16. PERCY

Akhlys lunged at Percy, and for a split second, he thought: Well, hey. I'm just smoke. She can't touch me, right?

He imagined the Fates up in Olympus, laughing at his wishful thinking: "Ok bro......"

The goddess's claws raked across his chest and stung like boiling water.

Percy stumbled backwards, but he wasn't used to being smoky. His legs moved too slowly. His arms felt like tissue paper. In desperation, he threw his backpack at her, thinking maybe it would turn solid when it left his hand, but no such luck. It fell with a soft thud.

Akhlys snarled, crouching to spring. She would have bitten Percy's face off if Theo hadn't charged and screamed a very vulgar word right in the goddess's ear.

Akhlys flinched, turning towards the sound.

She lashed out at Theo, but even with her bad foot, Theo was better at moving than Percy. Maybe she wasn't feeling as smoky, or maybe she'd just had more combat training. She'd been at Camp Half-Blood way longer than Percy. Probably she'd had classes Percy never got, like How to Fight While Partially Made of Smoke.

Theo dived straight between the goddess's legs and somersaulted to her feet. Akhlys turned and attacked, but Theo dodged again, like a matador.

Watching her move while made of smoke reminded Percy of seeing her in battle hiding behind her Invisi-Theo blanket. She had the same determined look on her face, the one that Percy loved so much.

He was so stunned he lost a few precious seconds. He stared at corpse Theo, shrouded in mist but moving as fast and confidently as ever. Then it occurred to him why she was doing this: to buy them time. Which meant Percy needed to help.

He thought furiously, trying to come up with a way to defeat Misery. How could he fight when he couldn't touch anything?

On Akhlys's third attack, Theo wasn't so lucky. She tried to veer aside, but the goddess grabbed Theo's wrist and pulled her hard, sending her sprawling.

Before the goddess could pounce, Percy advanced, yelling and waving his sword. He still felt about as solid as a Kleenex, but his anger seemed to help him move faster.

"Hey, Happy!" he yelled.

Akhlys spun, dropping Theo's arm. "Happy?" she demanded.

"Yeah!" He ducked as she swiped at his head. "You're downright cheerful!"

"Arggh!" She lunged again, but she was off-balance. Percy sidestepped and backed away, leading the goddess further from Theo.

"Pleasant!" he called. "Delightful!"

The goddess snarled and winced. She stumbled after Percy. Each compliment seemed to hit her like sand in the face.

"I will kill you slowly!" she growled, her eyes and nose watering, blood dripping from her cheeks. "I will cut you into pieces as a sacrifice to Night!"

Theo struggled to her feet. She started rifling through her pack, no doubt looking for something that might help.
Percy wanted to give her more time. She was smarter than he was. Better for him to get attacked while she scrambled together some sort of ridiculous plan.

"Cuddly!" Percy yelled. "Fuzzy, warm and huggable!"

Akhlys made a growling, choking noise, like a cat having a seizure.

"A slow death!" she screamed. "A death from a thousand poisons!"

All around her, poisonous plants grew and burst like overfilled balloons. Green-and-white sap trickled out, collecting into pools, and began flowing across the ground towards Percy. The sweet-smelling fumes made his head feel wobbly.

"Percy!" Theo's voice sounded far away. "Uh, hey, Miss Wonderful! Cheerful! Yo! Over here!"

But the goddess of misery was now fixated on Percy. He tried to retreat again. Unfortunately the poison ichor was flowing all around him now, making the ground steam and the air burn. Percy found himself stuck on an island of dust not much bigger than a shield. A few yards away, his backpack smoked and dissolved into a puddle of goo. Percy had nowhere to go.

He fell to one knee. He wanted to tell Theo to run, but he couldn't speak. His throat was as dry as dead leaves.

He wished there were water in Tartarus—some nice pool he could jump into to heal himself, or maybe a river he could control. He'd settle for a bottle of Evian.

"You will feed the eternal darkness," Akhlys said. "You will die in the arms of Night!"

He was dimly aware of Theo shouting, throwing random pieces of drakon jerky at the goddess. The white-green poison kept pooling, little streams trickling from the plants as the venomous lake around him got wider and wider.

Lake, he thought. Streams. Water.

Probably it was just his brain getting fried from poison fumes, but he croaked out a laugh. Poison was liquid. If it moved like water, it must be partially water.

He remembered some science lecture about the human body being mostly water. He remembered extracting water from Jason's lungs back in Rome... If he could control that, then why not other liquids?

It was a crazy idea. Poseidon was the god of the sea, not of every liquid everywhere.

Then again, Tartarus had its own rules. Fire was drinkable. The ground was the body of a dark god. The air was acid, and demigods could be turned into smoky corpses.

So why not try? He had nothing left to lose.

He glared at the poison flood encroaching from all sides. He concentrated so hard that something inside him cracked—as if a crystal ball had shattered in his stomach.

Warmth flowed through him. The poison tide stopped.

The fumes blew away from him—back towards the goddess. The lake of poison rolled towards her in tiny waves and rivulets.

Akhlys shrieked. "What is this?"

"Poison," Percy said. "That's your speciality, right?"

He stood, his anger growing hotter in his gut. As the flood of venom rolled towards the goddess, the fumes began to make her cough. Her eyes watered even more.

Oh, good, Percy thought. More water. He imagined her nose and throat filling with her own tears.

Akhlys gagged. "I—" The tide of venom reached her feet, sizzling like droplets on a hot iron. She wailed and stumbled back.

"Percy!" Theo called. "Stop!"

He didn't want to stop. He wanted to choke this goddess. He wanted to watch her drown in her own poison. He wanted to see just how much misery Misery could take.

But he looked over to Theo, letting up on Akhlys only momentarily.

She had retreated to the edge of the cliff, even though the poison wasn't after her. She wobbled precariously on her feet, watching Percy defeat the miserable goddess with a guarded expression on her face. Percy couldn't tell what she was thinking.

She wandered over toward him, eyeing Akhlys. Percy relented on the whole drowning bit for a second, waiting for Theo's reaction, hating that he couldn't just see what was going on in her mind.

Then he decided he didn't need to see what was going on in her mind.

Theo's eyes, still stuck on the wailing goddess, flashed green for just a second—the toxic green shade of poison and radioactivity. She looked downright evil, Percy thought, like a Disney villain. He wanted to know what she had imagined, what thought she'd thunk up, that would change her persona entirely. How much power did she have stored up from lack of use in Tartarus?

Percy watched in a sort of shellshocked awe, his rage fizzling off him like steam, as Theo's hand shot out toward the goddess. Immediately, Akhlys contorted in pain, her voice scratching out of her throat in a gut-wrenching scream. Theo's hand twitched; Akhlys moved with her, flailing around, looking like she was trying to escape her own body.

"Theo..." Percy muttered. His voice came out deep and grim.

She barely glanced over to him. "What?"

"What are you doing?"

Theo's eyes narrowed back in on the goddess. Maybe it was the smoky mist she was now made up of, but Percy could swear there were waves of poison emanating off Theo's skin like radiation. Like she was burning the poison inside herself to a boil.

She didn't answer Percy, but he didn't need her to. Now he thought he understood. Apollo wasn't just a god of sunshine and singing songs; he also had control of medicine, disease.

Plagues.

Percy watched, enraptured, unable to tear his eyes away from what Theo was doing to the goddess. He didn't quite understand the full extent—he didn't think he could, without experiencing it firsthand—but one thing was clear: Akhlys was in the worst pain Percy had ever seen. And Theo was the one behind it.

The goddess cried and screamed, clawing at herself, trying to rip open her own skin and release whatever Theo was doing inside her. She was still choking on her own tears, still trying not to suffocate from Percy's go at her. He willed the water in her body—all of it, from her blood to her tears—to relieve itself, to let up on the asphyxiation. But Theo wasn't going to let up any time soon, Percy could tell.

"Theo," he said again. She gave no indication that she'd even heard him.

"Theo, stop," he tried, putting more force in his words.

But he knew how she'd felt. He hadn't wanted to stop, either. But he'd forced himself to. The difference between he and Theo, though, was that Theo didn't have the same boundaries as him. She was the one that almost followed Luke to Kronos's side. She was the one whose fatal flaw was her belief that she was a god.

Akhlys sputtered, vomit pooling in her mouth and choking her even further. Her skin was turning black. Percy remembered learning about this when he'd taken World History in the eighth grade. Black skin, fever, chills, vomiting... they were all symptoms of the Black Plague.

"THEO!" Percy yelled, grabbing her shoulders. He met her gaze forcefully, his skin chilling at the harsh green that had overtaken her beautiful hazel eyes. "She's had enough!"

The color returned to Theo's gaze. The expression on her face drifted off. Panting, she seemed to finally realize Percy was in front of her. She looked like a corpse wreathed in smoke, but she felt solid enough when she gripped his arms. Her eyes wandered down to the dying goddess at their feet.

"Theo..." Percy took her head in his hands and turned it away from Akhlys. Theo allowed it, pressing her forehead to his chest, still breathless. Percy slid his arms around her shoulders.

"Some things aren't meant to be controlled," said Theo, though her voice was quiet and broken. "Agreed?"

Percy nodded, squeezing his eyes shut so he didn't have to watch Akhlys take her last grating breath. "Agreed."

They stood like that for a long moment, just the two of them catching their dying breath and recuperating back to themselves. Percy was getting used to moving with the Death Mist around him. He felt more solid, more like himself. Of course it helped that Theo was in his arms—he always felt like himself around her. But his mind still felt stuffed with cotton wool.

"She said something about feeding us to the night," he remembered. Theo picked her head up to meet his eyes. "What do you think that was about?"

Before Theo could reply, the temperature dropped. The abyss before them seemed to exhale.

Percy took Theo and backed away from the edge as a presence emerged from the void—a form so vast and shadowy he felt like he understood the concept of dark for the first time.

"I imagine," said the darkness, in a feminine voice as soft as coffin lining, "that she meant Night, with a capital N. After all, I am the only one."

Now, Percy had never been scared of the dark. After all, he'd always had access to his own little nightlight—and her name was Theo Scott. But recently the batteries in her seemed to have gone out of order. And normally 'the dark' wasn't a forty foot tall goddess with pitch black wings, a whip made out of stars, and a shadowy chariot pulled by vampire horses.

Nyx was almost too much to take in. Looming over the chasm, she was a churning figure of ash and smoke, as big as the Apollo Belvedere statue, but very much alive. Her dress was void black, mixed with the colours of a space nebula, as if galaxies were being born in her bodice. Her face was hard to see except for the pinpoints of her eyes, which shone like quasars. When her wings beat, waves of darkness rolled over the cliffs, making Percy feel heavy and sleepy, his eyesight dim.

The goddess's chariot was made of the same material as Nico di Angelo's sword—Stygian iron—pulled by two massive horses, all black except for their pointed silver fangs. The beasts' legs floated in the abyss, turning from solid to smoke as they moved.

The horses snarled and bared their fangs at Theo. The goddess lashed her whip—a thin streak of stars like diamond barbs—and the horses reared back.

"No, Shade," the goddess said. "Down, Shadow. These little prizes are not for you."

Percy eyed the horses as they nickered. He didn't much appreciate hearing their choices of words.

"Uh, so you won't let them eat us?" he asked the goddess. "They really want to eat us."

Nyx's quasar eyes burned. "Of course not. I would not let my horses eat you, any more than I would let Akhlys kill you. Such fine prizes, I will kill myself!"

Theo was still shrouded in the Death Mist, so she looked to Percy like an out-of-focus corpse, but he knew by her squeeze of his arm to let her take initiative.

"Oh, don't kill yourself," she said. "We're not that scary."

The goddess lowered her whip. "What? No, I didn't mean—"

"Well, I'd hope not." Theo looked at Percy and forced a laugh. "We wouldn't want to scare her, would we?"

"Ha, ha," Percy said weakly. He was still discombobulated from watching his girlfriend literally plague-bend a goddess to death. "No, we wouldn't."

The vampire horses looked confused. They reared and snorted and knocked their dark heads together. Nyx pulled back on the reins.

"Do you know who I am?" she demanded.

"Well, you're Night, I suppose," said Theo. "I mean, I can tell because you're dark and everything, though the brochure didn't say much about you."

Nyx's eyes winked out for a moment. "What brochure?"

Theo patted her pockets. "We had one, didn't we? Percy, where'd it go?"

Percy licked his lips. "Uh-huh." He was still watching the horses, his hand tight on his sword hilt. Slowly, though, he was starting to catch on.

"Anyway," Theo said, "I guess the brochure didn't say much because you weren't spotlighted on the tour. We got to see the River Phlegethon, the Cocytus, the arai, the poison glade of Akhlys, even some random Titans and giants, but Nyx... hmm, no, you weren't really featured."

"Featured? Spotlighted?"

"Yeah," Percy said, warming up to the idea. "We came down here for the Tartarus tour—like, exotic destinations, you know? The Underworld is overdone. Mount Olympus is a tourist trap—"

"Gods, totally!" Theo agreed. "So we booked the Tartarus excursion, but no one even mentioned we'd run into Nyx. Huh. Oh, well. Guess they didn't think you were important."

"Not important!" Nyx cracked her whip. Her horses bucked and snapped their silvery fangs. Waves of darkness rolled out of the chasm at her feet.

"Oh, my gods, please," said Theo, waving a hand dismissively. "My dad is literally the sun. I totally understand the whole time-of-day vibe you have going on—and I definitely think it's working for you—but... no, yeah. You just weren't in the brochure, baby. Sorry."

Percy felt Theo push down his sword arm. He lowered it immediately, understanding. This was a goddess beyond anything they had ever faced. Nyx was older than any Olympian or Titan or giant, older even than Gaia. She couldn't be defeated by two demigods—at least not two demigods using force.

"What of this brochure?" Nyx demanded furiously. "What do you mean, I'm not in it?"

"Well, how many other demigods have come to see you on the tour?" Theo asked.

Nyx's hand went slack on the reins. "None. Not one. This is unacceptable!"

Theo shrugged. "Maybe it's because you haven't really done anything to get in the news. I mean, I can understand Tartarus being important! This whole place is named after him. Or if we could meet Day—"

"Oh, yeah," Percy chimed in. "Day? She would be impressive. I'd totally want to meet her. Maybe get her autograph."

"Day!" Nyx gripped the rail of her black chariot. The whole vehicle shuddered. "You mean Hemera? She is my daughter! Night is much more powerful than Day!"

"Eh," said Theo. "I liked the arai or even Akhlys better."

She lowered her eyes to the dead goddess. "Ah, well, may she rest in peace."

Nyx fumed. "They are all my children as well!"

"Sorry for killing your daughter," Theo said innocently.

Percy stifled a yawn. "Got a lot of children, huh?"

"I am the mother of all terrors!" Nyx cried. "The Fates themselves! Hecate! Old Age! Pain! Sleep! Death! And all of the curses! Behold how newsworthy I am!"

She lashed her whip again. The darkness congealed around her. On either side, an army of shadows appeared—more dark-winged arai, which Percy was not thrilled to see; a withered man who must have been Geras, the god of old age; and a younger woman in a black toga, her eyes gleaming and her smile like a serial killer's—no doubt Eris, the goddess of strife. More kept appearing: dozens of demons and minor gods, each one the spawn of Night.

Percy glanced over to Theo. It was clear she wanted to run. She was facing a brood of horrors that could snap anyone's sanity. He could barely stabilize his breathing. But Percy knew if they ran they would die.

Next to him, Theo's breaths turned shallow. Even through her misty ghoul disguise, Percy could tell she was on the verge of panic. He had to stand his ground for both of them.

They're just visions, he told himself. They couldn't hurt him. It was just a movie. A scary movie, sure, but he'd always had to pretend not to be afraid of those when he watched them with Theo. She hated scary movies.

"Yeah, not bad," Percy said. "I guess we could get one picture for the scrapbook, but I don't know. You guys are so... dark. Even if I used a flash, I'm not sure it would come out."

"Y-yeah," Theo managed. "You guys aren't photogenic."

"You—miserable—tourists!" Nyx hissed. "How dare you not tremble before me! How dare you not whimper and beg for my autograph and a picture for your scrapbook! You want newsworthy? My son Hypnos once put Zeus to sleep! When Zeus pursued him across the earth, bent on vengeance, Hypnos hid in my palace for safety, and Zeus did not follow. Even the king of Olympus fears me!"

"Uh-huh." Percy turned to Theo. "Well, it's getting late. We should probably get lunch at one of those restaurants the tour guide recommended. Then we can find the Doors of Death."

"Aha!" Nyx cried in triumph. "You wish to see the Doors of Death? They lie at the very heart of Tartarus. Mortals such as you could never reach them, except through the halls of my palace—the Mansion of Night!"

She gestured behind her. Floating in the abyss, maybe three hundred feet below, was a doorway of black marble, leading into some sort of large room.

Percy's heart pounded so strongly he felt it in his stomach. That was the way forward—but it was so far down, an impossible jump. If they missed, they would fall into Chaos and be scattered into nothingness—a final death with no do-over. Even if they could make the jump, the goddess of Night and her most fearsome children stood in their way.

With a jolt, Percy realized what needed to happen. Like everything he had ever done, it was a long shot.

He managed a bored sigh. "I suppose we could do one picture, but a group shot won't work. Nyx, how about one of you with your favourite child? Which one is that?"

The brood rustled. Dozens of horrible glowing eyes turned towards Nyx.

The goddess shifted uncomfortably, as if her chariot were heating up under her feet. Her shadow horses huffed and pawed at the void.

"My favourite child?" she asked. "All my children are terrifying!"

Theo was still panicking from the visions, but she was starting to understand where Percy seemed to be going. She put a hand on his arm to stabilize herself.

Percy scoffed. "Seriously? I've met the Fates. I've met Thanatos. They weren't so scary. You've got to have somebody in this crowd who's worse than that."

"The darkest," Theo said. "The most like you."

"I am the darkest," hissed Eris. "Wars and strife! I have caused all manner of death!"

"I am darker still!" snarled Geras. "I dim the eyes and addle the brain. Every mortal fears old age!"

"Yeah, yeah," Theo said, though her eyes flashed with fear. "I'm not seeing enough dark. I mean, you're the children of Night. Show me dark."

The horde of arai wailed, flapping their leathery wings and stirring up clouds of blackness. Geras spread his withered hands and dimmed the entire abyss. Eris breathed a shadowy spray of buckshot across the void.

"I am the darkest!" hissed one of the demons.

"No, I!"

"No! Behold my darkness!"

If a thousand giant octopuses had squirted ink at the same time, at the bottom of the deepest, most sunless ocean trench, it could not have been blacker. Percy might as well have been blind. He gripped Theo's hand and steeled his nerves.

"Wait!" Nyx called, suddenly panicked. "I can't see anything."

"Yes!" shouted one of her children proudly. "I did that!"

"No, I did!"

"Fool, it was me!"

Dozens of voices argued in the darkness. The horses whinnied in alarm.

"Stop it!" Nyx yelled. "Whose foot is that?"

"Eris is hitting me!" cried someone. "Mother, tell her to stop hitting me!"

"I did not!" yelled Eris. "Ouch!"

The sounds of scuffling got louder. If possible, the darkness became even deeper. Percy's eyes dilated so much, they felt like they were being pulled out of their sockets.

He squeezed Theo's hand. "Ready? Off another cliff."

"Off another—?" Theo made an unhappy sort of sound. "Apollo's underpants, Percy, you can't be serious."

"Somebody give me light!" Nyx screamed. "Gah! I can't believe I just said that!"

"It's a trick!" Eris yelled. "The demigods are escaping!"

"I've got them," screamed an arai.

"No, that's my neck!" Geras gagged.

"Jump!" Percy told Theo.

They leaped into the darkness, aiming for the doorway far, far below.

Via Chatter

Pertheo the cliff jumpers im 😭

Tartarus fr has their characterization all over the place I'm laughing at how quick their emotions change in this chapter

Also. Might just drop May's perspective. Why is the Argo II so irrelevant rn. Nothing matters except Pertheo