[ 01 - CHAPTER ONE ]

― the one where carol almost dies ―

Liquid fire splashed in front of Carol's eyes like a flaming orange river. It coursed over layers of stark stone, its warm currency an incongruity to the gray rock it trickled over, tinging every strand of vine it touched with a layer of black, lifeless ash. Why the inhabitants of Camp Half-Blood were forced to maneuver this lava-ridden climbing wall, Carol would never know. It reeked of death.

A boulder tumbled down the side of the looming wall, and the campers who'd gathered at its base winced as the deluge of lava fluctuated in its path. The wave of fire nicked a half-blood's arm - this unfortunate child of Hypnos had taken too long to climb the gnarled surface - and yelped as his friends scrambled to pull him up the remainder of the wall.

The group of onlookers let out a collective sigh of relief when the last of his gangly body had been dragged to safety, their fretful, scrunched-up expressions lingering on their faces. It wasn't typical for the demigods to act so anxious around the climbing wall. After all, climbing the thirty-foot wall of fire was a weekly occurrence for them. Just another practice routine that most campers grew accustomed to by their second year at camp.

But something was different. The campers could feel it, in the underlyings of their bones and the warbled tissue that lied beneath their chest. There was a reason their climbing performances resembled someone grasping at straws. It was something that had lodged itself in the air at Camp Half-Blood, immovable, permanently harbored in the countenance of everyone that resided in the little niche on Long Island, until the right person forced it out of its hole. Except it appeared no one was the right person. Carol couldn't help but think that it was a sick, twisted retelling of the Sword in the Stone.

Though no one would come right out and say it, everyone knew what was plaguing the minds of campers. Their savior was missing.

Percy Jackson had vanished earlier that morning - or sometime during the night before, no one knew the exact time. He hadn't shown for breakfast, which was incredibly odd, given the renown for his cavern of a stomach. But no one had really freaked out. At least, not until lunchtime, when not even his girlfriend - ex-girlfriend? Acquaintance? Carol wasn't sure what label applied to the two anymore, ever since their big fight a few weeks back - the one person who should've known his whereabouts, didn't know where he was.

The Savior of Olympus was gone, and no one's nerves would settle because of it.

Carol, on the other hand...aside from her sorrow at the mere idea of an innocent boy's disappearance, she hadn't felt so weightless in months. When the son of Poseidon was around, people looked at her differently. Their eyes morphed into daggers of scorn, their lips into scowls of contempt, their thoughts harsh in remembrance of her actions during the Second Titan War. These things still happened when he was gone, but not nearly as often as when his presence - a beacon of Camp Half-Blood in itself - had been a constant reminder of her misdeeds against her own kind.

A spurt of giggles erupted from her left, tearing her consciousness out of the muddle of her thoughts. A group of Hermes kids stood huddled in a group next to her, no more than thirteen or fourteen years old each. Carol didn't know what it was. Whether it was the soft innocence of their youthful features, or the welcoming aura that all Hermes descendants seemed to carry, something prodded her to join in on their playful banter.

"I think he fell asleep on the wall," one of the light-haired girls said, presumably in reference to Clovis' recent climbing wall incident. "Apparently the Stolls found him asleep in a bathroom stall the other day. They wrapped toilet paper around his legs and everything, but he didn't wake up for hours."

"Oh, you can't be too hard on him." Carol forced a laugh from between her lips in an attempt to sound more jovial. "This wall is insanely hard to climb."

The eyes of each of the girls turned to rest on her. Six pairs. Six pairs of scrutinizing, watchful gazes, all focused solely on her. The things they could be thinking about her...good, bad, somewhere in the messy gray area that lied in between the two. The possibilities were endless. Why had she inserted herself in their conversation?

One of the girls in the group cocked her head, her ponytail full of curls bouncing behind her. "Well, not for you. You're always really good at this."

Carol lips curled in a sheepish grin, and her ivory-coated skin flushed red. She despised the climbing wall more than anything else in the world. In fact, she despised anything that put her in immediate danger, unlike most demigods who seemed to seek it out and ensnare between their tiny fingers. But it would be foolish to pretend she wasn't good at climbing the wall unscathed.

"Yeah," another girl added. It was the same girl who'd talked about the Stoll brothers TP-ing Clovis. "You probably use your voodoo or witchcraft or whatever to get to the top."

Suddenly, it was as if the girl had poked Carol with a needle. Her elation deflated like a balloon, and she was sure her face fell all the way to the Underworld. The girls turned away, snickering and exchanging jokes at Carol's defense, and the young girl's lips pressed firmly together in time with the invisible hands that were compressing and hiding the surge of emotion in her chest.

It seemed Percy Jackson's disappearance wasn't the only happenstance that was crawling under the skin of the other campers. She was too. It had been obvious for months. No matter the attempts she made to be friendly, the conversation she tried to start with the other girls at camp, her presence was jarring to everyone near her. And she couldn't blame them. She had tried to kill most of their parents.

"Hey."

Carol's head whipped around, searching for the person who'd spoken, her stiff posture loosening when her gaze was met with that of Will Solace. Gentle blond curls fell in heaps atop his forehead, a few stray coils sticking up at the apex of his skull. While everyone else squinted in the face of the bright afternoon sun, his deep blue eyes remained wide-open, complementing the meek grin he bore. The boy was a sunflower. It made sense, at least. His dad did hold the sun on a leash every morning.

"Ignore them," he continued, his quiet confidence simmering beneath his words. "They're just..."

Carol huffed. "Scared of me? Afraid I'm gonna use my voodoo to give them all pig noses? Yeah, I know."

"Well, I wasn't gonna put it like that," Will laughed. But his laugh, unlike the girls who'd laughed and pointed at Carol like children in a schoolyard, was kind. It effused a gentleness that made Carol regret how she'd snapped at him. It was unlike her to speak so harshly, and it wasn't his fault that every demigod in the camp hated her.

A few moments passed, and Carol stepped forward in the line for the climbing wall, Will at her side. The child of Apollo was one of the only campers that showed any tolerance towards her. In fact, he was more than tolerant - he was friendly. He didn't treat her like he was poking her with a stick, as most campers did. If Carol didn't know any better, she might have gone so far as to say he'd forgotten which side she'd fought on in the Second Titan War.

She knew better.

"I really don't think this is legal," Carol mumbled, her stare locked on the two parts of the climbing wall that were sliding closer together by the second.

A chuckle - no, a giggle - bubbled from between Will's parted lips. "You say that every time."

"Doesn't make it any less true."

Another set of campers climbed off the wall, leaving it open for the next group. Carol gulped when she realized that meant it was her turn.

She shuffled forward, her legs shaking. She instantly thought of the cartoons her father used to watch with her as a kid, years before he'd left her at a boarding school, where the animals' knees knocked against each other when they were scared. She began to fidget with the beaded necklace that lined the edge of her collarbone.

"Good luck," Will spoke up, holding a fist out in Carol's direction.

Carol gave him a half-hearted grin and bumped her closed fist against his. "You too."

A thin ringing sounded through the cool winter air, signalling the campers to start climbing. All at once, they charged the wall. Some demigods were more experienced than others. They leapt from ledge to ledge, their feet quick and their steps amble, their focus never once wavering from what would be a second-long obstacle for them. Some were considerably less skilled. They scrambled at whatever foothold they could find, slipping off most of them.

Carol, on the other hand, preferred to take her time when climbing the wall. Her tongue was trapped between her lips, a nervous tic of hers, and her eyes bore into the packed stone in front of her as she tried to find the most strategic way up the wall. She tried to ignore the geysers of lava and the streaks of blood - it tended to take away from her focus.

She'd almost made it up the wall. She'd just landed one of the last footholds in her area with dozens of seconds to spare. But then, all at once, the stone collapsed from beneath her.

She could still feel the warm, sticky surface beneath her soiled fingertips - sticky with what, she didn't want to know - but she no longer saw the pile of rocks she was supposed to be climbing. Instead, she could see nothing but pitch black, and hear nothing but white noise. It was a terrifying juxtaposition of colored senses.

Her heart began to pound in her chest, beating its way up her throat like the bass in a drumline. She had to get her vision back. Its loss had left her stranded on the climbing wall, for the gods' sake.

"Oh gods," she mumbled, but she couldn't hear her own voice, either. "Oh gods, I'm gonna die. I'm gonna die on this stupid freaking climbing wall."

Green started to leak into her peripheral. It wormed its way around the edges of her vision, a mixture of hazy garnet smoke and juniper cream. A set of torches appeared for a moment in the center of the blackness. The warm light they offered was ephemeral, however, because it soon melded into a woman wrapped in folds of shimmering white robes. Her face was buried beneath the hood, but a twisting in Carol's gut told her the identity of the shrouded goddess.

Hecate.

A flash of white light washed the woman away, the green smoke and cream swirling into nothingness, and the eerie vision was replaced with one of Carol's past. Of a darker, cataclysmic time, one that would taint Carol's being for months to come.

Hecate appeared once more, but this time, her face was visible. Where the hood had been were the features of a porcelain doll. Black eyes boasted from beneath her hollowed eye sockets, an elegant, high-set, blond ponytail rested atop her head. She was looking down at a Carol Wheeler of the past. A Carol with much shorter, curlier hair, and a much crueler expression on her face. This was the Carol that was empowered by Hecate. The Carol who'd scorned her fears and hesitations and let magic run through her veins as freely as a brook in an open field.

This was the Carol that had used her abilities against the gods and their children, and had vowed never to use magic again because of it.

She watched as the coils of her past self's hair flew around her faces, leaving blazes of green fire in its stead. She couldn't tear her eyes away as her hands moved in delicate, harried movements, careful not to move an inch out of its desired path for fear of casting the wrong spell. She winced as the vision shifted to the wreckage of her miniature war. Hundreds of upended cars and street signs, dozens of unaware house pets, a few satyrs, dryads, and hunters of Artemis. A newly claimed demigod. And then Hecate, standing behind her, smiling proudly as her wayward daughter mimicked her devastating movements.

"You will fight again," a deep, ominous voice sounded, vibrating her skull with its yawning feminine tones. "Three half-bloods will fall from the heavens. One of fire, one of beauty itself, and one of the lightning bolt from Zeus' left hand. You will know them by their marks."

The vision shifted once more, this time to three silhouettes, black against the outline of a vibrant gold...dragon? Ship? Carol couldn't tell what it was, because the camera in her mind zoomed in on the silhouette to the left. Fire licked at his wrists, slowly climbing up his arm until it engulfed his entire body in gluttonous flames. The middle figure - a tattoo on his wrist, an eagle with spread wings behind it. And the last body. In her hand rested a dagger, a dagger that showed swirling designs of mist, its true components hidden.

"You must join them, Carol. Join them or watch as Olympus perishes."

And then - yellow.

A blinding yellow, one that only slightly faded when she furiously blinked her eyes. Carol groaned. Her fingers twitched, and something sharp poked at her skin. She blinked a few more times, and she realized blades of grass had been poking at the epidermis of her fingertips. She was laying in the grass. She wasn't dead. She was laying in the safe, harmless grass. She wasn't dead.

But...how?

She shook her head, and a golden-brown face adorned with blinding white teeth entered her field of view. The face hovered over her like a helicopter, its fibers of hair the helicopter's blades, its smile the searchlights. Suddenly, she felt a hand feverishly pat the side of her face, and she huffed as she slapped it away.

"Will?" she muttered, her voice sounding as weak as the muscles in her arms felt. "Will, what happened?"

Will's eyes widened and he pulled the older girl into a crushing hug. "Carol! Oh my gods, I thought you were dead. You...you just fell, and no one could figure out what was happening, and then the boulders started falling, and then...I'm surprised you didn't fall all the way. It's a good thing your foot got caught on one of the footholds..."

"Slow down!" Carol breathed.

She shoved her elbows beneath her, pushing her torso up from the ground and out of Will's embrace. The back of her neck felt unusually warm, as did her temples and forehead, and her vision was slightly blurry as she looked at her surroundings. There was no one near. Not a demigod, not a satyr, not one curious soul, wondering if she would turn out okay after her near-fatal fall. No one. Carol's heart sunk. It wasn't a surprise, really. Not after the things she'd done.

"You passed out on the wall. The Stolls and I had to pull you up the rest of the way." Will was stumbling over his words once more. "Are you dehydrated? Have you been drinking enough water?"

Carol shook her head. "I'm not dehydrated."

Will's ramblings continued, his syllables blurring together in his rush to get them out, but Carol was too preoccupied to concentrate on what he was saying. What had just happened to her? She'd been perfectly fine, if a little scared, climbing the wall as she'd done every other week since her arrival at Camp Half-Blood, and then...what would she even call that? She'd never had a vision like that before. All the visions she had occurred in her dreams, when she was sleeping. So why now, in the middle of an obstacle course? And why that vision, of the three people she didn't even know? She explained this to Will, who simply frowned in response.

Will's jaw fell slack for a moment, then shot back up, and then fell once more before he said the exact words Carol had been thinking. "We need to take you to Chiron."

◈◈◈

"Well," Chiron brooded, one of his hands absentmindedly stroking the tufts of beard on his chin.

Carol and Will were sitting in Chiron's office. Their chairs smelled of an old sort of fabric, and Carol would've been marveling at the antiques around the room if it hadn't been for her current situation.

She tugged at a loose strand on the arm of her chair, chewing at her bottom lip as Chiron pondered the facts that had just been dumped in front of him. His hesitancy to offer an answer worried Carol more than the vision itself had. If her dangerous daydream could bewilder Chiron, then what hope did she have of figuring it out?

Finally, after what seemed like hours of silence, Chiron spoke. "I'm not fully sure of the meaning of your...ah...vision, but you are aware of your mother's abilities, correct?"

Carol nodded, unsure of what train of thought Chiron was leading her down. What could Hecate's abilities possibly have to do with this?

"You mother," Chiron continued, his words slow and thoughtful. "She's the goddess of prophecies. I've never seen it happen before, but it's possible...plausible, given the circumstances, that what you received on the climbing wall was a prophesying vision."

A prophesying vision. What did that even mean? She was receiving prophecies now? But that couldn't have been possible. She wasn't the Oracle; Rachel Dare was. She'd never heard of a child of Hecate having the gift of prophesying visions, and judging by how the vision had come to her, it was no gift.

Her thoughts drifted back to the Second Titan War once more, the focus of her plaguish vision. She'd sided with the titans. Abandoned what little home she had at Camp Half-Blood to war against Olympus. She'd fought against her friends, her siblings, to end the reign of the selfish gods upon their glass thrones. And she'd done it all with her mother at her side, with silent promises of approval in her ear with every step she made to support Hecate and the Titans' cause. She'd thought her actions would make things better. Better for all the demigods in Camp Half-Blood, whose mortal and godly parents had abandoned them. How was she supposed to have known tapping into her power would feel so good?

And now that the gods had apologized, had promised to do better, the best Hecate could do was send visions that almost killed Carol. It couldn't have been anyone else, after all. What other deity would've known to focus on that exact moment from Manhattan? On the proud look in Hecate's eyes as Carol began to realize the true potential of her abilities?

Carol scowled, a rare occurrence on the normally mild-mannered girl's face. Every time she fought for Olympus, it seemed, the gods were out to get her. Before the Titan War, before she'd signed her allegiance to Kronos, she'd had to witness the sorrows of other demigods' abandonment. Now, when she'd finally turned back around on what she'd been told was the right path, a supernatural vision had nearly sent her plummeting to her death. It was moments like this when Carol had to wonder...would Olympus ever cease to wreak it havoc on Carol's life?