Published: October 26, 2021
Edited: August 8, 2022
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"

Two on one," I challenged Luke, trying to stall. 

"What are you afraid of ?" Percy chimed in. "You're supposed to be the best swordsman at camp."

Luke curled his lip. The soldiers who were about to kill us hesitated, waiting for his order. Before he could saying anything, Agrius, the bear-man, burst onto the deck leading a flying horse.

It was the first pure-black pegasus I'd ever seen, with wings like a giant raven. The pegasus bucked and whinnied.

I could understand his thoughts. He was calling Agrius and Luke some names so bad Chiron would've washed his muzzle out with saddle soap. 

"Sir!" Agrius called, dodging a pegasus hoof. "Your steed is ready!" Luke kept his eyes on me ad my brother. 

"I told you last summer, Percy," he smirked. "You can't bait me into a fight." 

"And you keep avoiding one," I noticed. "Scared your warriors will see you get whipped?" 

Luke glanced at his men, and he saw I'd trapped him. If he backed down now, he would look weak. If he fought me, he'd lose valuable time chasing after Clarisse.

For my part, the best I could hope for was to distract him, giving my friends a chance to escape. If anybody could think of a plan to get them out of there, Annabeth could. On the downside, I knew how good Luke was at sword-fighting. 

"I'll kill you quickly," he decided, and raised his weapon. 

Backbiter was a foot longer than my own sword. Its blade glinted with an evil gray-and-gold light where the human steel had been melded with celestial bronze. I could almost feel the blade fighting against itself, like two opposing magnets bound together. I didn't know how the blade had been made, but I sensed atragedy. Someone had died in the process, which didn't surprise me.

Luke whistled to one of his men, who threw him around leather-and-bronze shield. He grinned at me wickedly. 

"Luke," Annabeth pleaded, "at least give them a shield." 

"Sorry, Annabeth," he smirked. "You bring your own equipment to this party." 

"Well and to think I ever called you brother." I quipped, pulling out Whirlpool. Luke's face darkened, and I knew that I had managed to get under his skin. I had landed a blow, not matter how small.

The shield was a problem. Fighting two-handed with just a sword gives you more power, but fighting one-handed with a shield gives you better defense and versatility. There are more moves, more options, more ways to kill.

Except...

Before I could put my plan into action, Luke lunged and almost killed Percy on the first try. His sword went under his arm, slashing through Percy's shirt and grazing his ribs.

Percy jumped back, then counterattacked with Riptide, but Luke slammed the blade away with his shield. 

"My, Percy," Luke chided. "You're out of practice." He came at Percy again with a swipe to the head. 

I parried, returned with a thrust. He side-stepped easily. My heart was racing.

When Luke lunged again, I jumped backward into the swimming pool and felt a surge of strength. I spun underwater, creating a funnel cloud, and blasted out of the deep end, straight at Luke's face. The force of the water knocked him down, spluttering and blinded. But before I could strike, he rolled aside and was on his feet again.

I attacked and sliced off the edge of his shield, but that didn't even faze him. Luke dropped to a crouch and jabbed at my legs.

Unfortunately for him, the water I had from my three-second swim solidified and Backbiter clanged off of a foot of solid ice.

If the sword had been purely steel it might have shattered on contact, but celestial bronze is a lot stronger than mortal metals. Luke staggered back and I released my ice casing, rolling behind a deck chair.

"Nerrrridia!" Grover bleated. I rolled again as Luke's sword slashed the deck chair in half, metal pipes and all. Percy ran for the pool but tripped, the cut on his torso spilling blood onto the deck. Luke advanced slowly, smiling. The edge of his sword was tinged with red. 

"One thing I want you to watch before you die, Percy." He looked at the bear-man Oreius,who was still holding Annabeth and Grover by the necks. "You can eat your dinner now, Oreius. Bon appetit." 

"He-he! He-he!" The bear-man lifted my friends and bared his teeth. That's when all Hades broke loose.

Whish! A red-feathered arrow sprouted from Oreius's mouth. With a surprised look on his hairy face, he crumpled to the deck.

The ice that had been protecting me had responded to my anger, shooting hail the size of baseballs at Luke.

"Brother!" Agrius wailed. He let the pegasus's reins go slack just long enough for the black steed to kick him in the head and fly away free over Miami Bay.

For a split second, Luke's guards were too stunned to do anything except watch the bear twins' bodies dissolve into smoke.Then there was a wild chorus of war cries and hooves thundering against metal. A dozen centaurs charged out of the main stairwell. 

"Ponies!" Tyson cried with delight. 

My mind had trouble processing everything I saw. Chiron was among the crowd, but his relatives were almost nothing like him. There were centaurs with black Arabian stallion bodies,others with gold palomino coats, others with orange-and-white spots like paint horses.

Some wore brightly colored T-shirts with Day-Glo letters that said PARTY PONIES: SOUTH FLORIDA CHAPTER. Some were armed with bows, some with baseball bats, some with paintball guns. One had his face painted like a Comanche warrior and was waving a large orange Styrofoam hand making a big Number 1.

Another was bare-chested and painted entirely green. A third had googly-eye glasses with the eyeballs bouncing around on Slinky coils, and one of those baseball caps with soda-can-and-straw attachments on either side.

They exploded onto the deck with such ferocity and color that for a moment even Luke was stunned, a hailstone bounced off of his nose. I couldn't tell whether they had come to celebrate or attack.

Apparently both.

As Luke was raising his sword to rally his troops, a centaur shot a custom made arrow with a leather boxing glove on the end. It smacked Luke in the face and sent him crashing into the swimming pool.

His warriors scattered.

I couldn't blame them. Facing the hooves of a rearing stallion is scary enough, but when it's a centaur, armed with a bow and whooping it up in a soda-drinking hat, even the bravest warrior would retreat. 

"Come get some!" yelled one of the party ponies. They let loose with their paintball guns. A wave of blue and yellow exploded against Luke's warriors, blinding them and splattering them from head to toe.

They tried to run, only to slip and fall. Chiron galloped toward Annabeth and Grover, neatly plucked them off the deck, and deposited them on his back. Luke was crawling out of the pool.

"Attack, you fools!" he ordered his troops. Somewhere down below deck, the large alarm bell thrummed. I knew any second we would be swamped by Luke's reinforcements.

Already, his warriors were getting over their surprise, coming at the centaurs with swords and spears drawn. Tyson slapped half a dozen of them aside, knocking them over the guard rail into Miami Bay.

But more warriors were coming up the stairs. 

"Withdraw, brethren!" Chiron called. 

"You won't get away with this, horse man!" Luke shouted. He raised his sword, but Percy seemed to have gotten over his shock and with a glare, Luke's sopping wet clothes pinned him down. A palomino centaur hoisted me onto his back. 

"Dudette, get your big friend!" 

"Tyson!" I yelled. "Come on!"

Tyson dropped the two warriors he was about to tie into a knot and jogged after us. He jumped on the centaur's back. 

"Dude!" the centaur groaned, almost buckling under Tyson's weight. "Do the words 'low carb diet' mean anything to you?" 

Luke's warriors were organizing themselves into a phalanx. But by the time they were ready to advance, the centaurs had galloped to the edge of the deck and fearlessly jumped the guardrail, as if it were a steeple chase and not ten stories above the ground.

I was sure we were going to die.

We plummeted toward the docks, but the centaurs hit the asphalt with hardly a jolt and galloped off, whooping and yelling taunts at the Princess Andromeda as we raced into the streets of downtown Miami. I have no idea what the Miamians thought as we galloped by.

Streets and buildings began to blur as the centaurs picked up speed. It felt as if space were compacting—as if each centaur step took us miles and miles. In no time, we'd left the city behind. We raced through marshy fields of high grass and ponds and stunted trees.

Finally, we found ourselves in a trailer park at the edge of a lake. The trailers were all horsetrailers, tricked out with televisions and mini-refrigerators and mosquito netting. We were in a centaur camp. 

"Dude!" Cheered a party pony as he unloaded his gear. "Did you see that bear guy? He was all like: 'Whoa, I have an arrow in my mouth!'"

The centaur with the googly-eye glasses laughed. "That was awesome! Head slam!"

The two centaurs charged at each other full-force and knocked heads, then went staggering off in different directions with crazy grins on their faces.

Chiron sighed. He set Annabeth, Grover, and Percy down on a picnic blanket next to me. 

"I really wish my cousins wouldn't slam their heads together. They don't have the brain cells to spare." 

"Chiron," I grinned, still stunned by the fact that he was here. "You saved us."

He gave me a dry smile. "Well now, I couldn't very well let you die my dear, especially since you've cleared my name." 

"But how did you know where we were?" Annabeth asked. 

"Advanced planning, my dear. I figured you would wash up near Miami if you made it out ofthe Sea of Monsters alive. Almost everything strange washes up near Miami." 

"Gee, thanks," Grover mumbled. 

"No, no," Chiron chuckled. "I didn't mean...Oh, never mind. I am glad to see you, my young satyr. The point is, I was able to eavesdrop on the twins' Iris-message and trace the signal. Iris and I have been friends for centuries. I asked her to alert me to any important communications in this area. It then took no effort to convince my cousins to ride to your aid. As you see, centaurs can travel quite fast when we wish to. Distance for us is not the same as distance for humans."

I looked over at the campfire, where three party ponies were teaching Tyson to operate apaintball gun. I hoped they knew what they were getting into. 

"So what now?" I asked Chiron. "We just let Luke sail away? He's got Kronos aboard that ship. Or parts of him, anyway."

Chiron knelt, carefully folding his front legs underneath him. He opened the medicine pouch on his belt and started to treat Percy's wounds. 

"I'm afraid, Neridia, that today has been something of a draw. We didn't have the strength of numbers to take that ship. Luke was not organized enough to pursue us. Nobody won." 

"But we got the Fleece!" Annabeth protested. "Clarisse is on her way back to camp with it right now."

Chiron nodded, though he still looked uneasy. "You are all true heroes. And as soon as we get Percy fixed up, you must return to Half-Blood Hill. The centaurs shall carry you."

 "You're coming, too?" Percy asked anxiously. 

"Oh yes, Percy. I'll be relieved to get home. My brethren here simply do not appreciate Dean Martin's music. Besides, I must have some words with Mr. D. There's the rest of the summer to plan. So much training to do. And I want to see...I'm curious about the Fleece." He looked sadly at Annabeth and I. 

I didn't know exactly what he meant, but it made me worried about what Luke had said: I was going to let you take the Fleece...once I was done with it.

Had he just been lying? I'd learned with Kronos there was usually a plan within a plan. The titan lord wasn't called the Crooked One for nothing. He had ways of getting people to do what he wanted without them ever realizing his true intentions.

Over by the campfire, Tyson let loose with his paintball gun. A blue projectile splattered against one of the centaurs, hurling him backward into the lake. The centaur came up grinning, covered in swamp muck and blue paint, and gave Tyson two thumbs up. 

"Annabeth," Chiron sighed, "perhaps you and Grover would go supervise Tyson and my cousins before they, ah, teach each other too many bad habits?"

Annabeth met his eyes. Some kind of understanding passed between them. 

"Sure, Chiron," Annabeth agreed. "Come on, goat boy." 

"But I don't like paintball." 

"Yes, you do." She hoisted Grover to his hooves and led him off toward the campfire. Chiron finished wrapping Percy's leg and moved on to rubbing cream onto my leg to combat the frostbite from my ice treatment.

"Percy, I had a talk with Annabeth on the way here. A talk about the prophecy."

Uh-oh, I thought. Percy winced.

"It wasn't her fault," I said. "Percy made her tell him."

Chiron's eyes flickered with irritation. I was sure he was going to chew us out, but then his look turned to weariness. "I suppose I could not expect to keep it secret forever." 

"So are we the ones in the prophecy?"

Chiron tucked his bandages back into his pouch. "I wish I knew, Percy. You're not yet sixteen. For now we must simply train you both as best we can, and leave the future to the Fates." 

"That's what it meant," Percy realized with a jolt.

Chiron frowned. "That's what what meant?" 

"Last summer. The omen from the Fates, when I saw them snip somebody's life string. I thought it meant I was going to die right away, but it's worse than that. It's got something to do with your prophecy. The death they foretold—it's going to happen when we're sixteen."Chiron's tail whisked nervously in the grass and I gasped. 

"My boy, you can't be sure of that. We don't even know if the prophecy is about you." Chiron said uneasily. 

"But there aren't any other half-blood children of the Big Three!" 

"That we know of." 

"And Kronos is rising. He's going to destroy Mount Olympus!" 

"He will try," Chiron agreed. "And Western Civilization along with it, if we don't stop him. But we will stop him. You will not be alone in that fight."

I knew he was trying to make us feel better, but I remembered what Annabeth had told me so many years ago. We had been ten years old when Chiron had let Annabeth hear the great prophecy. He had forbidden me from joining her, though I hadn't known why at the time. Annabeth had of course told me everything she could remember afterwards and the words had haunted me for years after.

It would come down to the heroes. One decision that would save or destroy the West. Something terrible was going to happen, either to me and Percy or to somebody I was close to. 

"We're just kids, Chiron," I said miserably. "What good are two lousy heroes against somethinglike Kronos?"

Chiron managed a smile. 

"'What good are two lousy heroes'? Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain said something like that to me once, just before he single-handedly changed the course of your Civil War." He pulled an arrow from his quiver and turned the razor-sharp tip so it glinted in the firelight. 

"Celestial bronze. An immortal weapon. What would happen if you shot this at a human?" 

"Nothing," I answered automatically, Athena's blessing made me naturally inclined to answer questions. "It would pass right through." 

"That's right," he hummed. "Humans don't exist on the same level as the immortals. They can't even be hurt by our weapons. But you two —you are part god, part human. You live in both worlds. You can be harmed by both, and you can affect both. That's what makes heroes so special. You carry the hopes of humanity into the realm of the eternal. Monsters never die. They are reborn from the chaos and barbarism that is always bubbling underneath civilization, the very stuff that makes Kronos stronger. They must be defeated again and again, kept at bay. Heroes embody that struggle. You fight the battles humanity must win, every generation, in order to stay human. Do you understand?" 

"I...I don't know." 

"You must try, both of you. Because whether or not you are the children of the prophecy, Kronos thinks you might be. And after today, he will finally despair of turning you to his side. That is the only reason he hasn't killed you yet, you know. As soon as he's sure he can't use you, he will destroy you." 

"You talk like you know him." Percy's voice was cautious and curious.

Chiron pursed his lips. "I do know him." I stared at him. I sometimes forgot just how old Chiron was. 

"Is that why Mr. D blamed youwhen the tree was poisoned? Why you said some people don't trust you?" 

"Indeed." 

"But, Chiron...I mean, come on! Why would they think you'd ever betray the camp for Kronos?" Percy begged. Chiron's eyes were deep brown, full of thousands of years of sadness. 

"Percy, remember your training. Remember your study of mythology. What is my connection to the titan lord?"

"You, uh, owe Kronos a favor or something? He spared your life?" Percy fumbled. I facepalmed.

"Percy," Chiron placed a hand on my brother's shoulder, his voice impossibly soft. "The titan Kronos is my father."

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Word Count: 3053