turn from blue to violet, the first stars pricking through.

This is too easy.

The thought was a quiet whisper in the crackle of his fire. Demigods didn’t get easy journeys. Easy journeys usually meant you were walking straight into a trap.

He tensed, scanning the darkening tree line, his hand drifting to Riptide in his pocket. Nothing stirred but the night insects.

Then, he remembered. The prayer. The deep hum from the wellstone. The phantom caress that wasn’t entirely hostile.

He wasn’t alone out here.

He wasn’t sure which one it was—his father smoothing his path, or Ares ensuring his prize didn’t die of thirst before he could claim him. Maybe a bit of both. Maybe the whole damn pantheon was subtly shifting the world around him, each trying to tip the scales in their favor.

A month ago, the idea would have infuriated him. Now, after Krokyleia, after choosing this path, he felt a strange, weary acceptance. They were part of the landscape now, like the weather or the terrain. Annoying, unpredictable, and impossible to ignore.

He shrugged, tossing a cleaned rabbit bone into the fire. “Whatever,” he muttered to the watching dark. “Free service is fine. Just keep the weird caresses to a minimum.”

As if in answer, a gentle breeze rustled the leaves overhead, carrying the clean scent of the spring and, very faintly, the distant, salty breath of the sea. It felt like a chuckle.

Percy finished his meal, banked the fire, and rolled himself in his cloak against the roots of the great tree. Above him, the stars of an ancient, unpolluted sky blazed with impossible clarity. He missed his mom. He missed his friends. He missed pizza.

But here, now, with a full belly, safe water, and a strangely benevolent wilderness watching over him, he felt a flicker of something he hadn’t felt since arriving in this time: a thread of… not quite hope, but possibility. The road was long, but it was giving him what he needed to walk it.

He closed his eyes, the sounds of the ancient world a lullaby. The gods could play their games. He had a journey to make. And for tonight, at least, the road was providing.                                        

———
Ares did not walk the mortal road. He loomed over it, an invisible pressure in the air, a silent, predatory heat haze that shimmered just beyond the edge of Percy’s perception. From this vantage, unseen, he watched.

He watched the demigod move through the wild with a grounded, efficient grace that was its own kind of warfare—a war against hunger, thirst, and loneliness, fought and won with every step. He saw Percy find the spring, a curl of satisfaction in his own gut. The Earthshaker’s blessing was obvious there, but Ares had whispered to the very stones of the hillside to guide the boy’s footfalls toward it. A shared gift. A collaborative claim.

He watched the rabbit fall. The clean, merciful efficiency of the kill sent a pulse of pure lust through Ares’s divine core. It wasn’t the act of killing—that was trivial. It was the style. No fanfare, no wasted motion. A solution. Percy fought necessity the way Ares fought armies: with total, unflinching focus on the objective. The sight of him roasting the meat over his own fire, self-sufficient and strong, was more erotic to the God of War than any bedroom spectacle.

But more than lust, there was a deepening, profound amazement.

This son of Poseidon was a natural force coming into perfect awareness. He wielded power not as a weapon first, but as a tool—for building, for feeding, for protecting. It was a philosophy of strength Ares had never encountered, and it fascinated him. It made Percy not just a prize, but a revolution. When the Fates finally cut his mortal thread (and they would, Ares would ensure it was glorious), his ascension was inevitable. The raw power, the unwavering will, the loyalty that could bind armies—it all screamed for godhood.

And Ares would be there.

The fantasy unfolded in his mind with the clarity of a battle plan. He would stand at the shores of the Styx as Percy emerged, reborn in immortal light. He would be the first to stride forward, not his father. He would clasp Percy’s newly divine shoulder, feel the incredible, solidified power thrumming under his palm, and he would…

He would kiss him.

Not a claim of conquest, but a seal of welcome. A branding of fire and blood and triumph, a communion of equals finally stepping onto the same eternal plane. He would taste the ambrosia on Percy’s lips and the lingering salt of the mortal sea, and it would be the beginning of everything.

His thoughts spiraled further, a divine obsession given concrete form. A throne. Percy would need a throne on Olympus, one that reflected his unique nature. Not some watery, passive seat. Something powerful. Unyielding.

He would go to Hephaestus. His brother owed him for… well, for many things. He would commission a throne forged in the heart of the greatest, most violent volcano. Not of gold or silver, but of black, star-fallen iron and celestial bronze, shaped like a crashing wave frozen at its moment of most terrifying power. It would be inlaid with mother-of-pearl that glowed with its own soft light, a nod to his father’s domain and his own gentle heart. It would be a throne that spoke of both profound strength and hidden depth.

Their throne.

The thought was a lightning strike of possessive desire. He imagined Percy seated upon it, resplendent in godhood, and himself beside him—not on a separate seat, but right there, on the arm of the throne, or better yet, pulling Percy into his lap, the cold, powerful metal under them as they—

A low growl vibrated in Ares’s chest, a sound felt more than heard in the mortal world below. The fantasy was almost too potent.

But the key, the glorious, maddening key to it all, was willingness.

Percy could not be taken. Not truly. To break that will, to force that spirit, would be to shatter the very thing that made him priceless. Ares had seen the way Percy had shaken off his invisible caress on the road, the defiant growl. It had only made the wanting worse.

He wanted Percy to turn from the horizon, to look into the heat haze of war and see not destruction, but a kind of brutal, honest truth. To see a home for his fierce loyalty and a purpose for his immense strength. He wanted Percy to choose the chaos, to choose the fight, to choose him.

He wanted Percy to walk to him, across a field of ashes or a hall of trophies, and take his hand because he saw in Ares the only force vast enough and real enough to match the tempest in his own soul.

The watching became a vigil. The lust became a vow. The obsession became a campaign with a single, glorious objective: the willing surrender of the unconquerable demigod.

Below, Percy finished his meal, banked his fire, and slept, utterly unaware that the very fabric of the night around him was thick with a god’s devastating, patient hunger.

Ares remained, a silent sentinel in the dark, already planning the battles he would orchestrate to show Percy his true calling, the gifts he would leave in his path, the subtle, relentless proof that in the heart of war, he would find not an end, but a beginning. And a throne, waiting.

Chapter 16: Tavern’s eyes

Percy woke with the dawn, dew dampening his cloak and a stiffness in his limbs that felt good, earned. He doused the cold ashes of his fire, shouldered his pack, and continued east.

The land began to change. The wild, lonely hills gentled into rolling slopes dotted with olive groves and small, terraced farms. The air carried the distant, rhythmic clang of a bronze smithy and the lowing of oxen. He was nearing the edges of civilized Achaean territory.

He kept to lesser paths, avoiding the main road where soldiers and merchants might travel. The strange providence of his journey continued. A forgotten apple tree, heavy with late-season fruit, stood just off the trail. A shallow stream crossing his path held fat, slow trout he could tickle to the surface with a whisper of current. It was as if the land itself was offering itself up to him.

He ate an apple as he walked, the crisp, tart juice a welcome change from dried rations. The ease of it all should have been unnerving, but a peculiar kind of peace had settled over him. He was a problem moving through the world, and the world—or the powers that watched it—was politely clearing a path. Fine. He’d take it.

By late afternoon, he saw his first major landmark: a wide, slow-moving river cutting a silver-green swath through the valley below. On the far side, nestled against a rocky outcrop, was a sizeable town. Walls of sun-baked mudbrick surrounded a jumble of whitewashed buildings. Smoke from a hundred hearths hazed the air. Pylos. Or at least, a town that would one day be part of it.

His destination. A place of people, trade, and hopefully, information.

As he descended into the valley, following a well-worn track toward a wooden bridge, the familiar tingle returned. This time, it wasn't a caress. It was a sudden, sharp heat low in his stomach, a flush that had nothing to do with exertion. It felt like the approving gaze of a predator seeing its quarry enter a chosen arena. It was gone as quickly as it came, leaving behind a faint, metallic taste in his mouth and a simmering irritation.

"Subtle," Percy muttered under his breath, adjusting the strap of his pack. "Real subtle."

He crossed the bridge, the river water flowing clear and strong beneath him. As his feet hit the dirt on the other side, he felt a different shift. The gentle, guiding presence of the wilderness fell away, replaced by the dense, chaotic aura of mortal settlement—sweat, animals, cooking oil, dung, humanity. The divine "room service," as he'd thought of it, had officially ended at the city gates.

He was on his own.

He moved through the open gates, nodding at a pair of bored-looking guards who eyed his travel-worn clothes and the fine staff in his hand with mild curiosity but no challenge. The streets were narrow, packed earth, lined with stalls selling fish, pottery, cloth, and spices. The din was overwhelming after the quiet of the hills and the sea. Dozens of conversations in rapid-fire ancient Greek swirled around him, along with the cries of vendors and the bleating of goats being led to market.

He kept his head down, his sea-green eyes scanning. He needed a place to stay, a bath, and most importantly, he needed to listen. Inns and taverns were the information hubs of the ancient world. He’d find one, trade some of his dried fish for a meal and a corner to sleep in, and keep his ears open for any talk of strange occurrences, powerful strangers, or—his heart clenched with a stupid, desperate hope—sailors' tales of lands beyond the sunset, of times out of joint.

He found a likely-looking place near the central square, a two-story building with a faded symbol of a wine cup painted beside the door. The air escaping was warm and smelled of smoke, soured wine, and roasting meat.

Taking a deep breath, Percy pushed the heavy leather flap aside and stepped into the dim, noisy interior of his first Bronze Age tavern, the eyes of gods and men alike upon him, and the true test of his journey just beginning.

———

The people inside the tavern experienced him as a single, shared shock.

From their places at tables and along the walls, this was not a man so much as an interruption in reality. His clothes were no different from theirs—linen tunic faded by sun, leather belt worn smooth by travel, sandals scuffed and dusty. Any other traveler dressed the same would have vanished into the room’s brown-and-iron sameness. On him, the simplicity became something else entirely. The fabric clung just enough to reveal the breadth of his shoulders, the taper of his waist, the long strength in his legs. It was as if the garments had been designed for him alone, elevated by the body that carried them. Finery would have been wasted on him; this was worse, because it suggested he needed nothing to be magnificent.

Eyes followed him helplessly. Mouths went dry. More than one person felt warmth flood their face, their chest, their lower stomach, an instinctive, visceral reaction they had no language for. A wool-seller leaned forward without realizing it, saliva slipping past his lip. A woman at the bar forgot to breathe, her gaze tracing the flex and release of muscle beneath sun-browned skin as he shifted his weight. He was devastatingly, unfairly beautiful… raw and alive, like something carved by the world itself rather than by human hands.

And then the weight of him settled over the room.

It wasn’t visible, but everyone felt it. A pressure behind the eyes. A tightening in the gut. The sense that if he willed it, the hearth fire would bow, the walls would crack, the earth beneath their feet would remember older, deeper masters. Lust faltered, twisted into something sharp and humbling. Spines wanted to bend. Eyes wanted to drop. Whatever he was, he was not small, and he was not safe to offend.

They knew it with the same certainty they knew storms or the sea.

So when the little boy came flying out from behind the tables—laughing, breathless, not looking where his feet took him—and ran straight into the stranger’s legs, the tavern froze.

Every adult felt it: the horror, the helplessness. The child tumbled back onto the dirt with a soft sound, unhurt but startled. His older brother stopped dead, color draining from his face. No one moved. No one dared. To interfere might save a child—or doom them all.

The impossible being looked down.

The instant stretched, fragile as glass.

Then he knelt.

From their perspective, it was like watching a king lower himself without losing an ounce of his authority. He moved smoothly, power folding into grace, one knee touching the floor as though the tavern were a throne room and the dirt worthy of him. Even then, even down low, he radiated strength—corded muscles shifting beneath his sleeves, balance perfect, controlled. More than one person swallowed hard at the sight.

And then he smiled.

The change hit them harder than the aura ever had.

 

Warmth spread across his face, softening the sharp lines, gentling the storm-green of his eyes until they looked like sunlit shallows. The fear in the room cracked. Something inside each watcher gave way.

“Easy there,” he murmured, his voice low and velvety, rich enough to feel rather than hear. “You alright?”

The boy nodded, wide-eyed.

Percy brushed dust from the child’s tunic with careful fingers, the touch light, reverent. He tipped the boy’s chin up, checking him with the ease of someone who had done this before. When he looked past the younger child and caught the older brother’s gaze, his expression remained kind.

“Hey,” he said softly, beckoning with two fingers. “C’mon. Take your brother. You’ve gotta keep an eye out, yeah? Roads get busy—even inside.”

The older boy moved as if in a dream, gathering his sibling close. Percy’s hand came down briefly on each of their heads, a gentle caress, protective rather than possessive. As he did, the muscles in his forearm flexed—controlled, powerful—and more than one adult felt their breath hitch at the sight, heat curling low in their belly despite themselves.

“Be safe,” Percy added, voice warm with something achingly sincere.

In that moment, watching him there—this terrifying, gorgeous force of nature kneeling in the dirt for two children, speaking with such quiet care—the tavern’s collective heart broke open.

This was not just desire. This was devotion blooming, sudden and merciless. The realization that such power chose gentleness. That such beauty housed kindness. That this was someone worth following, protecting, loving in whatever way they were allowed.

When he finally stood, the softness receded, the guarded traveler returning as his gaze swept the room. But it didn’t matter. They had seen him kneel. They had heard his voice turn tender. They had felt the truth of him settle into their bones.

As Percy Jackson stepped further into the tavern, every soul inside watched him go with aching admiration, fear, and an overwhelming, helpless certainty:

Whatever he was, he was everything.

———

Percy made his way toward the bar, feeling the stares like a physical weight. He kept his movements unhurried, his expression neutral—the last thing he needed was to look like he was trying to make a scene.

The grizzled tavern-keeper with the scarred forehead watched him approach, hands pausing where they were scrubbing a clay cup with a rag. His eyes were wary but not hostile. Good.

“Been traveling long?” Percy asked, leaning an elbow on the bar, his tone casual. “Heard this might be a good place to rest.”

The man gave a slow nod, his gaze flicking to the wave-carved staff, then back to Percy’s face. “Aye. Long enough to see too many roads. What’s your business in town?”

Percy shrugged. “Looking for a few things. Information, mostly.”

A flicker of something—understanding, maybe pity—crossed the man’s face. “Information’s free if you know the right ears. We get traders, sailors, soldiers passing through. Most talk louder with a bit of wine in them.”

“I’m listening,” Percy said, sliding a small, worn bronze coin across the wood. “Anything… unusual? Stories about places that don’t quite fit? Doors that shouldn’t be there? People who appeared out of nowhere?”

The barkeep’s eyes narrowed slightly. He took the coin, pocketing it without a sound. “You’re not the first to ask strange questions. A pair of priests from Delphi came through a week back. Whispered about a ‘tear in the tapestry.’ Said the Fates were restless. They left in a hurry, heading south toward the coast.”

Percy’s heart gave a hard thump against his ribs. South. Toward the coast. That could mean anywhere. Or it could mean nothing.

“Anyone else?” he pressed, keeping his voice low.

The man leaned in, his voice dropping to a rough whisper. “There’s a sailor. Drinks alone in the corner most nights. Claims his ship sailed through a fog that didn’t belong and came out under stars he’d never seen. Says he heard a song on the wind that wasn’t in any language.” The barkeep’s eyes darted toward a shadowed alcove near the back. “He’s here tonight. But he’s… not right in the head. Talks to things no one else can see.”

A sailor who’d sailed through strange fog. A song on the wind. It wasn’t much. It was less than nothing. It was also the first real thread he’d found.

“Thanks,” Percy said, straightening up.

“Don’t thank me,” the barkeep muttered, turning back to his cups. “Just don’t bring whatever you’re looking for down on my head.”

Percy’s eyes found the alcove. A hunched figure sat there, wrapped in a salt-stained cloak, staring into a cup of something that smelled stronger than wine. The air around him seemed colder, thinner.

Here goes nothing, Percy thought, and walked toward the sound of madness and maybe, just maybe, a way home.

Percy settled onto the rough bench across from the sailor. The man didn’t look up. His face was a map of sun-bleached wrinkles and salt sores, his eyes a milky, distant blue that seemed to focus on something beyond the tavern’s walls. He mumbled into his cup, a rhythmic, nonsensical chant.

“Hey,” Percy said, keeping his voice low and non-threatening. “I heard you’ve seen some things. Sailed through some strange fog?”

The sailor’s muttering stopped. His head tilted, one milky eye swiveling slowly toward Percy. He didn’t speak for a long moment, just stared as if trying to place him on a chart of forgotten seas.

“The fog…” the sailor finally rasped, his voice like grinding pebbles. “Aye. It sang. Not with a mouth. With the… the spaces between things. The ship went quiet. The waves went still. We saw colors that ain’t got names.” He took a shuddering gulp from his cup. “Then it spat us out. Sky was wrong. Stars were strangers. Felt like we’d skipped a beat in the song of the world.”

Percy leaned forward, his pulse quickening. “Where? Which direction? How did you get back?”

The sailor let out a wet, crackling laugh. “Back? Who says we’re back, boy? Maybe this is the dream. Maybe the fog’s the real place.” He tapped the side of his head with a grimy finger. “It leaves a mark. A taste. Like honey and lightning and… and forgetting.”

It was frustrating, maddening, but there was a thread of truth in the rambling. A distortion. A dislocation. It was something.

“Is there a way to find it again?” Percy pressed. “A time? A place?”

The sailor’s gaze suddenly sharpened, the madness in his eyes coalescing into a startling, piercing clarity. He looked Percy up and down, not with fear or awe like the others, but with a knowing, almost pitying recognition.

“You don’t want to find the fog, son,” he whispered, his breath reeking of spirits and brine. “The fog finds you. It’s looking for something. Or someone.” His milky eyes locked onto Percy’s. “It’s looking for pieces that don’t fit. For songs that are off-key. For hearts that beat in two times at once.”

A cold finger traced Percy’s spine.

The sailor leaned in even closer, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial hush. “You shine too bright for one world, boy. They all see it.” A gnarled, trembling hand gestured vaguely upward. “The shining one with the lyre… he wants to put you in a song. The bloody one with the spear… he wants to stand you beside his throne.” A cracked, yellow-toothed grin spread across his face. “You’ll make a fine wife for a god. Which one you choosing, my lord?”

The words landed like a physical blow. Heat exploded across Percy’s face and neck, a furious, embarrassed flush that felt as bright as a beacon. He recoiled as if scalded.

“I’m not—that’s not—I’m not choosing anyone,” he sputtered, the words coming out in a rushed, defensive jumble that utterly contradicted his usual composure. “And I’m nobody’s wife.”

The sailor just cackled, the knowing gleam returning to his eyes before fading back into cloudy madness. He turned back to his cup, muttering again about stars and songs.

Percy stood up, the bench scraping loudly against the floor. He felt disoriented, exposed. The madman’s words had ripped away the fragile illusion of anonymity, throwing the absurd, terrifying reality of his situation back in his face with crude, brutal accuracy.

He could feel the eyes of the tavern on him again, drawn by his sudden movement and his undoubtedly flushed face. He took a steadying breath, forcing his expression back into neutrality, but the heat in his cheeks wouldn’t fade.

Without another word to the chuckling sailor, Percy turned and strode back toward the hearth, seeking the shadowed corner and the illusion of solitude. The thread of a clue—the fog—was now tangled with the unwelcome, humiliating prophecy of his own divine dating life.

He sat down heavily, picking up his cold stew, his appetite gone. The sailor’s cackle seemed to echo in the smoky air.

A fine wife for a god.

He scowled into his bowl. This was getting ridiculous.

———

Apollo watched from his sun-chariot, currently parked in a pocket of folded daylight high above the mortal town. The tavern scene played out below him like the most riveting, intimate drama. His divine sight missed nothing: the way the lamplight gilded the curve of Percy’s neck as he leaned forward to question the mad sailor, the faint furrow of concentration between his brows, the powerful line of his back under the simple tunic.

And then the flush. Oh, the glorious, revealing flush that painted Percy’s cheeks and throat a devastating shade of rose when the sailor uttered those deliciously impertinent words.

‘You’ll make a fine wife for a god.’

Apollo’s breath caught. He watched Percy sputter, deny, recoil—the beautiful, powerful demigod reduced to flustered, mortal embarrassment by the mere suggestion. It was utterly captivating. The contrast between the storm-wielder and the flustered young man was a melody Apollo ached to compose.

The amusement he’d felt curdled into something sharper, hotter. Impatience.

This watching, this waiting from a distance, was becoming a form of exquisite torture. Percy was down there, real and vibrant and confused, shining with a light that was uniquely his, and Apollo was up here, composing paeans in his head. It was insufficient. He needed to be there. To be the one causing that flush for different reasons. To have those sea-green eyes turn to him not in frustration, but in dawning fascination.

He wanted to charm him. Properly. Not with a show of force like Ares, but with an offering so beautiful, so personal, Percy couldn’t help but be disarmed.

He imagined it: appearing not in a blaze of glory, but at dawn, as Percy left the town. He would be leaning against an olive tree, his lyre silent, his radiance softened to match the morning. He would speak not of power or possession, but of the loneliness of eternal light, and how Percy’s particular, storm-tossed brilliance was the only thing that had made the sun feel warm in eons.

He would play for him. Not a grand ode, but a melody spun from the snippets of truth Percy had already given the world—the sigh of his yearning song, the rhythm of his kindness in the village, the sharp, bright notes of his defiance. He would reflect Percy’s own soul back to him, perfected through Apollo’s art, and show him how sublime it could be.

And then… then he would court him. With poetry that didn’t feel like poetry. With gifts that weren’t things, but experiences—a private concert among the clouds, a lesson on the lyre where their hands might brush, a race of his sun-steeds along the shore at twilight.

The goal, the shining, urgent goal, was to have Percy want him. To see the god behind the god—the artist, the healer, the truth-seeker—and choose him.

And then, the wedding.

Apollo’s mind soared. It would be the event of the millennium. A union of Light and Sea, Art and Truth. It would be held at dawn, naturally, when his power was sweetest. The Muses would sing a hymn so potent it would make flowers bloom in the desert. The guest list would be the envy of Olympus. He would design the rings himself—gold for himself, of course, woven with a thread of captured sunlight. For Percy, a band of deepest blue adamant, like the heart of the ocean, set with a pearl that held a miniature, swirling tempest inside.

He was open to venues. Olympus was traditional. But if Percy wished… a wedding in his father’s realm had a certain symbolic appeal. A ceremony in a sun-dappled underwater grotto, with nereids as bridesmaids and hippocampi drawing a shell-chariot. He could make the very waters glow with golden light for the occasion. Yes, he could be accommodating.

But the image that truly burned in Apollo’s mind, that fed his impatience with a near-physical ache, came after.

The wedding night.

He dreamed of it with the vividness of prophecy. Their chambers would be open to the eastern sky. As the first true rays of his own dawn broke over the horizon, they would paint Percy’s skin in liquid gold and rose. Apollo would be above him, beside him, around him—finally, finally touching what he had admired for so long. He would map every scar, every muscle, every secret with lips and hands, and Percy would shine, not with power, but with a pleasure Apollo would orchestrate as his greatest masterpiece. They would move together as the world lightened, their new rings glinting, a perfect union of fire and water, light and depth, and it would be more beautiful than any sunrise he had ever pulled across the sky.

The fantasy was so potent, so real, that Apollo had to grip the rail of his chariot. The impatience was a fire in his veins.

He looked down at the tavern, where Percy now sat scowling into his stew, beautiful and oblivious.

Soon. The careful, charming campaign began at dawn. He would weave a net of light and music so exquisite that the storm-born son of Poseidon would willingly drift into it. And then, he would make him a god, his husband, and the co-regent of a new, radiant age.

Apollo smiled, a radiant, determined expression that made the folded daylight around him shimmer. Patience was a virtue. But some treasures were too bright to wait for.

 

Notes:

Who are you guys choosing?
Ares or Apollo?