The silence was the wrong kind. Not the peaceful quiet of deep woods, but the held-breath stillness of a place waiting for a blade to fall. For three days, that silence had been his only real companion. Artemis was present, of course—a silver-and-starlight effigy across the fire—but she wasn't company. She was a charge. An assignment. A divine, millennia-old problem the Olympian Council had stapled to his life.
Percy Jackson ran a thumb over the worn leather grip of Riptide. The fire crackled, spitting a pine-scented ember onto the packed earth between them. Artemis didn't flinch. Her attention was fixed on her bow, her slender fingers working a lump of beeswax into the string with a focused, almost devotional slowness. He had the ridiculous opinion that she was wasting her time. Celestial bronze didn't need that much maintenance. It wasn't like a mortal longbow that would fray and snap in the humidity. But he wouldn’t say that. He'd learned in the last seventy-two hours that offering practical advice to the goddess of the hunt was like telling his father how to make a decent wave. Pointless and likely to get you blasted.
He shifted on his log, his gaze drifting past her to a shallow depression in the ground where yesterday’s rain had gathered. A small, stagnant puddle, reflecting the waxing crescent moon in its murky surface. A muscle in his jaw tightened. He hated still water. Hated it. The ocean, rivers, even a rushing stream—that was power, life, his father’s blood in his veins. But a puddle? A bathtub? A pond with a skin of green algae? It was dead. Trapped. An invitation for unnatural things to breed in the quiet dark. His unease felt stupid and childish, but it was there, a low hum of revulsion under his skin.
“You are restless, Perseus.”
Her voice cut through the quiet, not loud, but sharp enough to make the hairs on his arms stand up. She hadn’t looked up from her bow. Her eyes, the color of moonlight on ice, remained on her task.
“Just keeping watch,” he said. It sounded lame even to him.
“The perimeter is warded. My arrows would find a threat before your senses could.”
It wasn’t a boast. It was a simple statement of fact, and it made him feel about as useful as a screen door on a submarine. After Annabeth… after everything, the council had decided he was a flight risk. A loose cannon. Too powerful to be left to his own devices, grieving and angry. So they gave him a job. *'A great honor,'* Zeus had boomed, which was Olympian for 'a gilded cage'. *'You will be Artemis's Guardian. She requires a protector of your unique skills for a… sensitive task.'*
They’d separated him from his world and bound him to a goddess who famously wanted nothing to do with men. He couldn’t go more than a mile from her. He’d tested it the first day, walking until a strange, nauseating pull in his gut, like a fishhook behind his navel, had forced him to turn back.
“Right,” he mumbled. He took the initiative, pushing himself to his feet. The motion felt good, breaking the static energy of the camp. “Still. A walk couldn’t hurt. Why’d you pick this spot, anyway? No offense, but it’s not exactly a tactical marvel. We’re in a basin, the stream’s the only water source, and the tree cover is mostly pine. Easy to burn.”
Artemis finally paused, setting the bow aside. She looked at him, properly looked at him, and her gaze was ancient. It saw the breakup, the wars, the stupid mortal boy who’d been forced to grow up too fast. And it offered no sympathy whatsoever.
“The celestial alignments are favorable here,” she said, her tone clipped and final.
He knew a lie when he heard one. Even from a god. It was too neat, too dismissive. There was a reason she was camping in this unremarkable patch of the Catskills, and it had nothing to do with stars. She was withholding it. Fine. Let her have her secrets. Two could play at that game.
“All right. I’m checking the treeline.” He didn’t wait for a response, just turned and let the shadows swallow him.
The air grew colder the farther he moved from the small bubble of the fire’s warmth. The wards she’d mentioned tingled against his skin, a faint, silvery hum in the air. They were strong, but they felt… passive. A tripwire, not a wall. He walked the circumference of the clearing, his sneakers crunching softly on pine needles and damp earth. The scent of loam and night-blooming flowers filled his lungs. It was almost peaceful. Almost.
He was near the edge of his invisible leash, the hook in his gut beginning to pull taut, when his foot hit something. It wasn't a rock or a root. It was too smooth, and it rolled.
Percy crouched, Riptide now a solid weight in his hand. He brushed away the layer of dead leaves. There, nestled in the dark soil, was a small sphere. It was no bigger than a golf ball, made of a stone so black it seemed to drink the moonlight. Obsidian, maybe. But as he reached for it, a wave of cold radiated from its surface, completely out of place in the humid night air.
He hesitated. This wasn’t monster sign. No sulfur smell, no ichor, no disturbed ground. This was something else. Something quiet and clean and wrong. On his own initiative, driven by a protective instinct he hadn't realized was so sharp, he picked it up.
The cold was immediate and absolute. It wasn't the brisk chill of ice; it was a dead cold, a void where warmth should be. It sank into his palm, through his skin, chasing the heat from his blood. The sphere was perfectly smooth, without a single flaw on its polished surface, and it felt heavy, far heavier than stone had a right to be.
He closed his fist around it, the unnatural chill seeping toward his wrist. A question bloomed in the back of his mind, cold and sharp as the object in his hand: What kind of power feels like nothing at all? He looked back. The campfire was a tiny, flickering point of orange in the vast, pressing darkness. It no longer looked like a boring campsite. It looked like the last warm place in a world that was rapidly going cold.