PROLOGUE
task and reward

Selene Lopez watched her mother die. It sounds so tragic when you put it like that, but that's what happened. It played in her mind, over and over, surpassing all the happy memories she once had. It played like a dream, something so far from reality that sometimes she thought she had made the entire event up. But alas, her mother was still dead and Selene lived alone in a cold apartment complex in New York.

How do you come to terms with something like that at only eleven years old? To scream at the sky at your dead—beat God father, who never cared about Sofia Lopez anyways. Hades had been their ruin, the God of Death (that much had been for certain thus far). Fallen angels had taken her in her sleep from her foster placement and swept her away into the night — sending her to Camp Half—Blood.

It was so beautiful and bright, it looked like a place she'd imagine when her mother would read her a bedtime story. Upon admission, she was placed in Hades Cabin — where she met other children to who she shared the same father with.

It was a cruel joke but a real one.

The cabin itself had a huge skull hung up upon the doorway. Her bed was coffin shaped with polished mahogany frames, brass railings and was decorated with blood red velvet sheets. It was luxurious, it was nothing like she had ever had before. Before all this, Selene and her mother lived in a one bedroom apartment with a few small windows and lived pay cheque to pay cheque.

Now, she lived in a place with the rest of her father's Demigod children. And that's without training, eating and seeing all the other Gods' children that lived in the camp with them.

What a mockery. Selene rejected the camp immediately. Refused to speak to anyone, refused to acknowledge her father completely. And in return, her father never acknowledged her. Some of the children she roomed with boasted about Hades claiming them as their own child as if they hadn't been his child before. It made Selene feel sick.

But, she hadn't been the only one to share such views. Atlas, son of Apollo, watched her everywhere she went. Saw how pitiless and angry she was, he noticed the resentment other children of Hades felt towards her, muttering between themselves how ungrateful she was. She was just a child though, a lot like himself.

Both suffered a loss from a young age and both changed because of it. Atlas never knew his mother, he had been raised in the camp his whole life, for as long as he could remember. Apollo acknowledged him as his child when he turned ten when Atlas performed a beautiful song he had wrote on his Lyre. It had been his happiest day but not his most cherished memory.

Seeing her for the first time was his most cherished memory. And after a while, he worked up the courage to speak to her. Others had tried but they often ran away shortly after, got hurt or landed in the pond. However, he tenderly walked over to her and sat down silently. He could feel her burning gaze on the side of his face, a silent question 'what are you doing?' that was left unspoken.

Atlas sat there for an hour not saying a word and then when she eventually left, he did too. And the next day, he found her. Waiting and looking around for something. Or someone. He joined her once more and her shoulders sagged but not in a way that made him feel like he wasn't the one she was waiting for, but a sag that told him that he was.

And then they talked. For hours. Day after day, night after night. Just the two of them.

Being the son of a God never came to a shock for him like it had for Selene, he never knew any different. But the stories he heard of his father and his... temper were left to be told by people who never really knew him. But somehow he believed it to be true. His own anger bubbled in his chest often after tournaments were lost or when people made fun of him for playing his instrument.

These were all things he admitted to the girl as she refused to open up about herself.

As he got older, now being twenty and still living at camp (being a trainer for the new children coming in), his anger slowly faded into the pits of his insides, they screamed to come out some days but he pushed them away. He didn't want to be talked about like how his father was. He was a good person, a happy person and didn't want anger to reside within him.

Selene, also now being twenty and still never having opened up fully to the boy, had left camp shortly. Chiron, a trainer at camp, had always known she wanted to leave and explore the world. Therefore, when Chiron received a prophecy of a boy named Percy Jackson, he sent an eighteen year old Selene to watch over him — moving her into an apartment complex (the door only opposite Sally and Percy's) in New York.

Once, Percy started school, Chiron followed as a Latin teacher. He would watch the young Percy when he was at school and Selene would watch him when he came home. Selene had a stifling sense that Percy's mother, Sally Jackson, knew who she was. Or more or less where she came from. She opened her home to the girl and allowed her to babysit Percy. The three became very close over the two years they lived there.

There was only one issue. Selene had only ever cared for one living person before she met Sally and Percy and that was Atlas. He had been hurt when she told him she was leaving but he understood. He too knew of her mind and how she always seemed to want more than what he could give her at Camp Half—Blood. But, now she cared for the mother and son too.

She should have known that they wouldn't always be safe. That somehow eventually they would figure out who he was. Who Percy Jackson really was.

He was the son of Poseidon.

And Selene would have to fight like hell to make sure she never watched anyone else die. Because if they did, she would feel like she was the curse that sent them to their deaths.

She was Hades daughter after all.

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