CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

₊˚࿐࿔ 𖥧‧₊⚘ ❀༉. 𓏲｡

Sylvie didn't really sleep much last night, though that was seeming to become a normal thing for her now.

First, she had a nightmare about how her dad was doing in his ward (it wasn't good, by the way), and then Cedar woke her up by having a terrifying dream of his own. Since it was now becoming an unfortunate routine, Sylvie climbed over into Cedar's bunk. She put him back to sleep telling the same story as always—her mother and father's love story—but at that point it was no use trying to go to bed herself. Sylvie sat in the rocking chair on the Demeter cabin's porch, rocking and waiting for the sun to rise.

Although a small disruption to her routine, Florian finding her outside. He sat himself on the wooden railing protecting the porch, idly growing and un-growing a sapling in his hand.

"Cedar having nightmares again?" he asked.

Sylvie raised an eyebrow again. "Again? He never stops."

Florian sighed. The plant died again. "You don't have to do this every night, you know? One day we're actually going to have to go to war. You're gonna pass out in the middle of the fight out of exhaustion."

Her heart skidded at the mention of going to war. Sylvie could've handled any topic except for that one. Now she was thinking about Percy's nearing birthday. She was thinking about the prophecy. She was thinking about Percy, hitting sixteen for maybe a day before he had to martyr himself for Olympus.

Sylvie was nowhere near done loving him, but that didn't seem to matter to anyone except for her. The Fates were cruel.

"We heard the Great Prophecy," Sylvie finally said, voice strained. Florian couldn't even hide his shock.

"Oh," he said. "What did it... say?"

Sylvie met his widened gaze with a tired and worn-out one. "Nothing good. If that surprises you."

"I wish it did," Florian scoffed. He'd been far dimmer ever since the Battle of the Labyrinth last summer, where his best friend Castor died in his arms. Bad things never happened to Florian, so the loss was weighing down heavily. He couldn't get used to the grief he felt. It was so foreign to him. "Let me guess, we're fucked?"

Sylvie recalled the lines, "The hero's soul, cursed blade shall reap. A single choice shall end his days."

Florian swallowed thickly. "I see. So Percy's fucked."

"So it seems," she exhaled, but her voice was dry and her sigh was shaky. "Just my luck, isn't it?"

"Sylvie," Florian frowned.

"I can lose my sister and my dad and the only person I'm ever going to love, but I can't escape myself," Sylvie ranted angrily. "The one person I actually want to be rid of."

"It might not go the way we expect," he tried feebly. But it didn't reassure Sylvie the way it should, because she knew not even Florian himself was confident in the idea.

Regardless, she agreed, "Yeah. Maybe."

They sat in silence for long enough that the sun began creeping up into the sky. It was still relatively dark, but an orange hue glowed upon Sylvie and Florian. The children of Demeter longed for light like two plants deprived of the sun.

"Castor at least deserved to make it this far," Florian's voice was hoarse from lack of use.

Sylvie's eyes softened. Her older brother had never seemed so raw of a person until last year.

"A lot of people did," she said softly. "We have to keep going. For them."

"Castor is the only reason I keep going."

Sylvie and Florian stayed outside throughout the entire sunrise. Neither of them said another word, the only noises being natural sounds from the forest or other campers waking up.

The sibling duo ate depressing breakfasts at the Demeter table with their siblings—who didn't seem that enthusiastic either. Sylvie kept staring at the fissure in the marble floor where two years ago Nico had banished a bunch of bloodthirsty skeletons to the Underworld. The memory didn't exactly improve Sylvie's appetite.

After breakfast, Sylvie found out that she and Florian weren't the only ones having shitty mornings. They spotted Pollux by himself at the Dionysus table, looking absolutely horrible. Florian went to go check on him, and it turned out that he was also having nightmares, though it was of his late twin brother Castor. So Sylvie offered to cover Florian for Demeter cabin's chores while Florian stayed with Pollux.

Now, Sylvie, Percy, and Annabeth walked down to inspect the cabins. Actually, it was Annabeth's turn for inspection. Sylvie's chore was to sort through reports for Chiron. They figured if they did their miserable chores together, it wouldn't be so miserable—Percy didn't technically need to be there, because his was to put all of the equipment and animals up at the end of the day, but he was Percy, so he forced himself to tag along.

They started at the Poseidon cabin, which was basically just Percy. His bunk bed was made (well, sort of) and the Minotaur horn on his wall was straightened. He gave himself a four out of five.

Sylvie made a face. "Really, Fishstick?"

"Yeah, you're being generous," Annabeth used the end of her pencil to pick up an old pair of running shorts.

Percy snatched them away. "Hey, give me a break. I don't have Tyson cleaning up after me this summer."

"Three out of five," Annabeth said.

Percy gaped, and Sylvie laughed mockingly. He glared at her. Sylvie grinned back.

They all moved along. Sylvie tried to skim through Chiron's stack of reports as they walked. There were messages from demigods, nature spirits, and satyrs all around the country, writing about the latest monster activity. They were pretty depressing, and Sylvie's ADHD brain did not like concentrating on depressing stuff.

"Just give me the reports," Percy sighed like it was a hassle. "I'll do them instead."

Sylvie's head whipped over. "Are you serious?"

For some reason that made Percy's cheeks go red. He stuck his hand out impatiently as if that might cover the depth of his actions. "Just give me the reports, Duvall."

"I—" Sylvie's cheeks heated up too. "Okay. Um, thanks. I guess."

Percy grabbed the stack with a small smile creeping onto his face. "You're welcome. I guess," he teased.

As they continued, little battles were raging everywhere. Camp recruitment was down to zero. Satyrs were having trouble finding new demigods and bringing them to Half-Blood Hill because so many monsters were roaming the country. Their friend, Thalia, who led the Hunters of Artemis, hadn't been heard from in months, and if Artemis knew what had happened to them, she wasn't sharing information.

They visited the Aphrodite cabin, which of course got a five out of five. The beds were perfectly made. The clothes in everyone's footlockers were color coordinated. Fresh flowers bloomed on the windowsills. Percy tried getting Annabeth to dock a point because the place was pungent with designer perfume, but she ignored him.

"Great job as usual, Silena," Annabeth said.

It was actually Mickey who had cleaned the whole cabin, but she didn't speak up, because they all knew why Annabeth singled Silena out like that. The head counselor of Aphrodite just nodded listlessly. The wall behind her bed was decorated with pictures of Beckendorf. She sat on her bunk with a box of chocolates on her lap, and Sylvie remembered Mickey telling her that Silena's dad owned a chocolate store in the Village. It was how he'd caught the attention of Aphrodite.

"You want a bonbon?" Silena asked. "My dad sent them. He thought—He thought they might cheer me up."

"Are they any good?" Percy asked.

Mickey shook her head. "They taste like cardboard."

Apparently Percy didn't have anything against cardboard, so he tried one. Sylvie and Annabeth politely declined. They all promised to see Silena later and kept going.

As they crossed the commons area, a fight broke out between the Ares and Apollo cabins. Some Apollo campers armed with firebombs flew over the Ares cabin in a chariot pulled by two pegasi. Soon, the roof of the Ares cabin was burning, and naiads from the canoe lake rushed over to blow water on it.

Then the Ares campers called down a curse, and all the Apollo kids' arrows turned to rubber. The Apollo kids kept shooting at the Ares kids, but the arrows bounced off.

Two archers ran by, chased by an angry Ares kid who was yelling in poetry: "Curse me, eh? I'll make you pay! / I don't want to rhyme all day!"

Annabeth sighed. "Not that again. Last time Apollo cursed a cabin, it took a week for the rhyming couplets to wear off."

"That was an amazing week," Sylvie sighed, feeling the nostalgia. "Connor was so pissed."

Percy's head practically flung over to Sylvie. "Connor?" he asked.

"Yeah?" Sylvie eyed him oddly. "Because they cursed the Hermes cabin. For pranking them. So... Connor was pissed."

She swore she saw Percy clench his jaw, and Sylvie still didn't get why he always acted like this about Connor specifically. Sure, he was annoying, but Sylvie thought it was amusing and so did everybody else—no one hated Connor.

Percy must have noticed Sylvie catching onto something, because he shook his head and his stiff features fell. "Uh," he said, "what are they fighting about anyway? Ares and Apollo, I mean."

Sylvie decided it best not to question Percy's weird behavior. She started answering Percy's question, but Percy found himself just staring at Sylvie, which was stupid since he'd seen her a billion times. Because Percy had grown since last summer and Sylvie hadn't, their height difference was finally something significant. But still, Sylvie seemed much more mature. It was kind of intimidating. Well, sure, she'd always been cute, but the only thing Percy could think now was that she was seriously beautiful.

"...who gets it ever since," Sylvie finished.

Percy blinked rapidly. How long had he been just looking at Sylvie? He swallowed, cheeks tinging in embarrassment. "Sorry, what'd you say?"

"Um—what?"

Annabeth looked up from where she scribbled on her inspection scroll incredulously, having given Ares and Apollo a one out of five. The judgment in her face and the confusion on Sylvie's had him growing even more flustered. Percy kind of looked like he wanted to curl up in a hole and die.

"I... asked you about," Percy cleared his throat, "what Ares and Apollo are fighting over."

"Yeah, and I told you," Sylvie pointed out, not comprehending.

Percy focused his gaze on the fight going on before him instead of Sylvie so that he didn't lose focus this time. "I just—I guess I didn't hear you. Sorry. The fight is... distracting."

Annabeth scoffed. "Yeah, I'm sure the fight is real distracting."

He looked like he was about to hit Annabeth, but thought better of it.

Finally, Sylvie repeated, "That flying chariot is what it's all about." She pointed at the Apollo cabin's current method of transportation. "They captured it in a raid in Philadelphia last week. Some of Kronos's demigods were there with that flying chariot. The Apollo cabin seized it during the battle, but the Ares cabin led the raid. So they've been fighting about who gets it ever since." Then, "Did you hear me that time?"

They ducked as Michael Yew's chariot dive-bombed Phoenix. Phoenix tried to slice him and cuss him out in rhyming couplets. He was pretty creative about rhyming those cuss words.

"We're fighting for our lives," Percy said, "and they're bickering about some stupid chariot."

"They'll get over it," Annabeth said. "Clarisse will come to her senses."

Sylvie wasn't so sure. That didn't sound like the Clarisse that Sylvie knew.

They inspected a few more cabins. Sylvie's cabin got a four. Hephaestus got a three and probably should've gotten lower, but with Beckendorf being gone and all, Annabeth cut them some slack. Hermes got a two, which was no surprise. All campers who didn't know their godly parentage were shoved into the Hermes cabin, and since the gods were kind of forgetful, that cabin was always overcrowded.

Finally they got to Athena's cabin, which was orderly and clean as usual. Books were straightened on the shelves. The armor was polished. Battle maps and blueprints decorated the walls. Only Annabeth's bunk was messy. It was covered in papers, and her silver laptop was still running.

"Vlacas," Annabeth muttered, which was basically calling herself an idiot in Greek.

Her second-in-command, Malcolm, suppressed a smile. "Yeah, um... we cleaned everything else. Didn't know if it was safe to move your notes."

That was probably smart. Annabeth had a bronze knife that she reserved just for monsters and people who messed with her stuff.

"We'll wait outside while you finish the inspection," Malcolm said. Sylvie had a feeling he still wasn't over her little tree act during their chariot race. Him and the other Athena campers filed out the door while Annabeth cleaned up her bunk.

Sylvie didn't really know what to do—Percy was doing her reports for her, and Annabeth was busying herself too. She kind of just shuffled there, not wanting to disrupt either of her friends while they were working.

Then Annabeth straightened up. She closed her laptop, which had been given to her as a gift from the inventor Daedalus last summer.

"So," Sylvie couldn't restrain herself from talking much further, "get any good info from that thing?"

"Too much," she said. "Daedalus had so many ideas, I could spend fifty years just trying to figure them all out."

"Yeah," Percy said. "That would be fun."

Annabeth shuffled her papers—mostly drawings of buildings and a bunch of handwritten notes. Sylvie knew Annabeth wanted to be an architect someday, but she'd learned the hard way not to ask what she was working on. Annabeth had started talking about angles and load-bearing joints until Sylvie's eyes glazed over.

"Three out of five," she stared at her inspection scroll, "for a sloppy head counselor. You guys go ahead without me. And give this back to Chiron while you're at it, please."

Sylvie and Percy could sense Annabeth's disappointment in herself tampering her entire mood, so they didn't press. Sylvie took the inspection roll from Annabeth, and she and Percy left Cabin 6.

On the way to the Big House, they finished the reports, the last one being handwritten on a maple leaf from a satyr in Canada. If possible, the note made Sylvie feel worse.

"'Dear Grover,'" Percy read aloud. "'Woods outside Toronto attacked by giant evil badger. Tried to do as you suggested and summon power of Pan. No effect. Many naiads' trees destroyed. Retreating to Ottawa. Please advise. Where are you? — Gleeson Hedge, protector.'"

Sylvie grimaced. "You haven't heard anything from him? Even with your empathy link?"

Percy shook his head dejectedly.

Ever since last summer when the god Pan had died, their friend Grover had been drifting farther and farther away. The Council of Cloven Elders treated him like an outcast, but Grover still traveled all over the East Coast, trying to spread the word about Pan and convince nature spirits to protect their own little bits of the wild. He'd only come back to camp a few times to see his girlfriend Juniper.

Last Sylvie had heard Grover was in Central Park organizing dryads, but nobody had seen or heard from him in two months. They'd tried to send Iris-messages, which never got through. Sylvie hoped that Percy would know what was happening to him, since he shared an empathy link with Grover, but evidently that didn't hold up as of late.

"Sylv." Percy stopped her by the tetherball court. For a moment, a foolish moment, Sylvie felt a surge of hope for some reason. "Listen, I had this dream about, um, Rachel..."

Sylvie didn't know why he felt the need to tell her the whole thing—Rachel throwing darts at Percy's head, wishing he was going on vacation with her, creating weird ass paintings, and sounding far too ominous for her own good.

For a while Sylvie didn't say anything. then she rolled up Annabeth's inspection scroll so tight she ripped it. "Okay? I didn't really need to know that."

Percy sighed. "Come on," he said. "You don't care? Not even about the fact Typhon is just a distraction? Or that Kronos is planning on hitting Olympus while the gods are away?"

"Percy," Sylvie said, her voice tight, "Rachel is just a mortal."

"But what if her dream is true? Those other Titans—they said Olympus would be destroyed in a matter of days. They said they had plenty of other challenges. And what's with that picture of Luke as a kid—"

"We'll just have to be ready, then—I don't know!"

"How?" Percy pressed, getting on Sylvie's nerves. "Look at our camp. We can't even stop fighting each other. And I'm supposed to get my fucking soul reaped."

Sylvie threw down the scroll. "I wished you never heard that stupid prophecy," she cried, voice angry and hurt. "All it did was scare you. You run away from everything when you're scared!"

Percy stared at her, completely stunned. "Me? Run away? Says you?! Your fatal flaw is literally timidity!"

"Fuck you!" Sylvie shoved him, then got right in his face. "You think I'm the coward here, but it's you, Percy!"

They were inches apart, Sylvie being forced to tilt her head up to glare at him. But it lost its heat when Percy realized that her eyes were red, and maybe she wasn't talking about the prophecy when she called him a coward.

"If you don't like our chances," she said, "maybe you should go on that vacation with Rachel."

Percy deflated. "Sylvie—"

"If you don't like my company."

"That's not fair!"

Sylvie pushed past him and stormed toward the strawberry fields. She hit the tetherball as she passed and sent it spinning angrily around the pole. As her feet touched the grass, vines kept curling around her ankles like her rampant emotions were controlling her chlorokinesis. They even latched onto a poor, unclaimed kid and sent him flying twenty feet away. Miranda happened to be there, catching notice and making Sylvie put the DAYS SINCE SYLVIE'S LAST ACCIDENT!!!! count back to 0.

Sylvie would like to say her day got better from there. Of course it didn't.

That afternoon they had an assembly at the campfire to burn Beckendorf's burial shroud and say their good-byes. Even the Ares and Apollo cabins called a temporary truce to attend.

Beckendorf's shroud was made out of metal links, like chain mail. Sylvie didn't see how it would burn, but the Fates must've been helping out. The metal melted in the fire and turned to golden smoke, which rose into the sky. The campfire flames always reflected the campers' moods, and today they turned black.

Sylvie hoped Beckendorf's spirit would end up in Elysium. Maybe he'd even chose to be reborn and try for Elysium in three different lifetimes so he could reach the Isles of the Blest, which was like the Underworld's ultimate party headquarters. If anyone deserved it, Beckendorf did.

Sylvie left without a word to Percy, even though she saw he kept desperately trying to catch her gaze. She just couldn't stand to be around him any more today. She just couldn't believe he acted so nice and close to her for the past months, yet always found a way to sneak Rachel in, whether it be hanging out with her or in literal conversation.

Sylvie almost missed it when she knew for a fact Percy absolutely didn't like her back at all. At least then she knew. Now she was always confused and angry and desperate for his presence, but stung by it the second he was near.

Usually she'd confess all of her Percy-frustration to Mickey, but she was busy with Silena, which Sylvie completely understood, so she backed off. Now she was just letting her feelings fester—Annabeth was always way too logical about the situation, she'd rather die than be vulnerable to her siblings, she was pissed at Phoenix for prioritizing a chariot over a war, and Grover was missing, so Sylvie just let herself feel like she was going insane. That's basically how she always felt when it came to Percy. Not much was different.

Little did Sylvie know, he was about to make her feel a lot more insane when he up and disappeared from camp.

╰━━━ ◦ ❀ ◦ ❀◦ ━━━╯

BAILEY YAPS...

Tell me why Persylv is in a 14 month situationship bruh 😭😭😭😭😭

Sylvie's so strong for this actually because imagine pining for this pathetic boy for 1,173 DAYS and you're fine with that but then he kisses you and starts showing reciprocated feelings BUT IS ALSO PULLING SHIT LIKE THIS GN PERCY KEEP MY WIFE'S NAME OUT YOUR MOUTH

Whatever like me and Sylvie still love him so whatever.

It's been too long since I've said this in the notes so I love user Aquamcnti and Via is my soulmate and Via is my wife and Via is my muse

Also I love meep city endlessly hi Mattheo hi Lyn hi Mel hi Lia hi Evie

Also Florian Whitlock I'm sorry I fucked up your life do u forgive me

Sylvie's ass mad and bold as hell I'm laughing