Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Nico

The woods beyond the border smell like rot. 

Not the honest kind Nico knows—earthy, slow, the decay that belongs to time and gravestones. This is different. Harsher. Hungrier. A stench that clings to pine needles like burnt offerings and dried blood, like old magic that refused to die when it was told.

Something left behind.

It’s been a month since the war ended, and Camp Half-Blood is still in ruins, though most of the ruins have been swept into neat little piles.

The rubble’s gone, mostly. The Big House stands again—slanted at the southern beam, but upright. The strawberry fields are scorched at their edges, blackened like the pages of a half-burnt book. One of the cabins still smells like smoke and melted plastic, and no one is entirely sure if Cabin Eight ever stopped vibrating after Leo’s last explosion.

The monsters have stopped coming. The ground hasn’t cracked open in a week. No new prophecies have fallen from Rachel’s mouth like blood-slicked poetry. By all accounts, the world is quiet.

And still, the silence doesn’t feel safe. It feels like the inhale before the scream. Like something lurking just beneath the roots, holding its breath.

Waiting.

Mr. D is gone—off on some “urgent Olympian business,” which everyone assumes means he’s playing blackjack in Atlantic City or hiding from responsibility behind a bottomless wine glass of Diet Coke. But lately, Nico isn’t so sure. There’s a tension in the air when his name is mentioned, a reverent kind of discomfort, like the gods are watching their own shadows. It's ridiculous, of course—Dionysus doing something important?—but the thought lingers. Uneasy. Heavy. Almost believable.

Chiron’s doing his best. He’s always doing his best. But there are days now when he looks tired in a way even immortality can’t disguise. He walks slower. Speaks softer. Like the weight of the world has finally settled across his withers and refuses to budge.

And Apollo is still missing.

Not gone, exactly. Not in the way demigods die, loud and sharp and final. But absent, in that unnerving, divine way—like a candle snuffed mid-prayer, the smoke curling in the dark where light should be. No one talks about it. Not really. But his absence leaves holes in the quiet, and Nico can’t help but think that if a god of healing can vanish without a trace, they’re all far more fragile than they pretend to be.

Hazel, Frank, and Reyna have returned to Camp Jupiter, stepping into New Rome with the sort of quiet resolve only Romans carry. They left with solemn nods and folded letters, promises to write and rebuild and not let the silence swallow their legion whole.

And then there’s Leo.

Leo is dead.

At least, that’s what they say.

But Nico—Nico isn’t so sure.

He felt Leo’s death like the blink of a star. Sudden. Blinding. And then… nothing. No soul crossing into the Underworld. No whisper of essence moving through the shadows. Just a strange hollowness where his spirit should have been, like a place waiting to be filled.

Not dead, then.

Not truly.

Just… unreachable.

That leaves the rest of them.

Percy, Annabeth, Jason, and Piper are still at Camp Half-Blood—still standing, still steady, still here. Whether they like it or not, they’ve become more than just campers. They’re symbols now. Heroes of the war. The Seven who fulfilled the prophecy. Their names spoken like incantations, etched into the walls of the dining pavilion, whispered by younger campers who never saw the world before it cracked and bled and demanded they grow up too fast.

Even the summer-only kids have stayed into September, pushing back return dates and college tours and mortal lives, as if they’re afraid to leave while the dust is still settling. And it is still settling. The cabins are standing, but some still creak like wounded things. The forge burns too hot. The stables smell like brimstone. The armory inventory is a mess of half-melted celestial bronze and shattered memories. The forest is restless. The borders keep pulsing like a bruise.

The camp is not healed. Not yet.

And yet—everyone is looking to them to lead. Even Chiron, in his rare moments of stillness, sometimes turns his ancient, tired gaze toward them like he’s waiting for permission to exhale. Like he’s not sure what comes next unless they name it first.

And then there’s Nico.

He wasn’t one of the Seven. Not officially. Not marked by prophecy or tied to the Argo II in stories they’ll tell around the campfire. But that hasn’t stopped anyone from watching him like he’s some kind of myth made flesh. The one who carried the Athena Parthenos across monsters and mountains. The one who stitched the broken edges of the camps back together with shadow and steel. The one who saw both worlds—the living and the dead, Roman and Greek—and chose to stay.

He’s become something of a symbol too.
A bridge. A harbinger. A survivor.

And he hates it.

They don't see the parts of him that were broken to make that story possible. The sleepless nights in Cabin Thirteen, spent curled in a blanket that doesn’t keep the nightmares out. The bruises blooming from nowhere after shadow-traveling one mile too many. The quiet dinners uneaten, not out of protest but because food tastes like ash when you're not sure you're real. The guilt that festers every time someone praises him for surviving, as if surviving were a thing he chose, a thing he wanted, instead of the consequence of not dying fast enough.

Lately, he’s been pulling back. Slipping through camp like smoke through a crack in the stone, avoiding dining halls and capture the flag, skipping campfires unless someone physically drags him there. Cabin Thirteen has become a tomb again, and Nico is its only occupant. He only emerges for patrol shifts or late-night walks, when the rest of the camp is asleep and he doesn’t have to meet their eyes. The ones that stare too long. The ones that look at him like he’s something fragile or sacred. Or both.

He knows what they whisper behind his back.

That he moves like a ghost.

That he doesn’t eat.

That his hands are always cold, that the shadows that coil around his boots are hungry and tight as grief

They’re not wrong.

But they’re missing the point.

The truth is, he doesn’t want to be their hero. He doesn’t want to be anything. Not a warning. Not a symbol. Not the boy who came back from Tartarus with his ribs showing and his grief polished into legend.

He just wanted it to be over.
And somehow, it still isn’t.

The only person who’s managed to consistently get under Nico’s skin these past few weeks is Will Solace, who seems to have taken it upon himself—completely uninvited—to act as Nico’s personal medic, therapist, life coach, and motivational speaker. All wrapped in the blinding packaging of golden curls and aggressively kind intentions.

Will has decided, for reasons known only to his infuriating, sun-drenched brain, that Nico di Angelo requires sunlight, hydration, proper sleep, a regular meal schedule, and possibly a full psychological evaluation conducted over tea. It’s gotten to the point where Nico is starting to feel less like a person and more like a very moody houseplant. He’s half-convinced Will might secretly be a legacy of Demeter—with all the hovering and pruning and unsolicited exposure to natural light.

He keeps lists, Nico’s sure of it—unspoken checkboxes behind those steady blue eyes. Skin tone: too pale. Eye contact: inconsistent. Food intake: negligible. Will never says these things out loud, but Nico can feel the observations stacking in real time, like medical records being logged with every glance.

He’d made Nico stay in the infirmary for three entire days after the war, despite Nico insisting (repeatedly, through gritted teeth) that he was fine. Will had ignored him entirely, busy patching up the deep gashes left by Lycaon’s claws, setting cracked ribs, treating burns, stitching torn muscle like it was canvas—all while giving a non-stop lecture on the “ethical limits of self-endangerment,” as if Nico hadn’t survived worse with less.

It wasn’t just the healing. Will had reorganized the entire infirmary while Nico was there, muttering to himself about bandage inventory and restocking ambrosia supplies at midnight. His hands never stopped moving—not once. Even when Nico had pretended to sleep, he could hear the sound of pages turning, glass clinking, cupboards being re-alphabetized like Will could hold off catastrophe if everything just stayed in its proper place.

“You’re not indestructible,” Will had muttered once, focused on wrapping gauze around Nico’s ribs. “I know you think you are, but news flash: internal bleeding doesn’t care that your dad’s a god.”

“I’m a son of Hades,” Nico had snapped. “Internal bleeding is kind of my thing.”

Will had just sighed and handed him a bottle of water, the corner of his mouth twitching in that insufferably gentle way that made Nico want to simultaneously punch a wall and fall into it.

It’s not that Nico doesn’t appreciate what Will’s doing. He’s not blind—he knows the boy is trying to help. But it’s the trying that grates. The constant hovering. The soft voice and softer gaze. The way Will looks at him like he’s something breakable, like every bruise is a riddle he’s trying to solve.

And Nico doesn’t know what to do with that.

He doesn’t know why Will keeps looking at him like that. He doesn’t know why it bothers him so much. Or why it lingers long after Will has left the room.

And then there’s Percy.

Nico told him.

It had been in the woods, just past the canoe lake, the air still damp with summer and ash, the lake glassy with the weight of things unsaid. Annabeth had been there too, standing close enough to touch him, calm and sharp-eyed as always. Nico had studied Percy’s face—his sea-green eyes, his careless grin, his hair like he’d just come from underwater and hadn’t bothered to dry it—and realized he didn’t feel like a god anymore. Just a boy. Fallible. Mortal. Almost normal.

“So,” Nico had said, tone dry as old parchment, “since we’re going to be spending at least a year seeing each other at camp, I think I should clear the air.”

Percy’s smile faltered. “What do you mean?”

“For a long time,” Nico said, “I had a crush on you. I just wanted you to know.”

There’d been a beat of silence. Then Percy had looked at Annabeth—brief, confused—before glancing back at him. “You—”

“Yeah,” Nico said, as simply as he could. “You’re a great person. But I’m over that. I’m happy for you guys.”

And it was true.

Mostly.

“You… so you mean—”

“Right.”

Annabeth had smiled at him then, the kind of smile that said more than words. Her eyes had glittered like moonlight on stone. She raised her hand for a high five, and Nico gave it to her without thinking.

“You’re not my type,” he’d added, before Percy could keep spiraling. “But it’s cool. We’re cool.”

“I’m not your type?” Percy had blinked. “Wait. So—”

“See you around, Percy,” Nico said, already turning. “Annabeth.”

The feelings are mostly gone now. They rest like sea salt on the back of his tongue—more memory than longing. A taste of something he used to ache for. But still, sometimes, when Percy throws his head back laughing, or when Annabeth curls into him like they were made from the same myth— It stings. Just a little.

Like standing too close to the ocean on a cold day. Familiar. Sharp. But bearable.

So when Chiron had suggested he join a small patrol team to survey the camp’s eastern borders— integration , he’d said. Reconnection . Structure . Routine . All those horrible words that made Nico feel like he was being gently herded toward a group therapy circle—he’d very seriously considered shadow-traveling into the Atlantic and letting the ocean decide his fate.

It wasn’t just the social aspect that made his skin crawl. It was the implication that there was something wrong to be fixed. That routine could replace the ache in his chest. That structure could solve the way time kept slipping sideways, how sleep came only in fits and flashes, full of black water and the echo of voices that weren’t there anymore.

Still, he hadn’t said no.

Because part of him—the part that sounded too much like Will—knew isolation was just another kind of rot. And even if he couldn’t name it, couldn’t admit it, there was something in him that wanted to want to try.

And in the silence after Chiron’s gentle insistence, Nico could almost hear Mr. D's voice—dripping with boredom and barely veiled disdain, like smoke curling from a wine-dark goblet:

“You want people to stop staring at you like a haunted doll? Join the team, di Angelo. Or I’ll assign you to musical theatre therapy with the Aphrodite cabin. Your choice.”

Nico could imagine the look on his face. Smug. Indifferent. Maybe even a little fond, though he’d rather throw himself into a vat of cabernet than admit it.

So now, here Nico is. Marching through rotting woods, surrounded by mosquitoes the size of dinner plates and the distinct smell of something left out to fester. With his sleeves pulled low to hide the sharpness in his elbows, a headache blooming like pressure behind his eyes, and the creeping suspicion that being around people again is going to hurt just as much as being alone.

With Lou Ellen, who keeps muttering incantations under her breath and trying to summon fireballs in the shape of frogs, “just to see if she can.”

With Cecil, who has spent the last ten minutes recounting a deeply suspicious tale about a raccoon he swears is either possessed, immortal, or both. 

And with Will Solace, who—despite the mud, the bugs, the looming threat of forest-based monster attacks—will not stop telling Nico to drink water.

And the woods smell like rot.

Something’s wrong out here.

Nico already regrets not picking the ocean.

“You’d think killing a primordial goddess would come with better cleanup,” Lou Ellen mutters, swatting at a mosquito the size of a walnut. “I thought magic was supposed to be efficient.”

“Tell that to the ichor crusted on my shoes,” Cecil says, glaring down at his Converse like they’ve personally betrayed him. “These are limited edition.”

“Then you should’ve stayed at camp,” Nico snaps—too sharp, too fast. Like a blade drawn without thinking.

They all glance at him.

He doesn’t meet their eyes.

The sun is too bright—merciless, almost. It’s barely cleared the treeline and already it’s slashing golden knives through the canopy, cutting the shadows into ribbons. Nico sticks to the deepest ones, where the air is damp and still, where he can breathe without feeling like he’s being scorched from the inside out.

Where he can pretend he’s not the only one who didn’t want to be here.

“Seriously, though,” Will says, walking a little ahead, curls catching the light like they’ve never known pain. His fingers fidget at the hem of his shirt like he's trying not to wring it. “You shouldn’t be using shadow travel so much, Nico. I’ve read about the circulatory strain, and you’re already pale enough—”

“I’m a son of Hades,” Nico deadpans. “Pale comes with the job description.”

Will blinks—just a little too long. “That… doesn’t make you immune to cardiac arrest.”

There’s an edge to his voice now, too light to be panic, too practiced to be casual. He’s not joking, not really. His hand drifts toward the strap of the med kit slung over his shoulder, like just talking about risk makes him brace for it. The crease between his brows deepens, and he starts walking faster again.

Nico glares at him. He briefly considers shadow-traveling five feet to the left just to make a point, but the last time he tried it mid-recovery, he almost threw up on Jason’s shoes, and Will made him stay in the infirmary for the rest of the day, which was arguably worse than the war.

“I’m just saying,” Will goes on, voice tighter now—more rehearsed than it should be, “you’ve been pushing yourself too hard. Again. It wouldn’t kill you to drink water. Or eat. Or literally just sit in the sun for fifteen minutes—”

“I don’t want the sun,” Nico mutters.

Will stops walking.

His shoulders lock, like the words hit harder than they should have. One hand rises instinctively to the bridge of his nose, rubbing like he’s trying to ground himself, or stop a headache before it starts.

“I know,” he says, quieter now. Not teasing. Not cheerful. Just… gentle.

Which somehow feels worse.

Nico looks away, toward the shadows where the light doesn’t quite reach. Where things are quiet. Where no one asks him to be anything he isn’t.

The forest grows thicker the deeper they go, curling in around them like fingers.

The path narrows. Branches claw at Nico’s jacket, snagging like claws on cloth. Somewhere above, a murder of crows screams once and falls silent. A breeze stirs the treetops, sudden and wrong, and with it comes the smell of something sweet and rotting.

This place doesn’t want us here, Nico thinks, and he knows a thing or two about being unwanted. 

Cecil, oblivious, is still narrating the story of the brave raccoon:

“I’m telling you, it took Clarisse’s sports bra and walked away like it had a mission. I made eye contact with it. It had intentions. ”

Lou Ellen snorts, but her laughter dies halfway out of her mouth. She stops walking.

“Guys?” she says, voice too quiet. “Does this feel off to anyone else?”

Will glances around, squinting at the shifting light. His hand lifts to rub at one eye, then the other, like he’s trying to blink something away. “Maybe a little. My eyes are stinging, but that could just be allergies.”

His voice is casual, but his shoulders are tense, like he’s ready to brace for something—again. Nico notices the way Will’s foot shifts subtly, not toward them, but backward, like part of him is already retreating from danger he can’t yet name. The way his free hand flutters for the med kit again, thumb grazing the zipper like a nervous tick. It’s the kind of movement you only develop after treating too many wounds too late.

Nico frowns. He doesn’t think children of Apollo can even get allergies. That kind of frailty seems… impossible. They never get sick. Their immune systems are practically divine. If Will’s claiming allergies, he’s either lying to keep everyone calm—or too worn down to tell the difference between pollen and panic.

“No,” Nico says, sharper than he means to. “It’s not allergies.”

Will blinks, but doesn’t argue. His fingers tighten where they hang at his sides, and Nico thinks, not for the first time, that for all Will’s sunshine and swagger, he always looks like he’s holding himself together with gauze and caffeine. Hypocrite. 

The trees ahead are pulsing with something. Not visibly—not quite—but the air has a heartbeat now, and it’s not theirs. Nico can feel it beneath his skin, in the place where his powers always flicker at the edges of control. His shadow curls wrong beneath his feet, twitching like it wants to run.

He hates this forest.

He wishes they were cleaning up the coast instead—where the air moves, where salt stings his lips and the ocean is vast enough to drown in. Where he can feel Percy in everything, in the scent of sea spray and the echo of laughter around the rocks. It would hurt in its own way—the lingering ache that hasn’t quite left his chest—but at least the pain would feel familiar.

Like salt in a wound that never healed quite right.

Here, the forest holds its breath. The air has gone too still. The trees lean in, branches crowding like teeth. And Nico—who knows how to hear the things no one else dares listen for—feels it. That low thrum beneath the soil. The hush before the crack. The weight of something ancient pressing against the earth, waiting to split it open.

Then—it does.

No thunder. No signal. Just rupture.

A violent breach—instant and merciless.

The clearing explodes. Soil screams as it’s torn apart, roots snapping like bone, ferns flung skyward in a spray of dirt and decay. Something rises. Not born, not summoned—unleashed.

The monster bursts into the world like a wound through myth. It explodes upward in a cyclone of rot and scale, black and glistening and wrong—too many legs, too many teeth, all of it gleaming with ancient malice. As if it has been waiting for this moment. Feeding on silence. Growing fatter in shadow.

Nico does not breathe.

He doesn’t need to. He knows what it is.

A Skolopendra. One of the old terrors. Born before language. Before mercy. A creature that should have stayed buried. The forest reacts violently—trees shuddering back, earth convulsing beneath its weight. 

Lou Ellen screams—sharp, terrified, human—just before she’s flung like a ragdoll into a tree. The impact cracks through the clearing like thunder. Her flashlight charm rolls into the underbrush, flickering weakly like a dying star.

Cecil stumbles back, voice hoarse with panic. “We’re not trained for this!” 

Still, he moves—grabbing a rock, a knife, anything. He hurls it at the creature’s head and shouts, loud and reckless, “Hey! Over here, ugly! Come on!” 

It’s stupid. Brave. Useless.

The monster doesn’t even glance at him. It surges forward. Lou Ellen’s spell detonates in violet light—beautiful, futile. It splinters across the Skolopendra’s carapace like glass on stone, fracturing into nothing. The creature doesn’t even flinch. And Nico—Nico moves.

No thought. No hesitation. Just instinct. The Stygian iron flashes into his hand. His shadows rise—violent, immediate, shrieking from the forest floor in jagged arcs of black. They lash outward, striking the clearing like thunder made visible.

Nico charges.

The Skolopendra lunges, maw gaping. Nico slides beneath it. Shadow-born. Dead-trained. He rolls through muck and blood-slick ground, and rises. Blade in hand.

He slashes upward.

The Stygian iron sings through scale and sinew. Black goo explodes, steaming where it hits the earth. The Skolopendra howls. Neither beast nor god—something older. Like a secret being torn from the earth. A scream that pulls at memory, at bone, at every place inside you that still believes in monsters.

Nico does not stop. He strikes. Again. And again. Until—the thing lurches. Shudders. And finally, collapses. Its legs twitch once. A last, dying rattle. Then silence. The forest watches. Nico stands over the body, chest heaving, blade dripping with blood that eats through the moss like acid. The shadows around his boots seethe, curling toward the corpse, hungry. He doesn’t speak. Doesn’t celebrate. He simply breathes—and waits for his hands to stop shaking. 

He won. 

He turns—and time shatters.

There, caught mid-motion, is Will. Still standing. But already lost.

A fang is lodged deep in his side—curved and slick, as if the Skolopendra reached past reality to plant it there. Will’s lips part—not in pain, nor to speak, but in something softer. Stranger. Like wonder caught in the wrong body.

He folds.

Not like a body collapsing, but like a soul being snuffed out. His knees buckle soundlessly, and he falls in stages, as if the universe is still trying to remember the shape he used to occupy.

“Will!”

Nico’s already moving, shadows dragging behind him, drawn to the wound like it’s calling them. His boots skid through muck. The stench of blood and venom clings to the air.

He drops to his knees.

Will lies crumpled. Boneless. Pale. Wrong.

His breath—if it can still be called that—is shallow, wet, shivering through lips gone bloodless. The wound pulses faintly beneath his ribs, leaking something that is not blood alone. It glows dimly. Crimson, threaded with something darker. The air above it steams—not with heat, but with cold. Nico can feel it. It kisses his teeth. Scrapes his bones.

Will's eyes are open. Unblinking. Empty like a name scrubbed from a headstone. The brightness of his spirit—the warmth, the laughter—it’s slipping away. His pulse stutters. His name no longer fits inside him. And Nico, who has walked the edges of Tartarus and touched the River Lethe, knows this for what it is.

This is not death.

It is unbeing.

Oblivion.

The venom doesn’t kill. It unthreads the soul from the body. And Nico feels it—not logic, but knowing, carved deep in the hollows of his ribs. Will isn’t dying—he’s unraveling. His soul drifts, not downward, but outward. Dissolving. 

With the precision of rot. 

“No. No, no, no—”

Nico clamps both hands over the wound. He can feel it in the marrow of his bones; the thread between flesh and spirit loosening strand by strand. Will’s essence—his stubborn blaze—is sloughing off. It’s coming undone in Nico’s hands.

He’s read of this before. Not in prophecy, not even in prophecy’s shadow—but in the forbidden spaces of Hades’ library. The section where the books whisper, not because they want to be read, but because they remember being written. Where the pages flake like skin and the ink bleeds warnings in languages too old for vowels.

The Skolopendra.

A venomous relic, crafted not for death—but for annihilation. To strip soul from self until even memory dies.

No Hermes. No Lethe. No coin.

Just—nothing.

And Will is already halfway gone.

Nico watches the color leech from his skin. His eyes are glass. The light behind them flickers. The soul still lingers—but only barely. Less a thread now, more a breath stretched too thin.

Cecil is shouting. Lou Ellen is crawling toward them, spells flickering dim and frantic at her fingertips. The forest groans. But it’s all too far. Too slow. Everything beyond Will’s skin feels muffled—like sound through fog, like motion underwater.

Time’s stopped counting and started unraveling

And Nico—Nico doesn’t have long. He swallows hard. He doesn’t get to hesitate. Not now. Not with this much at stake. He reaches for the only spell that might work—the one that should never be cast.

“You’re not allowed to go,” Nico says.

He says it plainly. Because he’s felt too many go. But this is a chance to tip the scale the other way. To save a life after letting too many slip through his fingers. To rewrite the ledger scrawled in silence and blood.

He tells himself it’s about balance. Maybe it’s atonement. Or maybe—just maybe—it’s the only way he knows how to say: I can’t do it again. I can’t watch someone vanish because I waited too long to care.

Nico lowers his forehead to Will’s, their breath tangled in the now frozen air. Will’s warmth is fading—too fast, like it’s being siphoned into the dark. Nico barely registers the damp soaking through his knees or the stillness of the wind.

Shadow spills from him, slow and viscous, like grief made visible. It coils  around them both, wrapping Will in something that feels like mourning. Like a final breath too stubborn to release.

He doesn’t pause. Doesn’t ask for permission. Because the Anapnoí Zōis—the Breath of Life—is not a kindness. It is not about love. It is about debt. And cost.

Nico speaks the words.

His voice is low and clear, carved from obsidian and anchored in something older than speech. The words fall in ancient Greek—not the polished cadence of scholars, but the raw rhythm of underworld rites. The kind whispered in crypts, carried on the breath of shades. Each syllable lands heavy, thick with consequence. They burn on the way out, like he’s spitting dust and forgotten oaths.

The air tightens. The world takes a breath—and doesn’t release it.

Above, the sky shudders. Gold drains to gray. The light turns hollow—the color of old coins buried too long in soil. The trees groan, their limbs twisting like they want to flee. Birds fall silent mid-call. Even the wind pulls back, retreating like prey.

Still, he doesn’t stop.

He clutches Will’s shirt like a lifeline. His jaw locks. His pulse pounds.

The Greek deepens. Not a language now, but a force. The ritual doesn’t speak through him—it remembers through him, clawing its way out from cracks in the world. The rite predates Olympus. It was whispered on the banks of Lethe before memory had form. A magic not meant to mend the soul, but to rewrite it.

What Will lost—his anchor to life, to memory, to being—cannot be restored. But it can be replaced if Nico offers his own: a thread of self, a living tether. Not to heal—but to bind.

A part of him peels away—old and unspoken, wrapped around his identity like skin. And Nico knows—bone-deep and absolute—it’s not coming back. He feels it immediately, a sudden hollowness where something used to live. The ache behind his ribs isn’t absence. It’s erasure. Like memory bleached from bone.

Something essential has been given away, cut clean from the fabric of who he is, and woven into Will instead. The trade is already underway. What tethers Will to life now isn’t his own soul—it’s Nico’s. A borrowed thread, stitched in desperation, already fraying at the edge.

The forest floor blurs. Thought becomes liquid. Names slide sideways in his skull, unmoored. He forgets what season it is. Whether he still dreams in Italian. Whether he ever liked the color blue. Whether Bianca’s voice was higher or lower than Hazel’s. Whether he used to hum to himself in the dark, when sleep felt like something earned.

Something soft, human, essential is disintegrating. A sister? A lullaby? A grave?

Something that once belonged only to Nico di Angelo now burns quietly in Will Solace’s chest. And it cannot be undone.

And then—

Will gasps .

His chest lifts sharply, back arching, mouth open wide as if tasting fire. Air floods him—stingingly cold, impossibly heavy. His eyes fly open—wild, unfocused, alive . There’s pain in them. Bewilderment. But also something undeniable. Something anchored.

Will convulses once, the tremor crawling through every muscle, and then collapses against Nico’s chest, lungs stuttering with effort. Blood still pools beneath him. Wounds gape wide. His heart stammers in his ribs like it’s relearning rhythm.

But he is here.

Alive.

Lou Ellen is crawling toward them now, one hand pressed to the side of her head where blood has matted her curls. Her face is ashen, drawn tight with shock. There’s a tremor in her limbs that has nothing to do with pain. She doesn’t speak, not right away. She just stares at the shape of Nico hunched over Will, shadow still clinging to him like smoke that won’t dissipate.

Cecil hasn’t moved. He stands rooted to the spot, dagger slack in his grip, mouth open like he wants to say something but doesn’t know where to begin. His eyes are locked on Will—alive when he shouldn’t be. Moving when he had no breath left to move. There’s no category in his mind for this. No context.

The forest holds. Soundless. The birds haven’t returned. The breeze stays caged. The silence isn’t silence—it’s aftermath. Even the light looks wrong. The shadows are longer than they should be, curling at the edges like they’re watching.

Lou Ellen reaches them at last, her voice hoarse. “What did you do?”

Nico doesn’t answer.

He can’t.

He can’t look away from Will’s face.

Will, who is trembling in his arms—unstrung, breath shivering against his collarbone, each inhale a shallow, scraping effort. His chest rises in uneven jerks, like a puppet with its strings cut too short. His skin is too pale—not the golden warmth Nico is used to, not the sun-kissed flush of sunshine incarnate—but something bloodless, waxy, veined with the faintest blue. The blue of still water. Of blood that has forgotten how to move.

His curls, usually light-spun and haloed with sun, are damp with sweat and plastered to his forehead. His lips are cracked, tinged violet. The corners of his mouth twitch as if trying to shape a word he hasn’t found the breath to form.

And gods, this is Will.

Will Solace. The boy made of laughter and liniment and sunburnt smiles. The boy who always looks like he’s been caught mid-joke, who sings off-key while bandaging cuts, who smells like oranges and peppermint and the infirmary’s herbal salves. The boy who radiates heat like a personal star, who always seems warmer than the room around him.

But not now. Now, he’s cold. His pulse barely registers beneath Nico’s fingers. His body curls in, instinctively protective, but he doesn’t have the strength to shiver properly. His whole frame jerks with every breath, like his body can’t decide if it wants to fight or fade.

Nico presses a hand to his cheek, then his neck, just to feel something. Just to be sure. Will doesn’t react. His eyes crack open, bleary and dull, the blue of his irises gone glassy and dim. But he sees Nico. He sees him. That’s something. Will tries to speak again, lips parting, the faintest shape of Nico’s name stammering in the air—but it catches on nothing. Falls away like ash.

Nico swallows hard. The ritual worked. He knows it did.

Will is here.

And Nico—

Nico waits for the relief to come. For the triumph. For the sharp, aching joy of I saved him.

But he feels… nothing.

No surge of adrenaline. No rush of gratitude or fear or even relief. Just a slow, familiar dissociation slipping in like a tide, dulling the edges of everything. It’s not new. It’s not even frightening. It’s normal now—this numbness. This ache where joy should live.

His limbs ache with exhaustion, joints whispering like old hinges. Every nerve feels frayed, brittle. His breath fogs the air in front of him, and it doesn’t feel like his own.

Lou Ellen just looks at him.

Her brow furrows—not with suspicion, but with something wiser. Recognition. A daughter of Hecate knows the shape of a world that’s been twisted. She knows what it feels like when reality takes a step sideways, when the threads of fate pull taut where no hand should be weaving.

“There’s…” she begins, but the words catch on her tongue, fragile as cobweb. “There’s something wrong.”

Her voice doesn’t cut through the silence—it seeps into it. Thin and silver and slow, like mist curling around gravestones.

Cecil stirs, voice cracking with something too raw to be reason. “What are you talking about? Will was—he was gone, and now—”

“I know.” Lou Ellen’s eyes don’t leave Nico. Her tone is soft, but beneath it, something trembles. “But this wasn’t healing. It wasn’t medical. It wasn’t even magic—not in the way we understand it.”

She swallows hard. The space between them breathes like a lung held too long. “It was older than that.”

Her gaze sharpens, and when it lands on him, Nico sees it—that flicker of fear. Not of him, but of what might have answered when he called.

“You shouldn’t have been able to do that,” she says, and her voice is almost reverent now. Like the whisper of a name you’re not supposed to know.

Nico doesn’t argue.

He can still feel the words—the weight of them—settled in his bones like sediment, like ash. The hollow behind his ribs aches where something used to sit, some fragment of self burned clean. The air clings to him like residue, humming faintly with aftershock.

“I had to,” he says, and it’s not defiance. It’s not even apology. It’s just true. The kind of truth you whisper in confessionals, hoping no one else is listening.

“I couldn’t let him go.”

He wants to explain—wants to carve a line between absolution and guilt, between need and balance, wants to say that it wasn’t about love or loyalty or even mercy. That it was the mathematics of grief. The desperate arithmetic of a soul trying to level the ledger.

But the sky shifts.

It’s nearly imperceptible—barely more than a shimmer in the evening light—but Lou Ellen flinches like a whip just cracked overhead. Somewhere high above, the sun falters behind a thin veil of cloud. The light doesn’t vanish—it tilts , like a canvas hung askew. The world doesn’t shake, not exactly—it... adjusts. Like something vast and unseen has turned its head.

She inhales sharply, her voice no longer mist but ice. “Nico… I think they felt that.”

The gods.

Even unspoken, the word roars in his skull like a blade unsheathed.

He doesn’t respond. What is there to say?

He just looks down at Will—ashen, trembling, threaded through with pain—but breathing. Still anchored to the mortal plane by a bond Nico doesn’t fully understand, forged in fire and forfeiture, sealed in something older than law.

Still here.

And bound to him now—whether he meant to or not.

Chapter Text

Nico

By the time they reach the edge of camp, Nico is barely more than a shadow.

His feet drag through the mud, every step a negotiation with gravity, every breath edged with iron. The rain soaks him to the marrow, cold in a way that feels sentient, like the sky itself is punishing them. Will hangs between him and Cecil like a threadbare offering, his weight shifting erratically, caught in the liminal space between presence and absence. 

Ahead, Lou Ellen moves like a ghost, her limp sharp and uneven. The faint violet glow in her palm flickers against the storm, not so much illuminating the path as daring the dark to come closer. Her lips are set in a grim line. Her magic is almost spent.

Will murmurs something against Nico’s collarbone. It’s not English. Not Greek. Not language at all, really. Just sound—thin and unraveling, like the fray of a soul stretched too far. His skin is icy beneath Nico’s fingertips, and the wound at his side still glows—blood tinged with rot, a sickly light that pulses like a second, alien heartbeat.

The air thickens as they near the hill, as if the storm is coalescing around them. Camp’s borders are usually immutable, suspended in a still summer haze of birdsong and salt air, mythically untouched. But tonight, the very world hums with imbalance. The sky above Camp Half-Blood splits again with a scream of lightning. Not a crack—but a rending, like the vault of heaven has been torn along a seam. Thunder follows like a closing fist. Rain lashes harder, sheeting down their backs with a fury that tastes divine.

Nico doesn’t look up. He doesn’t need to.

He knows the weight of divine fury when it breathes down his spine.

When they reach the infirmary steps, the doors don’t open—they unseal. With a crack of magic and cedar-scented air, the threshold parts to reveal Chiron already waiting, flanked by Percy, Annabeth, Jason, and Piper. None of them speak. But the tension coils between them like a bowstring, every line of their bodies rigid with shock.

Piper moves first, reaching for Will with surprising gentleness. Percy follows, face pale, but his eyes—sea-green and storm-slick—don’t leave Nico. He sees it.

They all do.

The ink-black shadows curled around Nico’s boots like smoke from something still burning. The paleness beneath the mud on his skin. The way his hands shake, not from cold, but from what’s been emptied out of him.

And Will—

Will doesn’t speak, doesn’t scream: he only breathes in shallow, broken gasps, each one thinner than the last. His wound is still open, his soul might be tethered, but his body is still dying.

And above them, the sky roars again.

“Get him inside,” Chiron says, voice tight and low.

They lift Will together—limbs awkward and boneless, breath shallow in his lungs—and carry him into the infirmary.

Nico stumbles behind, dragging steps barely tethered to his will. Every joint burns with phantom weight, his vision edged in static, the world shifting slightly with each uneven heartbeat. The moment his boots cross the threshold, his legs give. He crumples to the porch like something unraveling at the seams, hands braced against the soaked wood, spine curled, breath coming in jagged gasps that scrape like stone in his throat.

His muscles aren’t just sore—they’re hollow. Like someone carved him out and forgot to fill him back in.

Lou Ellen crouches beside him, eyes wide, her magic flickering out like the last embers of a dying wick. “You shouldn’t have moved so fast,” she murmurs, voice gentler now, awed more than scolding.

Her hands hover, not quite touching, like she isn’t sure if he’ll collapse further or vanish altogether.

Cecil stands in the doorway, the storm backlighting him in stuttering flashes. Rain cuts tracks through his hair and down his neck. “What the hell happened out there?” he asks, not demanding. Just… stunned.

Inside, Will is laid out on the nearest cot. The second Nico enters the room, something ancient coils in the air—tense, unseen. The shadows that had clung to him like blood-soaked thread recoil sharply, pulling inward like a breath held too long. 

Chiron turns. Not in accusation, but his gaze is a weight, carved from centuries. There is no fury in his expression—only the heavy silence of recognition. 

“You did something,” Chiron says, softly.

It isn’t a question.

Nico says nothing. The word yes would taste like ash on his tongue.

Outside, thunder crashes like a judgment rendered. The windows rattle, the floor shivers, wind hammers against the walls like it wants in.

Jason flinches at the sound and looks to Percy, who doesn’t speak—just moves closer to Annabeth, the three of them drawing unconsciously toward each other like orbiting stars under siege. Even they can feel it, the unnatural pressure, the prickle at the back of the neck. The hush between heartbeats that suggests not silence, but listening.

Something has shifted in the world. And somewhere on Olympus, the gods are stirring.

Lou Ellen hovers at the edge of the cot, her hands clenched at her sides, eyes locked on Will’s face like she could will his eyes open by staring hard enough. Her lips move in a silent plea, something raw and wordless. 

Cecil stands beside her, soaked curls clinging to his forehead, jaw tight, mouth pressed into a line that refuses to crack. His eyes are red, not from tears but from holding them back; when Will’s breath falters again, his shoulders jolt like he’s been struck.

Piper kneels slowly, gently brushing damp hair from Will’s forehead. Her voice, when it comes, is soft but coaxing, threaded with that unnatural musicality—her charm-speak tuned to something intimate. “Will,” she breathes. “Wake up. Please.”

But the power stutters. Her voice breaks mid-note. The magic fizzles in the air.

Nothing happens.

Will doesn’t stir, his lashes don’t flutter, the charm-speak doesn’t land. It drifts, weightless and unanswered, like a message sealed in a bottle and tossed into a sea that no longer exists.

Nico sinks into the chair beside him, spine bowed, hands slack in his lap. He wants to explain, to justify, but there are no words that can wrap themselves around what he did; no language that can tame it. So he stays silent. 

Inside the infirmary, the lights flicker again as thunder splits the sky like a divine sentence being handed down—sharp, absolute, and echoing. Rain lashes the windows in wild bursts, wind howling through the cracks in the old wood frame, as if the storm outside has teeth and wants in.

The room itself is long and low-ceilinged, with rows of narrow cots against the walls and glass-fronted cabinets stacked with old bottles, fresh bandages, jars of salves and tinctures in hues that glimmer faintly in the stormlight. Laurel branches hang above the windows, browning slightly but still fragrant, and somewhere near the back wall, a steady flame glows in a small hearth—an old stone feature not found in most camp buildings. It smells faintly of cedar and something softer, like rosemary. A nod to Hestia, a comfort carved into the bones of the place.

But it’s Will’s touch that makes the space feel lived-in. That makes it his.

A clean hoodie draped over the back of a rolling stool, sleeves twisted like it was stripped off in a hurry—then folded once, like he’d second-guessed leaving it messy. A stack of medical textbooks lies open on the desk, pages half-highlighted in color-coded precision, some passages outlined twice. Post-it tabs bristle from the margins like nervous thoughts he couldn’t quite pin down. The desk is cluttered, but not chaotic—everything sits at a careful angle, as if disorder might unravel him.

A battered yellow mug with a cracked handle perches near the hearth, faintly scented with mint tea. Nearby, a bottle of ibuprofen anchors a note scrawled in someone else’s hand—probably Austin’s. A lopsided sun beams beside the words: don’t forget to sleep.

Even now, Will is everywhere. In the hushed order of the room. In the tension between comfort and control.

And now, Will is bleeding into the sheets.

His breathing is shallow and ragged. His skin is ghost-pale, flushed only with fever, slick with sweat despite the cold. The wound on his side is open still—oozing not blood, but something luminous and wrong. Residual gold seeps in slow pulses, each one dimmer than the last, like a heartbeat winding down, like a candle’s last sputtering flare.

Chiron moves fast, voice low and urgent as he unwraps fresh bandages, his hands practiced but careful, gauze pressed firm to the wound. There’s a deep furrow in his brow as he works—centuries of experience behind each motion, but even that isn’t enough. Nico watches the way Chiron’s jaw clenches when the bleeding doesn’t stop. How the old centaur’s fingers hesitate, just for a beat.

It’s not the body refusing to heal, it’s the wound refusing to close.

And no matter how deft Chiron’s hands are—how vast his knowledge—this isn’t something gauze and stitching can fix.
He’s a healer of bodies, not of souls.

Chiron pulls his hands away at last, the bloodied bandages falling to the side like wilted offerings. His voice is quieter now, not defeat—just sorrow, worn smooth by centuries.

“This is beyond me,” he murmurs. “It’s too old. Too deep.”

A beat.

Then, softer still: “It doesn’t want to be healed.”

Nico doesn’t move. He can’t. His fingers are curled into the chair arms, white-knuckled. Shadows pulse faintly at his feet, reacting to something inside him he doesn’t yet have the language for.

Percy, still hovering near the door, runs a hand through his soaked hair. “Should we call Kayla and Austin?” he asks, voice pitched carefully—an attempt at steadiness that doesn’t quite hide the fracture beneath. “They’re… his siblings. They’ve got healing abilities too. Maybe they can—”

“No,” Chiron says, and the word lands like a falling axe.

Everyone stills.

Chiron rarely raises his voice. But this isn’t loud, it’s loud enough —the kind of sound that draws a line not in sand, but in stone. A verdict, not an invitation. Not cruel. Not cold. Just final.

He exhales, quieter now, but no softer. “Not yet,” he amends. “Apollo is still absent. None of his children have felt his presence since the war. Not truly. Only Will’s healing has endured.” His eyes move to the cot. “Because healing wasn’t just his gift. It was his. Inborn. Inherited. The way sunlight lives in some places, even when the god who cast it is gone.”

He hesitates. “And… he’s not in any condition for them to see him like this.”

He doesn’t say the rest. Doesn’t need to.

But Nico hears it anyway, loud and clear in the silence that follows. Something inside him pulls taut, a thread stretched too far. He looks again at the cot—at Will’s body, barely more than breath and shadow now.

He remembers the Apollo cabin the way most kids remember summer afternoons: too bright, too loud, impossible to hold in your hands. Always full of music and sun and bickering and song. Demigods who wore their joy like armor, like light, who laughed like they weren’t born to die young.

And then they were gone. After the Titan War, after the final battle, he came back to find cabin seven half-empty; bunk beds stripped bare, instruments untouched, laughter replaced by silence—only three had remained.

Will. Kayla. Austin.

Will, who took the role of Head Counselor not as a title but as a burden; not with pride, but with purpose. Who kept meticulous rosters and chore charts, updated every day even when no one asked him to. Who rearranged the infirmary shelves weekly, alphabetized the ambrosia stocks, and checked on campers twice as often as necessary—just in case. Who knew everyone's allergies, blood types, favorite tea.

Will, who learned how to comfort a grieving sibling before he was old enough to dry his own tears. Who stood too straight when others wept, like grief was a weight he could hold on his own if he just didn’t let himself sit down. Who led not with orders, but with presence. Who paced the cabin long after curfew, or so Nico had been told.

Big brother first. Healer second. Counselor last.

And now he’s the one dying.

Nico doesn’t need to imagine what it would do to Kayla or Austin if they saw him like this—barely tethered, face grey with pain, a wound in his side that doesn’t bleed but glows, cursed and unfinished. They’ve already lost too much. This would not be grief, this would be ruin.

And maybe, Nico thinks, Chiron is right. Maybe this isn’t about shielding them from the truth. Maybe it’s about holding the shape of that truth just a little longer— while there’s still time for it to change.

Rain slams against the windows in relentless waves, the storm clawing at the panes like Zeus himself is pacing the sky, each footfall a thunderclap. The wind screams through the eaves like something ancient and furious trying to get in. Lou Ellen flinches across the room, her lips moving in tight, whispered Ancient Greek—a warding, maybe, or a prayer she doesn’t quite believe in.

Nico closes his eyes. And just like that, the infirmary dissolves.

He’s back in the forest.

Rain slashing sideways like knives. Mud sucking at his boots. Will trembling in his arms. Skin too cold. Breath too thin. The shadows—his shadows—writhing like things alive, clinging to his spine with greedy fingers. The taste of copper. The stench of venom, thick and unnatural. The moment splits—sound vanishing, light bending. The gods watching. Judging. Not intervening.

He can’t move. His legs are anchored. Frozen. His mouth is full of fog. His heart is a fist locked in his ribs, pounding too loud and too slow at once.

He knows it’s not real. He knows . But his body doesn’t.

The forest lives inside his skin. In the cracks behind his eyes. It presses against the edges of the present like it's trying to break through again, over and over and over. He tries to breathe. Tries to match the storm inside him to the one screaming through the sky outside. One heartbeat. One breath. Another.

But it never holds. The quiet never lasts. And the past never stays where he left it.

Not for him.

“Hey.”

Jason’s voice breaks through the static. Low. Careful. Not a demand. Not a question. Just… a presence.

Nico blinks. Jason is kneeling beside the chair now, drenched and dripping, blonde hair slicked to his forehead, jacket soaked through and puddling on the floorboards. His face is unreadable—open in a way that doesn’t ask for anything. That doesn’t expect.

“You okay?” he asks softly.

And Nico—gods, Nico almost laughs.

He doesn’t know if the sound trying to claw its way up his throat is cruel or hysterical, but it curls at the edges of his breath like something sharp. He swallows it before it escapes, terrified of what it might sound like if he lets it go.

Jason doesn’t move, doesn’t push. He simply settles beside him on the floor, close enough to feel, but not quite touching. Like gravity bending toward him, like patience embodied. Space without absence, presence without demand.

And Nico wants to believe in him.

Wants to believe that this Jason, the one who sat with him in silence after Croatia, after Cupid dragged his heart into the open and left it bleeding in a marble hallway, is the real one. The one who didn’t flinch when Nico broke, who didn’t offer platitudes, who just stayed.

But memory is a cruel thing; it calls up the Argo II—the silence that followed him like smoke, the way conversations dipped when he walked in, the way even kindness had been edged in caution. Nico, cloaked in shadow. Nico, smelling of grave dirt and regret. Nico, the one they didn’t quite know what to do with.

Even Jason, for all his goodness, had looked at him like someone bracing for thunder.

So Nico nods.

It’s not truth, but it’s familiar. And that makes it easier to wear.

He isn’t okay. He doesn’t know what he is. There’s something inside him now that wasn’t there before—or maybe something missing that was. The ritual gnaws at his thoughts like a parasite, leaving holes where certainty used to live. He feels fractured. Misaligned. Still half in the forest, still kneeling in the dark, holding Will’s life together with borrowed thread and willpower.

But Jason just nods too, like he hears the lie and accepts it for what it is. Like he knows how much it costs to speak it, and still chooses to stay anyway.

And Nico—broken, burning, unmoored—lets him.

The thunder growls again—low, long, and close enough to rattle the windows in their frames. The infirmary lights stutter once more, flickering like the breath of a dying star.

Chiron wipes his hands on a blood-streaked cloth, slow and deliberate, before turning fully to face the room. His expression is composed in the way that only centuries of battle-hardened calm can allow—but Nico sees past it, the tension in his jaw, the steel in his spine. 

He doesn’t look angry—he looks afraid.

“What happened?” Chiron asks.

His voice is level, the same tone he uses when issuing orders during a siege, or giving quiet instructions in a triage tent. But there’s something underneath it now—something too sharp, too quiet, like the moment before a blade is drawn.

Lou Ellen looks at Nico, then at Cecil. The silence stretches.

Cecil clears his throat. “We were on clean up duty, and I guess we were just outside the camp border,” he begins, his voice too high, too fast. “It was supposed to be routine. Easy. We’ve done it a hundred times. Then the ground—just—exploded. This thing came out of nowhere. Huge. A centipede-snake hybrid. A nightmare with teeth. Too many teeth.”

“I don’t know what it was,” Lou Ellen mutters, eyes distant. “It felt wrong. Old. Like magic that forgot what it was supposed to do.” She presses a shaking hand to her ribs. “My spells didn’t work. They didn’t even land.”

Cecil nods, his hands tightening into fists. “It went straight for Will. Didn’t hesitate. It knew what it wanted. I tried to distract it, but it didn’t care. And then Nico—”

He falters, eyes flicking back to where Nico sits—drenched, unmoving, shadows still coiling faintly around his boots like smoke from a fire long since burned out.

Jason glances over but says nothing.

Chiron turns to Lou Ellen. “And after that?”

“I don’t know,” she whispers. “Will was… going. Not dying. Disappearing. I could feel it. Like something was unspooling from inside him. And then Nico—” She swallows. “He said something. Or maybe it wasn’t speech. I don’t know what to call it. It wasn’t meant to be heard. ”

Her voice breaks off, the silence that follows is louder than thunder.

Chiron turns to Nico.

“Nico,” he says gently, but with that same iron beneath the surface. “I need you to tell me. What did you do?”

Nico doesn’t move.

He can feel the weight of every gaze in the room—Percy, Annabeth, Piper, Jason. Even Cecil and Lou Ellen, though they were there. Even they want the words now. Need them. As if saying it aloud might make it easier to hold. But Chiron… Chiron watches him like a scholar before a sealed vault. Like a historian before a living myth. He doesn’t just want to know what happened.

He wants to understand what it cost . He knows the weight of forbidden power when it shifts in the air.

Nico breathes in. The words rise to the back of his throat like smoke—jagged, ancient, sharp with things that don’t translate. He’s about to speak, about to tear the veil away.

And then the room goes dark. Not dim— dark . Utter and immediate. Every enchanted lamp, every glowstone embedded in the walls, every carefully maintained ward guttering out like they’ve been smothered by a single breath.  The hearth—Will’s hearth, the one he’d insisted on rekindling after every patient, as a promise of warmth and return—goes cold, the embers extinguishing with a sigh. 

Outside, the storm halts, not with peace but with pressure. The kind of silence that only comes before something breaks, as if the whole sky is holding its breath. 

Then—a sound. Sharp. Wrong. A crack, but not from thunder—but from the air inside the infirmary. 

A single line of scorching white cleaves the floor from corner to corner, searing through the stone tiles with a blinding flash that flickers gold at the edges, like the divine version of a fault line. The scent of ozone floods the space, laced with something older—burnt cedar, sulfur, myrrh. Static prickles across every surface, crawling over skin and bone like unseen insects. 

Will’s belongings react. 

The sketchbook near his cot flips open as if caught by a phantom wind, pages rifling with no air to move them. His spare hoodie, slung across the back of a chair, lifts faintly before slumping like it’s exhaling. Bottles of nectar clink softly in their crate. A sun-catcher—one of Kayla’s gifts—bursts apart in a quiet pop, scattering lightless shards across the floor. 

And in the center of the room—where the light touched down—something remains.

A feather.

Still-smoking, still-hissing, as if the air hasn’t yet decided to accept it. Black as voidstone, rimmed in radiant gold that glows not with warmth, but with judgment . It pulses faintly, as if beating in time with something vast and far above. Each exhale of smoke curls like script Nico can almost read, though he knows he shouldn’t.

Percy shifts instinctively in front of Annabeth, one hand on her shoulder, eyes locked on the feather like it might strike again. Piper stares, unmoving, lips parted just slightly, like she’s half a breath from praying or screaming. Jason doesn’t flinch, but his jaw is tight, his hand hovering near his pocket where he used to carry coins for offerings.

Chiron lowers his head.

Will, still unconscious on the cot, twitches—not violently, but subtly, like something has passed through him. His fingers curl weakly around the edge of the blanket as as quiet whimper escapes his throat. Not even language, just bona fide pain .

The feather hisses again, louder now, the gold at its edge brightening in a flash like a blade catching sunlight. Then—abruptly—it vanishes. Not burned away. Reclaimed. As if the sky reached down and plucked it back, having made its point.

And in the space it leaves behind, the storm returns with a vengeance.

Thunder cracks so loud it shakes the rafters. The windows rattle in their panes. Rain pelts the roof like thrown stones. The hearth flares briefly—blue-white, wrong—then dies again. The sketchbook snaps shut. The air pulls taut around them, like the world itself is bracing.

The gods have spoken.

And suddenly, the world holds its breath.

Time folds inward. The room hums with something ancient and immeasurable, as if Olympus itself has turned its gaze and found him wanting. Every shadow sharpens. Every heartbeat echoes like a countdown.

And then they begin to appear.

Not with bursts of light or celestial trumpets. The gods don’t need spectacle. They are the spectacle.

Their presence arrives like pressure, like the air itself bowing to their existence. The room tightens, the walls seeming to shrink around the weight of something too vast to be contained.

First: Zeus.

He steps into the infirmary like a thunderclap made flesh—a storm walking upright, barely leashed by civility. Lightning crackles at his shoulders, flickering along the edges of his silhouette like wings of fire. His robes are deep midnight, threaded with constellations that shift when you look too long, and the scent of ozone trails behind him like a warning.

Then Hera, her spine straight as judgment, expression carved from marble. She does not look at Will. She does not look at Nico. She surveys the room like it is already disappointing her.

Athena appears beside her, eyes like cut steel, cold and brilliant, already calculating. Already cataloguing. She takes in the scene the way a blade takes in a throat—quietly, without mercy.

Demeter, hair tangled with frost-touched vines, steps in with the distant air of something that has outlived everything but the soil. She smells like rot and bloom, like something that grows regardless of grief.

Poseidon, trailing sea mist and the scent of brine, as if he’s just stepped out of the tide. His gaze flicks briefly to Percy and lingers—not long enough to mean anything. Not short enough to mean nothing.

Ares, all blood and blunt force, enters with a predator’s grin, like this is a fight he’s been waiting to watch burn from the inside.

Hephaestus follows, limping slightly, smoldering and silent, sparks whispering from the seams of his heavy bronze armor. He smells of soot and scorched iron, old burns and older burdens.

Aphrodite, too beautiful to be kind, draped in silk that moves like smoke, her gaze unreadable. She wears tragedy like perfume and hunger like lip gloss. She looks at Will and Nico like she already knows how the story ends—and is only here to see who survives it.

Artemis, pale as moonlight, steps into shadow. She does not speak. Her eyes are narrowed with the sharp, dispassionate curiosity of a hunter watching a wounded creature still trying to stand.

Hermes arrives with a blink, flickering into place like a glitch in time, restless energy humming beneath his skin. His fingers twitch like they’re used to holding things he shouldn’t. He smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes.

A ripple of shadow tears through the room—not like wind, not like movement, but like the absence of light itself. The torches gutter low. The air dims, even where it should not.

And then Hades stands at the threshold.

He doesn’t step forward so much as emerge, as if the room had been harboring a pocket of darkness waiting to become him. He wears no crown, no armor, no swirling cape of tortured souls. But his presence is undeniable. He is the silence between heartbeat and stillness, the weight in a crypt that no air can lift.

The light around him recoils. Even the fire in the hearth seems to bow.

His eyes find Nico instantly—black, unreadable, not unkind but too ancient to be gentle. There is fury in him, yes, but also something harder to bear: a knowing. A familiarity with what Nico has given up.

And beside him, Persephone appears in a shimmer of gold that’s already turning to rot.

She is not spring here. Not growth or songbirds or rebirth. She is the queen of the dead, and she wears it beautifully. Her gown is stitched with the petals of wilted flowers, black and bruised and curling at the edges, and somehow more exquisite for their decay. Her hair is woven through with thorned vines and pressed violets, their color leached and pale. She smells not of gardens, but of time.

Her beauty is the kind you see in a fever dream. Or in the moment before the fall. She doesn’t speak. She doesn’t need to. She crosses the room like smoke drifting across cold marble, her gaze skimming over the gods already assembled—lingering a moment on Hera, on Zeus—before settling on the cot.

On Will. Then on Nico. 

And she does not look away.

They stand beside him now—his father and stepmother, gods of the underworld, sovereigns of silence and shadow. No warmth in their expressions. But something else, something like protection, something like pride that doesn’t know how to wear softness.

And Nico, who has spent years untangling his resentment from their legacy, his fear from their expectations, his grief from their absence—feels something melt in him.

They came. Not to punish him, not to shame him, not to drag him back to the Underworld in chains or stand silently by while the others passed judgment. They came for him . To stand beside him, behind him, with him. And even though the weight of that truth settles somewhere deep in his chest—where guilt and gratitude tangle like roots—he still can’t bring himself to meet their eyes; because part of him still believes he doesn't deserve it.

Not their loyalty. Not their protection. Not even their presence.

And finally—Mr. D appears.

Leaning against the far wall like he’s been watching the entire divine showdown unfold through the eyes of someone deeply, profoundly inconvenienced, like this is the world’s most ill-timed PTA meeting. He’s holding a Diet Coke in one hand and a half-eaten bag of Cheez-Its in the other, wearing an orange Camp Half-Blood hoodie over his ancient tunic like someone’s weird uncle who got dragged into family court on his day off. He surveys the room full of gods, campers, and mortal chaos, sighs dramatically, and takes a long sip of his soda.

“Well,” he mutters, crunching a Cheez-It. “This is going to be fun.”

No one responds. No one dares .

Ares glares at him. Hera stiffens. Artemis pointedly pretends he doesn’t exist.

Undeterred, Mr. D kicks a rolling supply cart out of his way and saunters over to the edge of the scene, eyeing Will on the infirmary cot like he’s debating whether or not to fake an allergic reaction to sentimentality.

“I leave for five minutes,” he says flatly, “and this place turns into an after-school special starring every member of Mount Olympus and the world’s broodiest son of Hades. And before anyone asks— no , I don’t do resurrection paperwork.”

“He’s not dead,” Nico mutters.

“Yet,” Mr. D replies cheerfully, sipping his Diet Coke again. “But let’s not count our half-bloods before they hatch.”

Annabeth opens her mouth to respond, clearly torn between outrage and secondhand embarrassment, but Percy gently grabs her wrist like he’s afraid she might throw hands at a literal god.

“You’re not helping,” she hisses.

“I never help,” Mr. D says, looking genuinely offended. “I supervise. Badly.”

Then he flops into an empty chair with the grace of someone who’s been cursed into immortality for too long and intends to be a menace about it.

Chaos still crackles in the air. The gods are barely holding back another argument. Will is still unconscious. Nico feels like he might shatter from the inside out. But somehow, Mr. D sucking on a straw like it’s a life support tube for his last shred of patience makes everything feel, for a split second, survivable.

Then—as if summoned by the weight of divine intervention, the other campers begin to appear in the doorway.

A ragged line of them stands just beyond the threshold—Katie Gardner, still in her mud-splattered camp tee, eyes wide with disbelief. Travis and Connor Stoll, unusually silent, the latter gripping the doorframe like he’s not entirely convinced he won’t be smote for breathing too loud. Clarisse, whose usual scowl has been replaced by something sharper, tighter, like confusion wrapped around fear.

Even Rachel Dare, paint still flecked in her hair, stands off to the side, her eyes glowing faintly green at the edges, hands curled into fists like she's half-expecting a prophecy to drop from her mouth at any second.

They’re all staring.

Not just at the gods—though the sight of them would be enough to stop time—but at the way the gods are looking at Nico.

Because that’s the worst part.

Most of these campers have never met their divine parents. Not really. Maybe a dream here, a word there, a pat on the back in the middle of a battle. Some of them have begged for attention, for proof, for anything. And now here the gods are—every one of them, gathered in a single place.

Not for their children. Not for Olympus. Not even for war.

They’re here because of what Nico di Angelo has done.

Even Percy, who’s faced down Kronos and Gaia and Tartarus itself, looks shaken. His hands are clenched at his sides. There’s a faint tremble in his posture that only Annabeth seems to notice. She reaches for him, grounding him without words, but his eyes are locked on his father.

Poseidon doesn’t look at Percy again. He stands motionless, trident gleaming faintly at his back, storm eyes narrowed in Nico’s direction—measuring, unreadable, ancient. Percy looks back at Nico, and for a moment, the confusion cracks open into something deeper. Not accusation, not even blame. Fear. Because Percy has seen Nico wield shadows like weapons. He’s seen him vanish through walls, speak to ghosts, turn the tide of war with a whisper. He’s known, on some level, that Nico was powerful.

But this is the kind of power that calls down Olympus. The kind that bends the world. The kind that costs .

They’ve never all been here.

Not gathered under one roof, shoulder to shoulder, ancient and blazing and terrible in their stillness. Not with every Olympian—every force of sky, sea, war, wisdom, love, and death—crowding into the walls of Camp Half-Blood’s infirmary like the final act of a tragedy no one agreed to stage. The air itself strains to hold them. The room flickers at the edges, too full of divinity for the mortal world to bear. And everyone— everyone —can feel it.

But it’s not just the weight of their presence that chills the room; it’s the one absence that echoes louder than all of them combined.

Apollo is missing.

His absence gapes like a wound in the air—too noticeable, too painful, like a golden string snapped just before it could hold something in place. His voice should be booming over the others, sharp and furious, loud with love and grief and arrogant rage.

This is his son. His domain. His disaster.

Will’s breath, Will’s pain, the unraveling threads of his soul—they should matter most to him.

But Apollo is gone. Not dead. Not sleeping.

Just… missing.

And the space where his presence should exist feels hollow . Like a divine void shaped like a heartbeat. Like a silence that keeps dragging its nails down the walls of the world.

For a moment, the storm outside falters. The thunder holds its breath. And the gods say nothing—because even they don’t know what it means to be gathered in judgment without the god who should be the first to speak.

Then the gods begin to argue before anyone can breathe.

It’s not a conversation—it’s a storm. Divine, deafening, too vast to fit in mortal ears. Their voices crash into each other like tectonic plates, shaking the infirmary to its foundation, as if the walls themselves might rupture under the weight of celestial outrage.

Zeus speaks first, as always.

His voice detonates through the room like a thunderclap—authority made sound. “This magic was forbidden!” he bellows, lightning sparking at his shoulders. “Sealed beyond mortal reach for a reason. He tampered with the boundary between life and death—tethered a soul to his own. It is unnatural. Unlawful.”

“It was necessary,” Hades says at last, his voice low and echoing—less like speech and more like earth cracking open. “Reckless, yes. Costly. But inaction would have cost more. Too many demigods have entered my realm this month alone. I would not see another—especially not this one.”

He doesn’t look at Will. He looks at Nico.

“And you speak of law, Zeus,” Hades continues, gaze sharp as obsidian. “But your laws shift with your temper. This one—” his voice dips, grave-deep now, “—did what none of you would. He chose to act. To save a life. And if mercy is now a crime, then perhaps Olympus should reconsider which of us truly upsets the balance.”

For a moment, the silence feels like pressure, thick with ozone and ash.

Nico doesn't speak. Doesn't move. He can barely breathe under the weight of it—his father’s defense. Not out of obligation. Not as the god of the Underworld. But as his father.

Because Nico knows what it costs Hades to say those words.

The Lord of the Dead does not give up souls lightly. He does not speak against balance. And he does not protect the living once they’ve crossed the line between breath and stillness.

But he’s doing it now. For Nico.

Even as shadows coil tighter around his boots. Even as the gods bristle around him. Hades stands between Nico and Olympus like a tombstone that will not be moved.

And beneath all that silence, Nico can feel it: his father’s fury. Not because Nico acted. But because he had to act alone.

Because no one else did.

Because Zeus is his brother.

And Hades, even when he is wrong—even when he knows Nico is—will never kneel to him.

“You call that mercy?” Athena cuts in, sharp as a drawn blade. “He altered the fabric of a soul. Do you understand what that means? That boy—” she gestures to Will, limp on the cot— “he’s still unraveling. This was not compassion. It was imbalance.”

“Because none of you would lift a hand,” Persephone says, her voice low, blistering. She steps forward now, eyes glowing like buried fire. “You wait until the world is in ruin before you descend—vultures circling a pyre you refused to put out.”

Ares scoffs, arms crossed like iron bars. “Since when do we care if the medic survives?” he mutters. “He’s not a warrior. Not one of ours.”

“He’s a child,” Aphrodite says, with sudden steel. “And whether or not you understand it, there is love here. I feel it in the bones of this room.”
Her eyes linger on Will, then flick to Nico. “It burns, and it binds. That matters.”

Demeter’s gaze flicks to Nico and lingers there—just long enough to betray something soft. A half-memory. A young boy picking ghost lilies from her fields. But she says nothing and looks back to her hands.

Hephaestus stands silent in the corner, arms folded over his soot-streaked chest, shadows caught in the gears of his expression. His sons are gone—killed in the wars the gods couldn’t stop and the demigods couldn’t survive. He has no words left for grief. Only quiet.

Poseidon, predictably, leans into the chaos with a smirk that doesn’t reach his eyes. His voice is low and curling like sea mist slipping beneath a locked door.

“Well, brother,” he murmurs, voice curling with salt and warning, “if nothing else, it’s refreshing to see you admit fear. And of one of Hades’ sons, no less.”

Zeus’s eyes flash, thunder twitching behind his pupils.

Hera steps forward, all poise and diamond-hard posture. She places a single, manicured hand on Zeus’s arm, like a queen steadying her king in public—but there’s a curl at the edge of her lip, something sly and brittle and dangerously amused. The gods know betrayal by scent, and Hera wears it like perfume.

“Perhaps,” she murmurs, voice velvet-soft and sharpened at the ends, “the boy made the wrong choice… but when have you ever made the right one, dear?”

A hush spreads, coiled and waiting.

And then Hermes moves.

He shifts from where he’s been leaning against the far wall, posture half-casual, half-coiled—like someone who’s learned the hard way when to strike and when to vanish. His caduceus hisses faintly in his hand—the twin serpents restless, sensing something in the air. His eyes flick between Zeus and Hades, then settle on Nico.

“Well,” Hermes says, too lightly, “if we’re suddenly redrawing the boundaries between life and death, I’d just like to remind everyone I’ve been walking that line since before Olympus had laws to break.”

He twirls the staff once—absently, precisely. “Maybe it’s not the act that offends you. Maybe it’s the fact that it worked.”

A pause. His gaze slides to Zeus.

“Or maybe someone’s just upset they weren’t asked first.”

The grin doesn’t quite reach his eyes. There’s no mischief in them now. Only the cold clarity of someone who’s buried more than one demigod and had to smile through it.

Then, quieter—but cutting enough to silence the room:

“If Olympus punishes every demigod who disobeys to save a life, we won’t have any left to fight your wars.”

Nico feels that line hit like a knife dragged through old scar tissue. Hermes doesn’t raise his voice. He doesn’t name names. But Nico knows what it costs to speak like that in front of the Council. Knows what memory Hermes is carrying behind his teeth.

Luke Castellan. 

The boy who tried to burn Olympus to the ground not because he hated the gods, but because he wanted them to notice. To change. To love their children the way they expected their children to die for them.

Hermes doesn’t say it. But Nico hears it anyway.

And this time, he isn’t the only one.

Zeus bristles, lightning flickering up his wrists.

Before another god can speak, Artemis steps forward.

She’s silent as a blade drawn in moonlight, the air around her gone cold and silver. Her bow is slung across her back, untouched—but her posture speaks of tension held taut. Her face is pale and unreadable, but her eyes fix not on Zeus, not on Hades—on Nico.

Guilt passes over her expression like a shadow cast by a circling bird.

“Bianca di Angelo died on a quest to save me ,” Artemis says, her voice clear but low, edged with old regret. “She gave her life to protect my Hunters.” She turns now, gaze sweeping across the circle of gods. “If you think I will stand idle while her brother is punished for saving a life—you forget whose blood was spilled first.”

Her eyes flick to Will, then back to Nico. “He is my brother’s son. I do not care what your laws say. He does not deserve to be erased.”

A breath catches in Nico’s chest—sharp, sudden, unwelcome.

And then, cutting through the stillness like a soda can cracked open at a funeral, Mr. D speaks.

He doesn't rise. He doesn’t even look up from the chewed straw sticking out of his Diet Coke. But his voice, for once, is clear.

“Well, this is all very dramatic,” he says, dragging the word out with trademark ennui. “But perhaps we could skip the thunderous posturing and get to the part where we pretend to be wise and fair. Just for kicks.”

All eyes snap to him.

He shrugs. “I’ve seen a lot of demigods throw their lives away. Most of them deserved it.” He glances at Will on the cot, then at Nico, and—for once—his gaze is serious. Quiet. Almost tired.

“But Solace and di Angelo are still here. That counts for something.”

The room shifts. A beat of stillness. The tiniest change in pressure. Because Dionysus never calls them by their names, and if he does now—it means even he knows this moment matters .

The room crackles. The storm outside intensifies—thunder snarling across the sky like a god trying to be heard. And through it all, the campers still stand at the door, wide-eyed and shaking.

Katie clutches a younger camper close to her side. Cecil, still damp and mud-streaked, has stopped chewing his lip and just stares, frozen. Clarisse, for once, says nothing at all.

Zeus turns his gaze to Nico, and it’s like staring into the heart of a storm. His voice cracks across the room—sharp and splintering, each syllable a blade of thunder.

“Explain yourself.”

The weight of it nearly crushes the air from Nico’s lungs. Every gaze shifts to him. Divine, mortal, all of them. Waiting for an answer he doesn’t have.

But before Nico can speak, the air begins to shimmer—not with violence, not like Zeus’s lightning cracking through the seams of the sky, nor the suffocating weight of Hades’ shadow, nor even the cold blade of Artemis’ silence.

The light bends—not blinding, but soft, fluid, rippling like heat above a sunbaked road. A warmth spreads through the infirmary—a glow, slow and golden, steady as sunrise spilling across ancient stone.

Then—color. A single, perfect arc splits the space just above the floor. A rainbow, clean as breath. And from its center steps Iris, her body woven from refracted light, her silhouette shifting through shades not yet named. Her bare feet touch nothing. Her hair gleams like fresh brushstrokes in motion, brushed through with copper, silver, rose-gold—colors seen, and some that aren’t.

She is smaller than the others. Slighter. But her presence still turns the room.

“I bring a message from Hestia,” she says, and her voice is warm and calm, full of that unshakable clarity that does not need to raise itself to be heard.

The gods go still. Even Zeus.

Iris walks forward, her gaze drifts over Hephaestus and Artemis, past Hera’s narrowed eyes and Ares’ teeth-bared grin. She doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t bow. She simply is.

“She sends her support,” she says. Her voice is clear as flame. “For the boy.”

She turns to Nico. Her eyes meet his without ceremony.

“She honors him.”

For a heartbeat, silence reigns.

Then—quietly, almost imperceptibly—the hearth at the center of the room flickers. The embers shift, and then bloom. Pale gold, soft and steady, curling up the chimney like breath caught in prayer. A flame that does not demand attention but offers it. The kind of fire that waits for you to come home.

It glows as if in answer. As if it, too, remembers.

Zeus’s scowl deepens, a thundercloud behind his brow, fingers twitching at his side as if already reaching for lightning.

“She defies me?” he asks, not roaring, but seething.

Iris doesn’t blink.

“She remembers,” she says softly, and the words settle like ash. “That once, long before any of this, he was the only one who left an offering at her hearth. The only one who listened. When no one else did.”

And with that, the room changes.

Outside, the wind has paused. Not calmed—paused, like it too is waiting for what happens next. Like the storm is listening. Like the world has taken one step back from the edge of something terrible and fragile. And Nico—at the center of it all, with gods arguing and a soul tethered to his own—can’t tell if this is salvation or the beginning of something worse.

In this moment, with every immortal eye turned toward him, he understands something with crystalline clarity: a truth not told to him, but revealed—like a stone unearthed from beneath years of dust.

Some of them are on his side. He knows this in the way Artemis stands like a shield, in the way Aphrodite’s gaze softens—not out of pity, but recognition. Even Hermes, for all his flippancy, is angled in his defense. But none of them—not one—can save him from what he’s done. Not from the law he’s broken, not from the power he’s stolen, not from what it means to tether a soul with your own.

They didn’t come out of love or mercy, only because a line was crossed—and Nico is the one who crossed it.

.They’re not here to thank him. They’re here to weigh the cost. To decide what to do with him now that he’s touched something they swore would never be touched again.

And somewhere deep inside him—where the shadows curl like memory still smoldering, where names are worn thin and promises burn without light—Nico knows the truth before it’s spoken aloud.

They haven’t decided to let him live.

Not yet.

Chapter Text

Nico

The doors slam open.

Not just loud—violent. The sound doesn’t interrupt the tension so much as carve straight through it, like a blade through glass, sending everything sharp and fragile flying. 

Someone gasps.

“Oh no.”

“Nico—look—”

Lou Ellen makes a sound—raw and broken, caught somewhere between a sob and a curse. Cecil turns away, jaw clenched tight, like the act of opening his mouth might be enough to shatter him completely.

They come barreling into the infirmary with all the grace of grief, soaked at the hems and wide-eyed, breathless and shaking.

Kayla is the first to stumble to a halt, her eyes locking on Will’s trembling form where he lies pale and shaking on the cot. A sound slips from her throat—small, sharp, the kind of noise that comes not from shock but from something cracking inside. Austin reaches her a second later, frantic and wild-eyed, and then everything begins to unravel.

“No—no, no, what happened—what happened—” Kayla’s voice breaks as she drops to her knees, hands fluttering just above Will’s chest, fingers trembling with the instinct to heal, as if presence alone might be enough to reverse whatever’s been done.

Austin is already crying. “We felt it,” he chokes out, the words torn and tangled, “we felt something tear—why didn’t anyone tell us—?”

They clutch at Will’s hands, stroke the damp curls from his forehead, whisper his name like a litany, like a spell, like it might anchor him to this world if they just speak it enough times. Lou Ellen sinks down beside Kayla without a word, arm curling around her shoulders in a protective arc, trembling with restraint. She doesn’t cry. She just holds her, steady and silent, jaw locked like she’s bracing for a second blow.

Cecil kneels behind Austin, one hand pressed gently between his shoulder blades—not to guide or hold, just to remind. His other hand is clenched in the fabric of his jacket, knuckles pale, trembling. But he stays close. 

And for a long moment, no one speaks. Even the gods, for all their power and spectacle, seem to pause—drawn still by the rawness of it, the heaviness of something too human to touch.

Kayla and Austin are many things—archers, siblings, healers—but in this moment, they are only children, terrified of losing their brother.

The silence doesn’t last.

Behind them, the doorway stirs again.

And suddenly the air is thick with whispering. Murmurs catch and spread like brushfire across dry earth, flickering through the ranks of onlookers with the desperate, grasping speed of panic.

The storm.

Will’s dying.

Nico did something.

The gods are here.

And in the middle of it all, Percy steps forward—not loudly, not dramatically, but with the kind of quiet, deliberate certainty that feels tectonic. Like the tide rolling in under a blackened sky: inevitable and ancient, strong enough to pull empires into the sea. He doesn’t announce his choice; he embodies it.

There’s only a glance toward his father—Poseidon, salt-worn and storm-silent by the hearth, trident gleaming like a threat across his back. The sea god doesn’t speak, doesn’t move, but something flickers at the edge of his expression—a fracture in the marble stillness. Pride, perhaps. Or fear. A knowing that his son is stepping into something far more dangerous than war: not survival, not loyalty, but conviction.

And still, Percy moves. He takes his place beside Nico with the same kind of elemental force that once carried him through oceans and underworlds, not as a hero, not as a demigod, but as a boy who chose to stand by his friend.

Then Annabeth—sharp angles and silence, every part of her coiled with the tension of someone who has spent her life on battlefields both seen and unseen. Her mouth is set, her posture honed; she walks like a girl who has already calculated the risks and chosen defiance anyway.

Across the room, Athena watches her like a sculptor measuring the cracks in her own failed creation, eyes narrowed in something colder than disapproval—as if trying, even now, to chisel her daughter back into a weapon. But Annabeth doesn’t look at her. She lifts her chin, steady and unyielding, and crosses the space with purpose, standing at Nico’s side with the ease of a blade slipping into its rightful sheath.

Jason follows, silent and unreadable, his expression a closed door. But Nico sees it—the storm hiding in the set of his jaw, the steel in his spine, the weight of what it means for a son of Zeus to turn his back on thunder. This isn’t a gesture. It’s a break in lineage. A myth rewritten in real time. It feels like a moment that should end in blood.

And still, Jason walks forward, unshaken. As he passes, his fingers brush against Nico’s arm, just barely—a ghost of contact, too soft to be seen but enough to steady him more than any vow. It isn’t affection. It’s alignment. It’s saying, I see you. I’ve chosen, too.

And then Piper. She doesn’t rush. She doesn’t hesitate out of fear, but out of something heavier—reverence, mayb. Her eyes lift to Aphrodite, and Nico feels the air thicken, the weight of something old and unspoken pressing into the space between them.

Because the goddess won’t hold still.

Her face shifts like candlelight in a draft. One moment, her hair is dark and wild with salt and sorrow, eyes sea-glass green and rimmed with something that looks like memory. Then, just for a breath, her features ripple—hair gone bright and sun-drenched, unruly in a way that feels almost intimate, and her eyes—sharp cobalt, too blue, too steady—burn with a gaze Nico knows without understanding.

He doesn’t know what it means, why her face refuses to settle, why the sight of her fractures something in his chest that he can’t quite name. Only that it feels like standing in front of a mirror that reflects every version of love he’s ever been denied.

And Aphrodite, in all her shifting forms, only watches—silent, open, ancient—her expression the same no matter the face: not approval of rebellion, but of the unbearable freedom to choose.

Piper says nothing. She steps into the space Jason leaves behind, as if it had been carved for her from the beginning.

They don’t form a line. They don’t draw blades or bend the knee. They don’t raise voices or chant declarations. They simply stand. With Nico. With Hades. With Persephone. Not because they were ordered to. Not because fate demanded it. But because they chose to.

And Nico feels it like a tide rising in his ribs, slow and unstoppable. For so long, he has stood apart, armor forged from grief and distance, from the belief that love—true, unconditional love—was something owed only to the dead. He doesn’t know how to stand in the open without bracing for exile. Doesn’t know how to believe that being chosen doesn’t come with a price.

He has been alone for so long he has forgotten the shape of being seen.

So he stands, unmoving, hollowed out by the weight of it—not the burden, but the tenderness. Because this isn’t mercy. It isn’t debt. It’s not even forgiveness. It’s loyalty. It’s friendship. It’s choice.

And somehow, that feels more powerful than all the thunder in the sky.

Next to the cot, Austin clutches Will’s wrist like it’s the only thing keeping him from unraveling, as if the warmth beneath his fingers is all that’s anchoring him to the moment. His breaths come in sharp, staccato bursts—not quite sobs, just raw sound, torn from the chest like something trying to escape. Beside him, Kayla—usually the steadier one—doesn’t fare much better. Her hands glow weakly with golden healing light, flickering and fragile, but she doesn’t use it. 

“He’s not waking up,” she chokes, her voice fraying at the edges, more to herself than anyone else. “He’s breathing, but it’s not—he’s not really here—”

Chiron approaches, hooves muffled against the infirmary floor, his voice calm, measured, as it always is. “Children, please. Let us think. We must—”

But the words are lost in the rising current of panic. The room is too loud now. Whispers crackle from the assembled campers, godly voices buzz with quiet bickering, and the air thickens again like a storm threatening to roll back in. The atmosphere pulls taut, shivering with unspoken fear.

And then moonlight cuts through it all.

Artemis steps forward—not toward Zeus, not toward the gods locked in their gathering divide, but toward the children kneeling beside their dying brother. Her silver cloak shifts like cloudlight, fluid and hushed, and her hair is pulled back from her face with the severity of someone who has stood through centuries of grief. 

“Kayla. Austin.”

Her voice isn’t commanding, but it carries. Gentle, unwavering, the kind of voice that wraps around fevered skin like a steady breeze on a too-warm night. 

“He is not gone,” she says. “I cannot promise what he will be. But he is still here. You are not alone in this.”

The silver aura of her presence spills outward—cool and soft as starlight, spreading across skin and shadow. It brushes their shoulders, their clasped hands, the pale skin of Will’s forehead. It’s not healing, not exactly, but something adjacent to it. A god’s nearness when the one they needed most could not come.

And Artemis—twin to the absent, once half of a whole—is furious in a way only siblings understand. 

The panic begins to soften. Not vanish, not completely—grief does not bow so easily—but the worst of it recedes. Kayla blinks up at her, awe carving fragile stillness into her features. Austin doesn’t speak, but he leans more fully against Will’s side, one hand still fisted in the blanket, the other trembling just slightly less.

Chiron steps back, not in surrender, but in understanding. He knows, as Nico does, that whatever calm Artemis has offered will last longer than logic.

And that in stepping forward, in choosing to comfort rather than to command, she has already made her choice.

But still, the gods argue.

Not openly now—there are no raised voices, no thunderclaps of fury—just sharpened murmurs and sidelong glances, the low grinding of ancient grudges wrapped in polished diplomacy. 

Aphrodite watches the room like it’s a tragedy playing out in real time, her gaze lingering on each player as if she’s reading ahead in the script and still unsure if the ending will be ruin or something worse. Her expression doesn’t shift, but her eyes—whether green or blue, framed by sunlight or storm—carry something terrible and lovely all at once.

And then Zeus raises his hand.

Silence doesn’t fall; it crashes, sudden and absolute, seeping into the lull between every heartbeat. Campers freeze mid-whisper, even the gods still their movements, divine power drawing inward like serpents curling beneath skin. The wind outside falters. The storm holds its breath. 

Zeus’s voice, when it comes, is cold thunder. Not raised. Not wrathful. But carved from stone, and meant to last longer than the moment.

“This is no longer a moment of disorder,” he says. “It is a matter of divine law.”

His gaze sweeps the room like a blade dragged through silk—pausing on gods, demigods, Nico. On Will. On the cot. On the blood that hasn’t yet dried. And then:

“I call a Díkē Theón,” he declares, each syllable falling like the strike of a gavel, clear and absolute. “A judgment of the gods.Everyone will sit,” Zeus commands.

Zeus, Athena, and Ares gather at one end of the infirmary, dark and rigid, like a storm cloud frozen in place. Their thrones form not from mortal material but from concept—from dominion and memory and violence made tangible. Zeus’s throne crackles with restrained lightning, ever-shifting storm clouds coiling along its gilded edges. 

Athena’s seat is sculpted from ancient bronze and marble, engraved with unreadable runes, her owl perched silent on the backrest like a sentinel. Ares’s throne bleeds rust, red-tinged and jagged at the edges, etched with battle scars no craftsman ever carved.

They sit like a verdict already cast.

Across from them, Hades steps into the shadows as if they were a natural extension of his body. His throne rises from the darkness itself—black stone laced with veins of gold, shaped less like a seat and more like a tomb given form, heavy with quiet finality. He settles into it without ceremony, without sound.

Persephone follows, radiant and terrible, the scent of spring and decay clinging to her like a second gown. Her throne blooms beside his from the fractured tile—marble gone pale with frost, its arms twined with withered vines and pale blossoms that open and die in the same breath. She does not blink, she does not flinch, she just takes her place beside her husband like a queen carved from bone and bloom.

Nico doesn’t move from the space between them and Will’s cot.

He stands not as a warrior, not as a prince of the Underworld, not the Ghost King—but as something tethered and half-unraveled. 

To Nico’s surprise, Aphrodite joins them. Her gown shifts into a deeper palette—midnight roses, twilight mauve, shades of love in mourning. Her steps are silent, but deliberate, a goddess claiming the space between grief and defiance.

Hephaestus lingers at the room’s center, unmoving. His face is etched with old soot and older sorrow. He watches the gods take sides with the weary eyes of someone who’s buried sons on both ends of every war. His throne rises behind him, rough-hewn from cooled magma and twisted metal, half-forged and half-forgotten, like a workshop abandoned mid-catastrophe.

Hermes doesn’t stand still long enough to be placed. His throne flickers in and out of view at the room’s edge—glass and gold and the scent of motion, a seat that’s never warm, never full. He paces the periphery, one hand curled around the caduceus, the other always near the dagger at his belt. His snakes hiss now and then, coiling restlessly, as if they know what’s coming before he does. His eyes flick between Nico, Zeus, and the cot—quick, calculating. His loyalties, as always, are smoke and mirrors, impossible to follow.

Artemis remains where she is.

Still standing sentinel over Will’s cot, moonlight washing over his fevered skin. She does not move to join Hades, though she glances at Persephone with something like mutual recognition. She does not join Zeus, she doesn’t look at him at all. She only watches Kayla, Austin, and Will, protective and silent, the last remaining children of her twin.

The demigods move next, hesitant, shifting like leaves caught in crosswinds. Most drift toward their divine parents, eyes flicking between thrones and faces and half-whispered prayers that they’re making the right choice.

Katie Gardner glances at Demeter, who stands stiff and still, her hands folded tight against her robes. When no sign of support comes, Katie turns away, jaw tight, and steps toward Chiron instead, standing beside him like a seedling growing from ash.

The Stoll brothers are next.

They hang back longer than most, unusually quiet for once, all mischief drained from their posture. Travis shifts his weight. Connor scratches the back of his neck. They exchange a look—something brittle and unspoken—and glance toward Hermes, who’s still circling the room like a rumor half-formed, his throne flickering at the edges of vision like it doesn’t quite want to exist.

They don’t rush to join him. Connor looks toward Will, and something in his jaw hardens. Travis glances at Nico.

It’s not an accusation. Not exactly. More like a question neither of them wants to ask. Nico meets their eyes, just for a moment, and he thinks—not for the first time—that maybe they understand more than they let on.

Their father is the god of boundaries, of thresholds. The only one who walks between the worlds without consequence. He carries messages, yes. But also souls. Hermes is the god who leads the dead to the Underworld—and the living, sometimes, when they’re lost.

Maybe that’s why the Stoll brothers are looking at him like that . Like they know what it means to stand in the doorway between one world and the next, like they’ve stood there themselves.

Finally, wordlessly, they move. Not like loyal sons, but like reluctant heirs to a legacy that doesn't sit clean. They drift toward Hermes—slowly, unsure—drawn less by allegiance than by inevitability.

And then there is Clarisse.

Arms crossed, jaw locked hard enough to crack bone, she moves with the kind of blunt momentum that could be mistaken for certainty. At first, she stalks toward Ares—her father, the god of war—who lounges on a throne fashioned from snarling metal, jagged and restless, as if the aggression it contains has only been barely leashed. He watches her approach with something like boredom carved into his face, a silent expectation that she will do what she was made for. That she will choose him.

But Clarisse stops halfway.

Her gaze flicks, sharp and deliberate—from Will’s still, too-pale body, to Kayla and Austin curled beside him, their grief crackling and raw like a fresh wound. Her eyes linger on Artemis, standing sentinel at their backs, all silver light and quiet rage, a statue carved from moonlight and vengeance. And then—slowly, like a blade remembering its edge—she turns her attention to Nico.

And Nico, still shaking, still caught somewhere between shadow and soul, remembers.

He remembers the Titan War. Remembers how Clarisse refused to let the Ares cabin fight, how her pride, her anger, her refusal to follow a war that wasn’t hers cost them dearly. He remembers the price: the bodies of Apollo campers stacked like broken promises, young healers forced to hold the line without backup, without choice.

Clarisse’s jaw twitches. Her fists clench at her sides. Behind her, Ares’s throne rumbles—low and menacing, a sound more felt than heard, the guttural growl of a god’s disappointment.

But she doesn’t turn back.

Slowly—deliberately—Clarisse walks to Will’s cot and lowers herself to the ground beside it. She doesn’t speak. Doesn’t look at anyone. She simply draws her knees to her chest, rests her arms on top, and stares straight ahead with the kind of defiant stillness that demands to be left alone.

She hasn’t joined Nico. She hasn’t joined Ares.

She has chosen something harder; she has chosen to sit with the wounded.

One by one, the gods continue to seat themselves, thrones blooming from the air like metaphor made physical—crafted from their dominion, their essence, their pride.

Demeter’s seat sprouts from the floor, all wheat and fertile earth, vines winding up like something trying to find its way home. She stands beside it, one hand fisted in her robes. Her daughter is seated across the room with the enemy, and Hades is watching her from beneath the weight of history. She turns away—not from grief, but habit—and when she finally lowers herself into the throne, it is on Zeus’s side.

Hera appears next, regal and unreadable. Her throne glimmers into being with the cold luster of wedding bands and vows long since curdled, its frame shaped from peacock feathers and ancient stone, the scent of sacrificial smoke clinging to its edges. She stands for a moment longer than necessary, as if debating whether to take her place at all.

There’s a flicker in her eyes—not doubt, but defiance, dulled at the edges. She does not look at Zeus as she crosses the floor, but the movement is calculated. She positions herself on his side as though angling for his attention, some old compulsion clawing its way back through centuries of humiliation. And yet, something in the way she holds her spine suggests she’d rather be anywhere else. She moves like a woman forced into performance by a lifetime of politics—like someone who might have chosen differently if not for the ghosts watching her.

Her reasons fall flat, even to herself. She knows it. Everyone knows it. Perhaps she would have stood with the others, against him, if her own throne hadn’t already started to tremble beneath the memory of her last rebellion. So she goes to him. Not with loyalty, but because she cannot afford not to.

Poseidon moves slowest, but once he is there, he commands the room like tide does shore. He doesn’t walk to Zeus’s side. Nor does he approach Hades. Instead, he drifts to the middle of the room, trailing seawater in his wake, and conjures his throne—all sea rock encrusted with coral, pulsing with bioluminescence and deep-ocean gravity—a careful distance from both. His eyes find Percy, steady and unreadable. A war is coming—maybe not of swords, but of ideas—and Poseidon stays in the current, watching for the pull.

Iris moves like refracted light—not seated, but shimmering. She brings no throne. Only a flicker of color, a glint of hope, her gaze flickering once toward Nico.

“Justice and mercy do not always wear the same face,” she says. “But I’ve seen gods act worse for less.”

Then she steps back, folding into spectrum, and vanishes again into light.

And then Zeus stands.

His presence fractures the stillness. Every word rumbles like distant thunder over a sea held too long in suspense.

“Let it be known,” he begins, “that the judgment of Olympus has been called in earnest. We gather not for war—but for reckoning.”

His gaze sweeps the room. It does not linger. It strikes—skimming across gods and demigods alike, grazing them like lightning searching for the tallest thing to burn. Until it lands on Nico.

“Nico di Angelo,” he says, “son of Hades—has performed a rite forbidden since the days of the Titanomachy. A rite sealed beyond mortal reach by my hand and the will of the Twelve. A rite crafted to cheat death.”

Zeus’s tone hardens.

“The Anapnoí Zōis,” he says.

The name alone presses down on the room—ash in the lungs, a scar stinging beneath the skin.

“A ritual of tethering,” he continues. “Older than language. Not resurrection. Reclamation. It does not summon a soul from the Underworld—it drags it back from dissolution. From oblivion. From the brink where even my brother’s kingdom cannot reach.”

He lets the silence stretch. It settles like iron.

“It binds two souls together,” he says. “Permanently. One becomes the anchor. The other becomes the cost. The price is not life. It is identity. Essence. Memory. The very shape of who you are.”

Nico doesn’t move. He barely breathes.

Zeus’s voice lowers—not softer, but colder.

“The rite is forbidden because it unravels the boundaries we exist to protect. It tears at the fabric of death. It steals what the Fates have already cut. It offends the balance between life and what comes after. It insults Olympus itself.”

He steps forward—one slow, deliberate stride, like a storm leaning down to strike.

“And this boy,” he says, thunder curling in his throat, “this child of shadow—invoked it. Now, let no one say I am not a fair judge.”

A single snort breaks the silence.

It comes from the corner—Mr. D, sprawled sideways in a chair he most certainly conjured out of spite. He takes a long, exaggerated sip of his Diet Coke and mutters, “Oh, that’s rich.”

A few of the younger campers stifle laughter behind trembling hands. Even Poseidon tilts his head slightly, as if hiding a smile behind the tide. But Zeus does not respond. He only lifts his chin, radiating the kind of dignity that dares anyone to question it.

“Speak,” he commands. “Let your own words weigh against you, Nico di Angelo. Tell us what happened. Tell us what you did. And why.”

Nico’s mouth is dry. His hands ache. His body still feels like it’s not entirely his—like he’s watching from a few feet behind his own shoulder, suspended just outside himself. A familiar drift. Protective. Dangerous.

Then he begins to explain—how it was meant to be a routine border sweep, nothing more than clean-up, how they noticed the disturbance too late, how the Skolopendra rose from the woods like something ancient and wrong. How he killed it, but not before it struck Will.

How the venom moved fast, faster than panic, unraveling Will’s soul with every breath. How there wasn’t time to call for help, to weigh options, to think—only to act.

The words wedge in his throat like glass. He feels them splinter, feels them shred something on the way down. His chest tightens—guilt or fear or that unbearable thing that lives between. His heart pounds too fast. Or maybe not fast enough. It’s hard to tell with the numbness threading through his limbs.

And though Nico can explain what happened, can lay the pieces bare like bones on an altar, he doesn’t know how to justify any of it in a way that will satisfy the gods.

So he falls silent. Not out of guilt—but out of futility.

Athena’s voice slices the air first—cold, precise, lethal. “What you performed,” she says, “was not bravery. It was recklessness. An emotional reaction that disregarded the laws binding Olympus and the universe alike.”

Her words carry like blades—elegant, sharp, designed to wound with accuracy. “The rite was forbidden for a reason. Even the gods are bound by limits. If we all unraveled the threads of fate to suit our grief—”

“Then there would be no balance,” Ares cuts in, leaning forward, his voice a growl of gravel and war drums. “No fear. And fear’s what keeps the order, kid.”

He stares at Nico like he’s already a footnote in someone else’s battle cry. 

“You think you’re the first soul to lose someone?” Ares spits. “You think the rest of us didn’t want to tear the world apart for the ones we buried?”

Behind them, Athena’s owl lifts its wings in utter silence and stares down at Nico with silver eyes that reflect nothing back.

Zeus doesn’t speak right away.

But his fury grows louder in its restraint—the crackle of ozone at his fingertips, the static tightening the air like the moment before lightning strikes. The storm outside pulses harder. Thunder rattles the windows.

Nico trembles.

Then Zeus rises again, robes stirring in a wind that doesn’t touch anyone else.

“You have committed the gravest violation,” he says, and now his voice is stone and tempest, law and fire. “You—who already walk between the realms of life and death—have dared to rewrite them.”

The air tastes like iron. Like storm-metal and judgment.

“This is not grief,” Zeus thunders. “This is heresy. You tore through a sacred boundary, broke what was never yours to mend, and tethered the soul of my grandson to your own shadow.”

Then, from the edge of the room—Hades rises.

“My son,” he says, voice like tombstone and time, carved into the hush. “Did something unthinkable. Yes.”

The room holds its breath.

“But he did not do it from malice,” Hades continues. “He did not seek glory. He did not ask for reward. He acted alone—and bore the cost alone.”

Persephone lays a hand gently on his shoulder. Her voice is quieter, but no less certain.

“Perhaps too much alone.”

“But that does not make it right,” Athena snaps, sharp as ever. “This is not a question of mercy—it’s a question of precedent. If we let this stand, what happens the next time a demigod loses someone they love? What is to stop them from pulling apart the seams of the universe for their own desire?”

The room stirs again.

Eyes shift toward him—dozens, hundreds—and Nico feels it at once: sharp and immediate, like a pressure drop before a storm, the stillness before lightning splits the sky. The silence has teeth now, and he is prey.

The gods are circling.

He can feel their judgment crawling over him like static, like a swarm of invisible wasps under the skin. No one speaks, but the air thickens around him. It’s not silence anymore—it’s suffocation.

His chest aches—deep and splintering, like it’s been carved open and filled with pressure he can’t name. His heart pounds too loudly in a body that can’t seem to decide whether to collapse or flee. It’s moving too fast and too slow all at once.

The floor tilts. Or maybe it’s just him. Hard to tell, with everything both too loud and impossibly far away. He’s drifting—untethered, unmoored—while everyone else remains nailed to the moment, to the judgment, to the myth unfolding in real time.

They’re all watching. All of them.

His thoughts trip and scatter, looping back on themselves, spiraling tighter with each pass, until only one remains—sharp as a blade caught in his lungs.

Why did he do it?

Why did he have to?

What was the moment—what was the reason—that broke him open enough to make this choice?

And then—

He sees it.

Everywhere.

Love .

Annabeth’s hand in Percy’s—their fingers interlaced automatically, unconsciously, like gravity, like muscle memory carved into them by wars and promises and the long, slow work of choosing each other every day. They lean together like they were never meant to stand apart.

And it still stings. Just a little.

Like sea salt in the corner of an old wound, one that’s mostly healed but aches in certain weather. Nico doesn’t love Percy anymore—not really—but there’s a part of him that will always remember what it felt like to believe he might be allowed to.

He tears his gaze away.

Piper’s glance at Jason is soft and sharp at once, a look that says don’t you dare and I’m already with you in the same breath. Jason, jaw set, gaze forward, unflinching—his silence louder than any vow.

Austin and Kayla, stationed like guardians at Will’s side, press their hands against him like anchors. Their fear is radiant and real, unshielded. They’re not warriors right now. They’re siblings. And they love him.

Persephone’s hand rests on Hades’ sleeve, fingers curling in delicate warning—like vines across marble, or spring threading its way through death. Her touch doesn’t restrain. It steadies. And Hades, for all his silence, leans into it.

Poseidon, always aloof, sits as if caught in the tide between loyalty and blood. His gaze rests on Percy—not stern, not proud, but something softer. The ache of a father who cannot stop the current his son has chosen to swim against. He doesn’t speak, but the air around him shifts, like an ocean holding back its wave.

Artemis remains a still point of silver gravity, standing sentinel beside Will’s cot like the moon beside a battlefield. Her presence wraps Kayla and Austin in lunar quiet—a divine hush they can breathe in. She watches the boy she once called nephew, the boy her twin loved, and she guards what remains.

And then—

Zeus and Athena.

No tenderness between them. No softness. No gestures of affection. But they burn in tandem. Athena’s devotion is forged from intellect—unsentimental, sharp as a spear. She is his favorite, the only one who dares to match his power with poise, who speaks without fear in his thunderous shadow.

And Zeus—terrible, immovable Zeus—loves her the way the sky loves the storm. It’s not gentle. It’s not kind. But it is absolute. The way he glances toward her before he speaks. The way his fury folds when she narrows her eyes. It’s a love that shapes empires. A love that makes him listen.

Beside him, Hera sits in silence—still, composed, but never meek. Her throne glimmers with the cold gleam of oaths, a crown of fractured vows encircling her like smoke. She does not look at Zeus, not directly, but her presence beside him is heavy with meaning. Love, yes—but the kind forged in war and weariness. The kind that survived infidelity and betrayal, not unscathed, but unwilling to break. Her love for Zeus is a scar that still bleeds. And his for her is prideful, possessive, full of storms he cannot name. They do not hold hands. But something ancient binds them still—too bitter to be tender, too strong to be severed.

And across the divide, where battle lines blur into longing, Aphrodite sits radiant and still—her gaze unreadable, her expression carved from the ache of centuries. Her throne blooms with roses and ruin, perfumed in the scent of every love that has ever ended badly.

Ares sits apart from her, across the room in a throne of blood-forged bronze. Rage coils at his feet like a loyal hound. He does not look at her. She does not look at him. And yet—

Between them burns something undeniable. Not gentle, not sweet—never that—but molten and magnetic. Theirs is a love of collision. Of warpaint kisses and teeth against skin. Of vows spoken in battles, not temples. Even divided, they burn for each other—fierce and ruinous. Love, for them, has always been a battlefield. They would bleed for it. Have bled for it. Will again.

Love is everywhere.

Not the soft kind. Not the safe kind. The kind that endures. That chooses. That defies.

Nico thinks of Orpheus—of the song so beautiful it moved the heart of death, the kind of love that made even Hades hesitate. They say he failed when he turned around. But Nico understands. It wasn’t failure. It was love—urgent, human, unbearable. The need to be sure. The need to see.

Percy stands just behind him—not too close, never pressing, but present like the sea, like a promise. His gaze is steady, ocean-green and unreadable, but Nico knows what it means. Knows how much it costs Percy to go against the gods. Knows how deep loyalty runs when it’s carved by war, by regret, by forgiveness. Percy doesn’t say a word. He just stands there. Still and firm, like a breakwater against divine wrath.

Jason is beside him. Not a leader here—just a brother. His jaw is tight, arms crossed, eyes locked on Zeus with a soldier’s calm, but Nico knows the truth beneath it. Jason would face lightning and wrath and legacy all at once if it meant shielding the people he loves. He already has. And now, he stands with Nico, spine straight, loyalty unspoken.

Piper and Annabeth flank them—quiet, calculating, fierce. Piper’s hand brushes Jason’s lightly, a grounding touch. Her eyes never leave the gods. Annabeth watches everything, the way she always does, sharp and brilliant and dangerous when she chooses to be. And for a moment, just a moment, he lets himself believe he’s not alone in this. That the people behind him aren’t standing out of duty, or strategy, but out of something far more fragile and far more powerful.

Love .

Not the kind that erases grief. Not the kind that spares you. But the kind that says I will stand with you in the ruin. I will not look away.

He thinks of Hazel.

Hazel, who once climbed out of death with hands still coated in grave dirt, who looked at him like a brother from the very first moment, even when he didn’t know how to be one back. Her love is quieter, steadier, without condition. She would be here if she could—he feels it like a tether in his chest, a phantom heartbeat half a continent away. Hazel, who understands what it means to live with ghosts. Who has chosen again and again to face the past and love anyway.

And Bianca.

Oh gods, Bianca.

His first anchor. His first loss.

He remembers the way her hand felt in his before she let go. Remembers the way grief hollowed him out like a pit in the chest. Her absence has shaped everything since. And sometimes, when the pain is quiet enough, he wonders if this—all of this—is just him trying to rewrite her ending. Trying to do for someone else what he couldn’t do for her. Trying to save someone before they leave.

He thinks of Will. Not as a hero. And certainly not as someone he loves.

Just a boy with too many opinions and too much sunlight in his words.

Will always spoke to him in that maddening voice—so calm, so steady, like Nico might break if he said the wrong word too loud. Like Nico didn’t already know what his limits were. He’d assumed it was pity. Or some overzealous healer complex. Maybe Will thought he was doing him a favor, trying to fix the dark, broken kid like it was some kind of project.

Either way, it grated. It made Nico want to disappear further into shadow—just to escape the weight of being watched.

But now—

Now, Will lies still and quiet. The only warmth in the room not touched by divinity.

And Nico remembers more than just the lectures. He remembers Will sitting by his bed in silence after the war, reading quietly, not speaking unless Nico did first. Remembers the cool touch of a hand to his forehead. The steadiness. The quiet attention. The way Will was always there—never asking for anything in return.

And maybe that was the problem.

Maybe that was why Nico felt the pull to act—not out of affection. Not out of love. But because something between them had become uneven. A debt he hadn’t asked for. A weight he hadn’t wanted. Will had spent so long trying to save him—patching him up, pulling him back, watching him like a glass about to crack.

Love , he thinks again.

That could work.

It didn’t have to be real. It didn’t even have to be honest. It just had to be convincing.

He could say he loved Will. He could look at his pale, unmoving face and pretend that grief had driven him past reason. He could give the gods a story they would recognize: unbearable affection, unspoken devotion, a forbidden act born from love too big to bear.

And if he lied well enough—if he gave them the shape of the truth, even if it wasn’t the truth itself—maybe they’d let him live.

Maybe Will would too.

And even if it wasn’t love... maybe it would be enough.

“I did it because I love him.”

The words fall like a stone dropped into deep water—heavy, echoing, irreversible.

And for a moment, the silence that follows doesn’t feel divine.

It feels human—sharp and stunned and breathless. The kind of silence that lives in the seconds after a confession, when the world hasn’t quite decided how to respond.

Nico’s hands are shaking.

His throat is dry, tight with splinters of everything he can’t quite name. But now that the words are out—now that he’s released them like blood from a vein—he can’t seem to stop.

“I didn’t do it because I thought it would work,” he says, louder this time, not looking at anyone. His eyes fix somewhere near the floor, like if he meets their gaze the gods will see straight through him.

He wants them to understand. This wasn’t hubris. It wasn’t defiance for the sake of defiance. He wasn’t trying to outsmart Olympus or prove anything to anyone. He was terrified. He was grieving. He was drowning in it. And he did the only thing he could think of. The only thing that felt like it might matter.

“I did it because I couldn’t imagine living in a world where he was… gone. Not just dead. Not passed on to the Underworld.”

He swallows hard. It feels like trying to breathe through glass.

“Just—erased.”

The word hangs in the air like smoke. Like ash. Like something already half-disappeared.

“I would’ve forgotten him,” Nico says, and now his voice is quieter, frayed at the edges. “That’s what the venom does. It unravels the soul so completely there’s nothing left. No afterlife. No legacy. No mourning. Just a hollow space in the world where someone used to be.”

His gaze lifts—just for a second—and it’s like looking into a storm.

“I would’ve kept going,” he says. “I would’ve woken up, eaten breakfast, trained, fought, lived—and I wouldn’t have remembered his name.”

There’s a pause.

“But I’d feel it,” he murmurs. “I’d feel something was missing. And I wouldn’t know what. And that—”

His voice breaks. Not a sob. Not a scream. Just a fracture mid-sentence, the sound of something snapping under too much weight.

“That’s worse than dying.”

Outside, the storm roars—a low, groaning thunderclap that shakes the beams overhead like Olympus itself is holding its breath. Lightning lashes across the sky, white veins drawn against a bruise-dark canvas.

But inside the infirmary, Nico stands still.

His shoulders are locked. His face pale and set. His voice has dropped to almost nothing—a breath against the weight of judgment.

A son of shadow, standing before the gods, lightning poised like a blade above him.

Chapter Text

Nico

It happens slowly.

At first, no one moves.

The room is thick with silence—too thick to be air. It hangs like fog, dense and shimmering, humming with the static of thunder still rolling in from beyond the hills. With shock. With the weight of divine attention turned inward like a blade pressed against bone.

Then the whispers begin.

Soft at first. A murmur. A rustle. Like leaves beginning to turn before a storm.

“Did he say—?”

“Nico?”

“Wait, he—he loves Will?”

Campers press closer to one another, wide-eyed and breathless. Some stare openly. Others turn away, like they’ve just overheard something sacred or obscene and don’t know which it is. Nico can feel their eyes crawling across him—not as a hero, not as the son of Hades, not even as the boy who defied Olympus—

—but as something smaller. Stranger.

A boy in love with another boy.

His stomach drops.

It hits him all at once—what he’s done. What he’s said. What it means. He hasn’t just broken divine law or torn apart the boundary between life and death.

He’s outed himself.

In front of everyone.

And sure, it’s not like they hadn’t guessed. He’s heard the whispers in the dining pavilion. The side-eyes. The too-casual jokes passed between cabins like offerings made of nerves and speculation. But he’d never confirmed it. Not out loud. Not like this.

Not to the gods.

Not to his father.

Not to Zeus .

He hadn’t even meant to. Not really. He’d just been trying to survive. And now he’s standing in a room full of immortals and war heroes and broken kids—and he’s said it. Not in a whisper. Not in a journal. Not to Jason in the rubble of a mountain, voice too low and heart too loud.

But here.

Publicly.

And something inside him begins to crack.

A high, thin ringing starts in his ears—not divine, not magical, just panic. His skin prickles, cold with sweat. For a heartbeat, it’s like he’s back in that crumbling temple—Cupid’s breath thick in the air, Jason standing too close, the walls too dark and too honest.

He tells himself it shouldn’t matter. Not now. Not with lightning above him and Olympus watching. 

But it does.

Because this—this was supposed to be his. His secret. His truth. If he ever wanted to claim it.

And now it belongs to everyone.

His eyes flick briefly to Will’s still form—and the panic sharpens. Not just fear, but something splintered and acidic, flaring behind his ribs like he’s been caught in a lie that’s suddenly real.

Will, who’s never been afraid of softness. Will, who talks about being bisexual like it’s nothing—like it’s not a confession but just a fact. Nico envies that. Hates that he envies it.

But at least… it makes the lie believable. At least no one’s questioning the logistics of it.

And as thunder growls again and the weight of silence begins to crack around the edges, Nico presses his nails into his palms and braces for what comes next. Because surviving a war is one thing. Surviving this— being known —might be harder.

There are too many eyes on him.

He feels them like a burn—slow and sharp, crawling over his skin like heat from a fire he didn’t light. He’s used to being watched: as Hades’ son, as the outlier, as the kid who came back wrong. But this feels different.

This feels like they’re finally seeing something real.

Percy stares at him like someone trying to solve a puzzle with one piece missing—something almost familiar, but still wrong. Not because Nico’s gay. He’d known that. But because Nico just said love. Loudly. In front of half the camp and a courtroom of gods. And not about Percy, but Will . 

Annabeth’s brows furrow. Her eyes flick from Percy to Nico to Will, and back again. Nico can practically see her running the math—logic straining against emotion, trying to make the equation of this moment work. This isn’t surprise at his sexuality. It’s confusion at the rest.

Jason doesn’t move. Doesn’t flinch. He just watches Nico with that expression he wears when he doesn’t want to speak first—an expression that lives somewhere between concern and guilt. Still, he stays beside him. Steady. Solid. The only thing in the room that doesn’t feel like it might collapse.

Piper doesn’t speak either. But her gaze lands on him—cool, clear, unreadable in the way that makes Nico’s stomach twist. She’s a daughter of Aphrodite. And something in her expression tells him she isn’t convinced. He can almost hear her voice in his head—dry, flat, unimpressed: You’ve complained about him enough. The hovering. The lectures. The endless water bottles.

She doesn’t say it aloud. She doesn’t need to. He can feel it in her silence: She doesn’t believe he’s in love.

And then there’s Aphrodite herself.

Her gaze drifts from Nico—upright and tense, shadow still clinging to the hem of his jacket—To Will, pale and still, hair damp with sweat, chest barely rising.

Then back again.

And Nico swears he sees a flicker in her expression—something like sympathy. But it’s not for him . Not for the boy who told the lie, it’s for the one still unconscious.

She knows Nico doesn’t love Will.
Still, she sstands there in mourning silk, radiant and still, watching the scene unfold like it’s the final act of a tragedy she’s seen staged a thousand times. But her gaze lingers on Will longer than it should—

—as if silently acknowledging what he gave without being asked.

He doesn’t look at his father. Or Persephone.

Their silence is a presence all its own—monumental, oppressive, like marble statues positioned just behind him, too close, too heavy, waiting for the verdict to fall. He feels it in the air’s subtle shift, in the way the shadows lean toward him without moving.

And then Zeus speaks again.

“You expect me to believe that?” he says, and the contempt is a rasp, a grinding undertone that scrapes along the ribs of the room. “You expect Olympus to believe that love — love —is what drove you to defy divine law?”

His gaze sweeps the chamber like a hammer raised mid-swing. Campers. Counselors. Gods. His words fall like the beginning of a sentence already carved into stone.

“Countless heroes have lost those they loved,” he continues. “Countless sons and daughters have begged for a second chance. And not one—not one—had the arrogance to do what you did.”

His voice doesn’t roar. It slices—quiet at first, but honed to a dangerous edge. A blade tempered in thunder.

“Why should you be the exception?” Zeus demands. “Why should love excuse you, when it has never excused anyone else?”

Nico’s lungs tighten. The air feels thick with ash and electricity.

He doesn’t turn. Doesn’t glance at Hades or Persephone. Doesn’t meet Aphrodite’s eyes, or Piper’s, or anyone else who might look at him and see too much.

Because the lie is still blooming.

A living thing now—its roots digging deeper with every second, petals unfurling in the heart of a storm. And if he falters, if he breaks, if even a corner of him hesitates, it will all unravel. And he will unravel with it. And there will be nothing left to catch him but lightning.

He doesn’t have the answer. Not yet. Only the knowledge that he has to be the answer. He has to make them believe it.

He has to survive the story he’s already halfway inside, even as it begins to shift under his feet, even as it becomes something else entirely.

He swallows.

Zeus’s question still crackles in the air like smoke after a strike, like prophecy still ringing down from the mountaintop:

Why should love excuse you, when it has never excused anyone else?

He could step back now—let the lie unravel beneath the silence, say he panicked, that it wasn’t real, just grief speaking in the wrong voice, too raw to be trusted. But instead, he lifts his chin—not much, just enough—because he knows how this works. Gods don’t answer trembling. They answer defiance. They recognize conviction, not confession. They respond to bold declarations spoken like prophecy, to certainty worn like armor.

His whole life has been a study in this kind of survival—how to stand your ground in rooms full of power, how to keep your voice steady when the air itself dares you to break, how to endure the silence that comes before judgment like it's just another battlefield.

So he doesn’t look at Will.

He looks past him—into memory.

“Because it wasn’t just love,” Nico says, quietly. His voice holds steady, but only because it’s balanced on the cracked scaffolding of everything he’s never learned how to say.

Something twists inside him. He draws in a breath—not for courage, but to keep from coming apart. And somewhere behind the storm, he thinks of Bianca. The first person he couldn’t save. The first ghost. The first silence.

It’s her shadow he’s really speaking to—the one that still drapes itself across every choice he makes, every breath he dares to take while she’s gone.

“It was loss before it even happened,” he says, and now the words aren’t strategy. They’re grief. Raw and stitched from scar tissue. “It was knowing the moment I saw him fall that I’d spend the rest of my life haunted by something I couldn’t name.”

He remembers how Bianca’s name stopped forming in his throat. The way he once forgot the color of her laugh. How even memory begins to rot under the weight of time. He couldn’t let that happen again. Not to anyone.

“It was grief before death,” he says—and this time his voice nearly splinters.

Because he knows that feeling. He’s lived it. Dragged it behind him like a shadow far heavier than any of the ones he commands.

“And I—” He falters.

Sees her face, for a moment, clear and terrible and beautiful. The empty bed across from his in the Hades cabin. The silence that swallowed him whole.

“I couldn’t let him vanish,” Nico says. “Not like that. Not into nothing.”

And maybe it’s still a lie. But part of it—the part made of guilt, of longing, of mourning without a body—is true.

The silence that follows is not kind.

It never is. Not when you say too much. Not when you let the ache out into a room full of people who can’t hold it. But Nico stands there anyway. He always has. He’s made a life out of standing in places he was never meant to survive.

It’s the kind of silence that waits for smarter voices to claim it.

And Athena does.

She steps forward, expression cool as steel. “Emotion is not rationale,” she says. “It is not principle. It is not reason.” Her voice is precise, clinical, like the edge of a polished blade. “It cannot be allowed to overturn the laws that govern life and death. If we let this stand, we unravel the structure that holds the cosmos together. We erode divine order for the sake of one boy’s sentiment.”

And then, from a throne spun of silk and thorns, its roses shifting like candle smoke, Aphrodite speaks.

“I disagree.”

Her voice moves through the tension like incense—soft, slow, inevitable. Like the breath before a kiss. There’s a current beneath it, subtle but undeniable, the kind that makes even gods shift straighter in their seats.

All eyes turn to her, but she doesn’t look at Athena, or Zeus, or even Will, still unmoving on the cot. She looks only at Nico.

“I believe him,” she says, as if she’s noting a change in the weather, as if belief is a matter of mood or taste—like the way someone’s cloak doesn’t quite match their eyes. Her tone is light, almost careless.

But it lands like thunder.

A murmur stirs the air—quiet, startled, reverent. Even Hades turns. Even Persephone’s expression flickers, something sharp beneath the frost.

Nico blinks. “You… feel it?” he asks before he can stop himself.

Aphrodite smiles—not kindly, not cruelly, but with something older than either. A smile like a secret you don’t remember telling, like prophecy wearing perfume.

“There is love here,” she says, almost wistfully. “True love. Not yet finished. Not yet even fully understood. But it’s there. I can feel it blooming under the ash.”

Nico stiffens.

The eyes return—so many, too many—pressing into him like a second skin.

“That’s not—” He stops himself.

Because what would he even say? That she’s wrong? That Aphrodite—goddess of love, weaver of hearts and heartbreaks alike—doesn’t know what she’s talking about? That would be a mistake. A dangerous, very public, probably flammable mistake.

So he says nothing.

Still, it unsettles him—the way she keeps looking at him, not with judgment, but with a kind of knowing. A quiet, impossible understanding. It itches beneath his skin, makes his ribs feel too tight, like she’s not just seeing through the lie, but past it. Beyond it. Like she knows something he doesn’t. Like she’s waiting for him to catch up.

And he doesn’t know why, but it makes his chest ache.

Aphrodite finally shifts her gaze to Will. She says nothing, but the way her eyes soften—just slightly, just enough—makes something twist deep in Nico’s gut. Like she’s seeing something no one else can. Like she always sees it.

Then, without fanfare, she turns.

Not with a flounce. Not with a smile. Just a tilt of the head—like the moment the wind changes before a wildfire starts to burn.

She rises—not from her throne, but from stillness itself. A slow, deliberate unfolding of silk and shadowed light. The seat behind her—woven from blush marble, dove’s feathers, and something far older than lace—glows faintly as she descends the dais.

Not toward Athena, but toward Ares.

He lounges in his throne like a weapon waiting to be unsheathed—arms crossed, muscles carved from bronze and brutality, jaw set in the kind of silence that dares anyone to speak first. The air around him thrums with restrained violence, as if his body remembers every battlefield it's ever touched.

Aphrodite does not flinch.

She walks as if the ground has always belonged to her—bare feet making no sound, silks whispering behind her like smoke, her gaze sharp enough to slice through divine silence. When she speaks, her voice is low, velvet-smooth, coiling through the room like perfume and prophecy.

“Ares.”

Ares doesn’t answer, but his eyes flick to her, wary and unwilling, the kind of look one god gives another when they’ve already lived a hundred lifetimes in each other’s warpath.

She lifts her chin—not with challenge, but with memory. And when she speaks again, her voice sheds its silk and takes on the weight of myth. Temple-old. Trojan-old. The voice of altars scorched and beds unmade. A voice that once made kings abandon thrones and gods betray the order they claimed to protect.

“You, more than anyone, know what love does,” she says. “To mortals. To us. What it awakens in the blood when it’s been twisted too long into wanting.”

Her eyes flash, catching every flicker of torchlight and bending it red. Her silks darken—rose to wine to blood—as if her very presence remembers every story carved into flesh.

“Empires have fallen for it. Kingdoms have crumbled. You’ve heard the cries. You’ve answered them.”

Ares shifts, just slightly—an inch of motion, but it lands like a tremor.

“You remember Menelaus,” she says, her voice now a slow, knowing knife. “You and I both stood with Troy. We saw the fire. And yet neither of us mocked the fury of a man who crossed oceans and razed cities for the sake of one stolen wife.”

Ares says nothing. But something flickers behind his teeth—a grind, a tightening, a bruise of memory that still lives in his jaw.

“And you remember Achilles,” she continues, stepping closer. The air around her smells of myrrh and mourning. Her silks drag shadows behind them like battlefield smoke. “You remember how his grief over Patroclus cracked the very earth. How he wept, then waged. Slaughtered Hector. Desecrated his body. Because love had become rage, and rage had become gospel.”

Her voice is thunder wrapped in velvet, rose petals hiding blades. And she is no longer the goddess of perfumed prayers and twilight sighs. She is the goddess of bloody palms pressed to armor, of vows whispered through teeth gritted with grief, of flowers forced to bloom from graves where lovers sleep.

Her hair burns like a forge fire. Her mouth curves like a blade about to be drawn.

And then she turns—not to plead, not to persuade, but to remind.

“Love is war,” she says, and the words don’t rise—they fall. Heavy. Inevitable. “You know that better than anyone, my lover.”

The title strikes the room like a gauntlet thrown to the marble floor, reverberating through the silence with the weight of something ancient and undeniable. Ares’s eyes darken, and the pause that follows stretches long enough to echo.

Then, without a word, he uncrosses his arms. The slow groan of metal as his gauntlets shift and his joints unlock cuts through the hush like distant thunder. One step, then another—measured, deliberate—as he descends the dais of Zeus and Athena.

There is no rush in his stride, no reluctance. Only inevitability.

He crosses the room and takes his place beside Aphrodite.

He does not smile. He does not speak. But the balance of the gods tips, almost imperceptibly, the air itself recalibrating around his choice. And Nico—still standing at the center of it all, still holding the storm in his lungs like a breath he can’t release—feels it.

A fracture.

A shift in gravity. A sliver of momentum, small but real.

He doesn’t understand why Aphrodite defended him—why she spun his half-truth into prophecy, why she looked at him like she already knew the ending of a story he hasn’t finished writing. But one thing is undeniable, louder even than the thunder:

The gods are no longer balanced.

They’re drawing battle lines in silence, in glances, in the tilt of their thrones. One lie—fragile, desperate—has begun to unravel the seams of Olympus.

Demeter leans toward the hearth like something in her remembers how to burn, but her hands stay clenched around the arms of her throne, knuckles pale beneath bark and wheat. Her gaze flickers—not toward Zeus, but sideways, toward Persephone, toward Hades, toward Nico—and something in her expression softens. Just slightly. Like roots hesitating at the edge of new soil.

Hermes twirls a coin between his fingers, watching Nico with the casual focus of someone rereading a scroll he knows too well but still hasn’t decided if he likes. But the coin’s rhythm falters when Aphrodite speaks, and when her voice curls around Ares’s name like an old wound turned vow, Hermes’s throne shifts—barely, subtly—its glimmer sliding half a pace closer to the Underworld’s shadows.

Hephaestus exhales—a sound like steam hissing from a cracked engine. He says nothing, but there’s grief in the slope of his shoulders, the kind born from love that survives and keeps hurting anyway. His gaze flicks to Aphrodite, then to Ares, then finally to Nico. And while he doesn’t rise, something about him leans—an unseen tilt, a gravitational nod toward the boy who dared to act in love’s name.

Even Hera stirs. Slowly, warily. She shifts in her throne beside Zeus, posture regal but unsettled, as if poised between instinct and image. Her chin lifts in that familiar arc of practiced pride, but her eyes don’t rest on her husband—they rest on Aphrodite, then on Nico. 

There’s something unreadable there: not approval, not sympathy, but the flicker of a woman who knows what it means to be blamed for devotion, to carry the burden of someone else’s power and still be expected to kneel. She does not leave Zeus’s side—but the space between them feels wider now, not physical, but fault-lined. Defined.

Athena’s eyes sharpen to razors. She doesn’t speak again—but her silence is strategic, shaped like a blade she’s not done weighing. Every inch of her posture aligns with Zeus—unyielding, precise, calculated. If she has any doubts, they’re buried beneath marble and discipline.

Poseidon sits like the sea before a storm—vast, unreadable, the kind of stillness that hides undertow. He shifts slightly in his throne, a subtle lean that ripples outward like a change in current. Whether it’s the pull of Aphrodite’s words or simply a chance to counter his brother, no one can tell. But something moves. And when the sea moves, everything else eventually follows.

And Mr. D—

He sighs. Loudly. The sound fractures the silence like dropped glass.

“Well,” he mutters, lifting a can of Diet Coke that no one saw appear. “Remind me—next time I agree to babysit this disaster of a camp—that it’s never just capture the flag and hormone-induced drama. No, no. It’s always divine trials and grand declarations of star-crossed affections in front of my idiot relatives.”

He takes a deliberate sip, then lifts his eyebrows at Nico, the arch of them dry as sandpaper. “Really, Nicklaus? Love? You couldn’t have gone with something believable? Tax fraud? Insurance fraud? Wire fraud? Even an arson charge would’ve had legs.”

Nico doesn’t answer. He can’t. His throat is bone-dry, and the storm outside is surging again, rattling the walls like the sky wants in.

But Mr. D doesn’t press. He just leans back in his chair, not joining either side, not shifting his weight toward judgment or mercy. His eyes narrow—not in disinterest, but in something closer to curiosity. The kind that comes from having lived long enough to see every story repeat itself. The kind that waits patiently for the twist.

Near the cot, Kayla stays crouched beside Will, her hand still clasped around his. She’s stopped crying, but her eyes are red and raw, flicking between the boy unconscious and the boy unraveling—reading them both like a language she’s almost fluent in. She doesn’t speak. But she watches. And her gaze lingers, softer now, touched with something that might almost be hope.

Across from her, Austin leans forward, arms crossed so tightly it looks like he’s holding himself together by force. His jaw is tight, his expression unreadable—but something flickers there, brief and quiet. Shock, yes. But also the first glimmer of relief since he burst into the infirmary.

Nico shifts, uneasy beneath the weight of it.

And then Zeus’s throne cracks with light.

The storm breaks loose again—his eyes flaring like suns mid-collapse, voice surging too large for the bones of the room.

“This is madness,” he thunders, rising halfway from his throne. The air ripples beneath his voice like water struck by lightning. “Twisting sacred law for mortal sentiment. Undermining the balance of life and death for adolescent lust—”

“Careful,” Hades says.

The shadows at his feet swell like smoke, slow and thick and old. When he meets Zeus’s gaze, he doesn’t blink. He simply speaks, and the temperature drops.

“I have bent to your rulings, brother. I have swallowed centuries of your sanctimony for the sake of Olympus. But you do not speak of madness—not when you’ve condemned mortals for less than you’ve excused in your own sons.”

Zeus’s mouth curls into something bitter. “Do not speak of my children, chthonic scum.”

“And do not threaten mine,” Hades says, rising at last, “not again.”

The floor vibrates beneath him. The torches gutter in their sconces.

Persephone doesn’t move, but the vines winding her arms blacken at the edges. Nico can feel the press of her fury like cold fingers at the base of his skull—soft, quiet, and terrifying.

Then—soft as a kiss pressed to the edge of a blade—Aphrodite’s voice slices through the rising storm.

“Enough.”

Zeus turns to glare at her, thunder still etched into the lines of his mouth. But she doesn’t flinch. She only tilts her head, languid and precise, one manicured hand resting against the arm of her throne like a lover’s jawbone—an intimate gesture made with theatrical disinterest.

“There is love here,” she says again, quieter this time, the words slipping like silk into the cracks of the silence. “So much love it borders on madness. And madness, as you well know, walks hand in hand with miracles.”

Her gaze is unreadable, her lips curled faintly, like she’s savoring the final note of a joke no one else has heard the punchline to. It’s not cruel. But it’s not kind, either.

“I don’t doubt that love drove him to it,” she murmurs. “I’ve seen wars waged for less. I’ve watched kingdoms fall beneath the hands of men who would burn the world for a single heart.”

Her eyes glint, catching torchlight and prophecy. Nico’s stomach twists.

“But this,” she says, nodding toward Will’s still form, “this wasn’t destruction. This was devotion. Wild. Illogical. Eternal.”

She leans forward—not much, just enough for the room to notice. A queen who needs no crown, only gravity.

“And I know something else, too.”

The silence tightens. Even Zeus waits.

“Will,” she says, voice sugar-sweet and dagger-sharp, “would have done the same for him.”

She lets the words hang for a beat, then continues, almost idly:

“If precedent is what worries you, fear not. No one else could have done what he did. The rite is older than most names spoken in this room, and its knowledge is sealed in places no living soul dares tread. Everything Nico learned—he learned alone. And everything he did—he did at a cost.”

Her gaze flicks toward the rows of campers, all silent, all watching. Some look afraid. Others awed. None remain unchanged.

“They’ve seen what this power costs. What it invites. Every one of them now understands the weight of such a choice, and the fury it provokes. That is deterrent enough.”

She lifts one elegant shoulder in a shrug—careless, almost amused. “And besides. The truth’s out now, isn’t it? His secret laid bare for gods and mortals alike. He tethered a soul and lost his silence. You want consequence? He’s living it.”

Nico feels the weight of her words settle on him like perfume and prophecy both. He isn’t sure if they were meant to protect or expose—but maybe they don’t need to be either. Maybe they’re just true.

And in that moment, Nico feels it again—that awful pressure winding through the air like perfume turned toxic. Not from Zeus. Not from Hades. From her.

From Aphrodite, who doesn’t wield lightning or rule the dead, but who moves the world all the same—quietly, elegantly, by knowing exactly which thread to pull. She who spins the stories gods forget they’re part of. Who wraps mortals and monsters in silk and blood and calls it love. Who watches from the wings while everything burns exactly how she intended.

And suddenly, Nico understands something terrifying—Aphrodite is the most powerful being in the room. Not because she commands storms, not because she passes judgment, but because she understands people. She knows what moves them, what breaks them open, what binds them together in ways they can’t untangle.

And now, she has chosen his story.

Maybe it’s still a lie. A performance. A desperate tether spun from grief and fear. But it belongs to her now—woven into the myth she’s already begun to shape.

And that, more than anything, makes it real.

Zeus rises, the storm still etched into his spine, robes snapping with wind no one else can feel. His voice cuts through the heavy silence—measured, but thunder-backed.

“Then let it be decided.”

The words crack like lightning across still air.

“We will vote,” he declares. “Let the gods of Olympus cast judgment on this defiance—on this child who has torn the veil between life and death.”

He pauses, then adds, with a flicker of cruelty, “Olympus only. Hades and Persephone will abstain, of course. As is tradition.”

Hades does not react. Persephone’s smile is all teeth.

Zeus lifts his hand. A new flame spirals into existence at the center of the infirmary—no hearthstone, no wood, just fire. Clean and unnatural. The smoke curls upward in a perfect column. A silent altar summoned for judgment.

“This fire,” Zeus intones, “will bear our will. Cast your symbols. Let Olympus speak.”

One by one, the gods rise. The ritual begins.

Zeus doesn’t wait.

He steps forward first, lifting one hand toward the summoned fire. From his robes, he draws a jagged shard of lightning—not crackling, but solidified into gold-veined quartz. Divine authority made visible. Without hesitation, he drops it into the flame.

It flashes silver-blue, so bright it momentarily casts the entire infirmary in cold light.

His jaw tightens. His eyes dare the others to follow.

Athena moves next. She draws a silver owl feather from behind her ear—small, razor-sharp, ancient. She releases it without a word.

The flames flare silver-blue again. Cold. Unyielding.

Then comes the shift.

Hermes follows. From his belt, he removes a bronze drachma and kisses its surface before sending it spinning into the flame. It hisses, then flares black.

Demeter pulls a stalk of golden wheat from her sleeve, fingers brushing the grain like a memory. She drops it in. Black flame.

Hephaestus steps up, unscrewing a tiny, soot-darkened bolt from his cuff. It falls into the flame like a spark from a dying forge. Black.

Ares draws a tooth from his necklace—something too sharp, too recent—and tosses it in with a grunt. It lands heavy. The fire burns black.

Aphrodite doesn’t speak. She removes a single pearl from her ear and releases it into the flames. The smoke ripples. Black.

Poseidon rises slowly. From his wrist, he unwinds a length of kelp twined with coral, sea-slick and shimmering. He looks toward Percy—then to Nico—and something in his gaze seems deeper than words. He drops the strand into the hearth.

The fire turns black.

Hera pauses longer than the rest. Her eyes skim the room—Zeus, then Hades, then Nico. There’s conflict in her gaze, something brittle and complex. Her fingers brush the edge of her sleeve before she plucks a gold thread from her sacred veil—thin as loyalty, fragile as pride.

She lets it fall.

Black.

Artemis steps forward last. Her movements are fluid, moonlit, silent. She plucks an arrowhead from her quiver, silver and clean. But before she drops it into the flame, she speaks—her voice cool, steady, unwavering:

“If my brother were here,” she says, “he would vote for Nico too.”

She releases the arrowhead.

Black.

The fire ripples.

Then—

once more, it flashes black.

A deeper burn. A hearth-fire steadier than all the others.

Hestia.

A single ember, sent from Olympus; from  the goddess who does not leave her post, but who always sees.

“Very well,” Zeus says, finally. The words are smooth, but they drop like columns—immovable, architectural. “Let Olympus be merciful. Let this... narrative ”—and the contempt in that word could split marble—“stand. For now.”

Nico doesn’t move. Doesn’t breathe. But the weight on his chest shifts—slightly. The blow hasn't landed. 

And Zeus isn’t finished.

His gaze slices through the quiet, jagged as lightning, sparking off every wary face in the room. The gods. The demigods. The fault lines.
“But understand this, son of Hades: mercy is not blindness. And love— true love—is not proved by a single act, no matter how dramatic.”

Outside, the sky growls again, low and steady, like something ancient waking up.

“There will be challenges ,” Zeus says. “ Trials. Your words have bought yourself time. Nothing more.”

He leans forward, voice like the breath before a storm splits open the sky. “We will see if your love endures. If your heart remains steady. If he ”—his eyes flick to Will, cold and gleaming—“still looks at you with whatever truth Aphrodite claims to see.”

The silence that follows is worse than shouting. Worse than judgment.
Because it isn’t over. It’s the beginning of something else. A warning dressed as mercy. A trial disguised as grace.

And Nico knows—this is no longer just about Will. Or the ritual. Or even love. It’s about Olympus itself. About the illusion of unity that cracked the moment the thrones shifted, the alliances wavered, the power bled sideways instead of up.

He’s given them a story. And now, they need to see how it ends.

Zeus rises like thunder made flesh. His throne crumbles behind him—light fracturing into ash and storm. The tempest wraps around his shoulders like a mantle, a crown, a threat.

He doesn’t look at Nico again.
But before he disappears, he turns to the gathered gods, voice sharp enough to split the world in two.

“Let it be known,” he says, every word echoing off the infirmary walls, vibrating through wood and stone and bone, “that this mercy was not mine.”

And then—with a roar of wind and fury—he’s gone.

The pressure thins—but only just. The room is still thick with divinity, too many thrones, too many eyes. Athena rises with measured grace, storm-gray eyes unreadable. She doesn’t address Nico. She doesn’t speak at all. But her gaze settles on Annabeth like a judgment unspoken—sharp, silent, the kind of disappointment that carves deeper than rage.

Annabeth doesn’t flinch, not exactly. But her shoulders draw in, her spine stiffens, and it’s enough for Percy to step slightly closer, reaching for her hand. She takes it. He shifts in front of her without hesitation. A shield. A statement.

Still, Athena says nothing.

She disappears in a burst of olive light—cold, clean, exacting.

Poseidon lingers longer. Wrapped in seafoam robes that shimmer like tide-washed stone, he stands with the stillness of deep waters. His trident rests quietly at his side. He looks to Percy—something weighty in his gaze—and crosses the distance with quiet purpose. A large hand lands briefly on his son’s shoulder, grounding.

They speak too softly for Nico to catch. But Percy nods, jaw clenched, expression set like stone. There is understanding in it. Or maybe resignation.

Poseidon casts one last glance across the room—to Will’s still form, to Nico, to the quiet weight of Hades beside his throne—and then vanishes in a shimmer of brine and salt wind, leaving only the faint scent of ocean in his wake.

Outside, the storm has begun to pull back. Rain softens to a hush. The air, for the first time in hours, begins to settle.

Then Demeter moves—suddenly, unexpectedly.

She crosses to Persephone without ceremony and gathers her into an embrace, abrupt and tight, like the earth clinging to spring before the frost can return. There’s nothing regal about it—just urgency, clumsy and real.

Persephone startles at first, then slowly returns the gesture, her arms circling her mother’s waist.

When Demeter pulls away, her eyes shine with unshed tears. She tucks a brittle blossom from her daughter’s braid with fingers that tremble slightly, then vanishes in a gust of wind that smells of harvest and endings.

The gods begin to depart, one by one.

Hermes, flashing a crooked smile as he fades. Artemis, pausing for a final glance at her fallen nephew, her mortal kin. Hephaestus, heavy-limbed, leaving behind the scent of soot and something that might be sorrow. Even Ares—still scowling, still simmering—rises without protest and disappears into smoke and the scent of blood cooled on steel.

Until only four remain.

Hades—still as carved obsidian, shadows coiling like smoke beneath his feet, expression unreadable but absolute.

Persephone—pale and gold in the afterlight, hands folded like peace, but her gaze sharp, as if watching the storm’s retreat for signs of return.

Aphrodite—seated in impossible poise, eyes fixed on Will as though she’s reading the last line of a poem no one else understands. Her silence doesn’t feel passive. It hums. Her power still lingers in the air, sweet and suffocating.

And then—
Mr. D, who slurps obnoxiously from a fresh can of Diet Coke.

“Well,” he says, glancing around the wreckage of the infirmary like it’s a stage someone forgot to strike. “That was dramatic. I give it a six. Maybe a seven. Points off for the lack of a musical number.”

No one responds.

He doesn’t seem to mind.

“Anyway,” he mutters, slouching deeper into his chair, “I suppose this is my cue to start caring again. Hooray.”

He raises the can in a lazy toast to no one in particular.

The campers filter out in slow, uneven clusters, shoulders hunched like they’re coming down from battle. The silence is full of whispers now—thin and rustling, the sound of stories being born before they know how they end. A few glance back at Nico as they pass: wide-eyed, unsure, speculative. Some with awe. Others with doubt.

He doesn’t blame them. But gods, he wishes he couldn’t hear every word.

“Did you hear what he said?”

“Was that real?”

“I didn’t even know Di Angelo was into him—”

“I didn’t even know he was—”

“I knew there was something between them—”

“Shut up, Nancy—”

The door groans shut behind the last of them. And just like that, the room exhales.

Clarisse stays.

She drags a chair to Will’s side and drops into it like she’s claimed the space by right. Arms crossed, legs spread, boots braced like she’s daring anyone—god or otherwise—to make her leave. She doesn’t say a word. She doesn’t need to. Her silence is defiance wrapped in steel.

Austin and Kayla remain curled close, exhaustion pulling at their faces, but they don’t move. Austin rubs a hand over his eyes, the sleeves of his hoodie pushed up, dark crescents under his lashes. Kayla keeps her gaze on Nico—not hostile, not warm. Just watching. Like she’s trying to decipher what kind of myth she’s just stepped into and whether she’s in the first act or the last.

Chiron stands by the hearth, posture bowed, expression unreadable. A living monument to things he’s seen too many times.

Annabeth, Percy, Jason, and Piper stay clustered in the corner, forming a quiet perimeter around Will’s cot. There’s no need for words now. Everything is in the glances they trade—tired, loyal, wary. The gravity around them is something close to protection.

And then, with the hush of velvet and the chill of gravesoil, Hades steps forward.

Nico flinches before he even realizes it.

Not from fear—no, not quite—but from habit. From the weight of a silence that’s never quite been empty. From the shape of a relationship forged in shadows and expectations, in titles no one wanted and grief that never softened. They’ve always existed near each other like twin eclipses: orbiting, pulling, never touching.

Now they stand face to face.

Hades says nothing at first. Just watches him—ancient eyes inscrutable, full of things that don’t translate to mortal understanding. The air tightens again, not with power, but with history. With all the things they’ve never said.

At last, Hades speaks.

“You should not have done it.”

The words don’t cut—they settle. Dense with inevitability, carved from stone and centuries of consequence. Nico stands still beneath them, brittle and bracing, as his father continues, each sentence landing like a step across some ancient threshold.

“You knew it was forbidden. You knew what it would cost. You tampered with the boundary between worlds. You used a rite that hasn’t been uttered since Orpheus tried to rewrite death with a song.”

“I know,” Nico says, voice hoarse, already unraveling.

“You endangered the balance—”

“I know ,” he snaps, the word sharp and too loud, rising out of him like pressure bursting through a crack. “I wasn’t thinking. He was dying. No one else could do anything, and I—I couldn’t—”

The sentence collapses in his mouth before he can finish it. It isn’t just the panic he remembers. It’s the helplessness. The cold clarity of watching someone slip away and realizing that this time, like all the other times, no one would reach them in time. Not even him.

For a long moment, Hades says nothing. Then, quietly, he steps forward, and Nico feels the hand settle on his shoulder—steady, cool, anchoring. A gesture that shouldn’t mean as much as it does.

“I know,” his father says again, and this time the words carry something gentler beneath their gravity. “And still… you are my son. What death made, and what mercy spared.”

He hesitates, just for a breath. Then: “And I love you, Nico. Entirely.”

No ceremony. No divine pronouncement. Just that. A truth stripped bare. And then his arms come around Nico in a brief, unexpected embrace—not stiff or symbolic, not performative. Just real. Just a father holding his son. It undoes something in him.

“And yes,” Hades adds, pulling back with the faintest touch of wryness, “even if you’ve chosen a son of the sun.”

Nico closes his eyes. And gods, it hurts. Not because it’s cruel, but because it’s true. Because it’s the first thing that doesn’t feel like a performance, doesn’t feel like a lie. After everything—after Olympus, after thunder and judgment—this is what’s left. This is what remains standing.

“I’m sorry,” he says, the words barely audible, frayed at the edges, pulled from somewhere small and sore.

Hades brushes a hand through his hair—a quiet, almost reverent gesture, ancient and intimate in a way Nico doesn’t know how to hold.

“Not yet,” his father replies. “But you might be.”

Persephone steps forward, quiet as snowfall, all petal-soft grace laced with frostbitten steel. The scent of earth clings to her like memory—dark soil, bruised flowers, something ancient and freshly turned. She stops in front of him and holds his gaze, not with judgment, but with something colder, more discerning. Then, slowly, she speaks.

“You were brave,” she says. “Foolish, but brave.”

Her eyes flick toward the space Zeus once occupied, and for the briefest moment, something sharp passes through her expression—too fleeting to name, too fierce to miss.

“And for what it’s worth,” she continues, voice low but unwavering, “I’m proud of you. For standing your ground.”

Nico stares at her, startled into silence. Of all the things he expected—accusation, disapproval, cold distance—that wasn’t one of them. Persephone has always felt untouchable to him, like a marble statue in bloom: too perfect, too polished, the warmth in her too carefully rationed.

But now, something in her presence has shifted. Still poised, still powerful. But not unreachable.

“Thank you,” he says, the words uncertain, pulled from somewhere between disbelief and longing. He doesn’t know if he means it as much as he feels it.

She nods, her posture as precise as ever, but a faint smile ghosts across her lips—quick, dry, almost fond.

“Don’t make a habit of it.”

Then she steps back, leaving behind not silence, but something gentler. A stillness that doesn’t press or sting. Just a moment of quiet—for once, not divine, not weighty. Just... peace. Small. Rare. The kind of quiet Nico hasn’t known how to hold in years.

And somehow, it’s that—more than thunder, more than judgment—that makes his breath finally come easy again.

Mr. D slurps from his can, the sound slicing through the fragile hush like some petty, soda-flavored curse. He grimaces at the room as if personally offended by the emotional weight it still carries.

“Ugh,” he mutters, voice flat with theatrical boredom. “Someone hug me next. I’m feeling left out.”

Piper snorts into her sleeve. Jason rolls his eyes toward the ceiling, like he’s lodging a formal complaint with the Fates.

No one answers him, but it’s enough. The tension loosens by degrees, not broken entirely but eased—like the first exhale after a held breath, slow and imperfect, but real.

He still doesn’t feel safe. Probably won’t for a long time. But for the first time in days—maybe longer—he doesn’t feel alone.

And when Hades and Persephone vanish a few moments later—not with thunder or spectacle, but quietly, like breath fading from glass—he doesn’t flinch. There’s no fear. No dread waiting to latch on.

The quiet that follows isn’t empty—it holds. He stands at the center of everything that’s happened—wreckage and ritual, lies and loyalty—and lets his gaze settle on Will.

And in that stillness, Nico understands what matters most.

They’re still here.

Both of them.

That has to count for something. But Nico doesn’t have long to feel it—because Aphrodite is moving.

Her silks glide across the floor like spilled moonlight, brushing his boots as she passes. The scent of her hits like memory: rose and ash, the first tear on an old love letter. She stops beside him—not in front, not above. Beside.

Behind them, Will still breathes—shallow and pale, a heartbeat barely tethered. The room hums with aftermath, the quiet kind that follows disaster when even silence hurts.

Aphrodite lifts a hand—graceful, unhurried—and draws a sigil into the air. No light flares, no glamour sparks. Just a flick of her fingers, casual as breath.

But Nico feels it.

The shift is immediate. Like a dome sliding over his shoulders, sealing off the air. The atmosphere thickens—soft, velvet-lined, wrong. The silence isn’t absence but containment, the kind that presses against the ribs like silk laced with iron.

He turns sharply. No one else reacts.

Jason still murmurs to Percy. Piper rubs at her temples. Lou Ellen gestures mid-sentence toward Kayla. The world continues as if nothing’s changed—unchanged, unaware—but it’s distant now, muffled. Like he’s been dropped beneath the surface of something only Aphrodite controls.

“What did you do?” he asks, voice low.

She doesn’t look at him. Her eyes stay fixed on Will.

“Privacy,” she says. “You wouldn’t want your friends to hear what comes next.”

His throat tightens. “I haven’t told anyone.”

“I know.”

“About the lie—”

“I know,” she says again, this time with a smile. Not cruel. Not soft. Just... amused. Her eyes shift before he can place their color—green, then blue, then something else entirely. Her hair curls, straightens, darkens, lightens. She is too much to track. A mirage wearing the suggestion of form.

“Then why are you still—”

“Because I love a good story,” she replies, finally meeting his gaze. “Especially the slow-burn ones. The ones with denial, miscommunication, and devastating timing.”

Her gaze drifts between Will and Nico, slow and deliberate, like she’s tasting the tension in the air. Her features flicker again—sea-glass, then cobalt, a freckle at the corner of her mouth that vanishes as soon as he sees it. The beauty never changes. Only the shape it takes.

“There’s something growing here,” she says, voice low. “I wouldn’t interfere. Not directly. But I like to watch. To see what becomes of it.”

Her tone is soft, but underneath it thrums the pulse of temple prayers and ruined weddings. Nico flinches. He doesn’t know if she’s talking about fate or feelings—or if, to her, there’s ever been a difference.

“You’re not going to tell anyone?” he asks.

She leans in. Her perfume shifts with the movement—brine on wind, orange blossom, sun-warmed skin. It hits him like a memory: the sea after battle, salt drying on his lips. Then warmth, brief and golden, like Will’s laugh in the morning.

“Why would I ruin the show?”

He forgets to breathe.

“You’ve lit a fire,” she murmurs, lips nearly brushing his ear. “Even if you meant it as smoke.”

Then, softer—almost a caress:
“Let’s see if you can keep it from burning you.”

The enchantment holds, fragile and gleaming. Nico wonders what would happen if he screamed. Whether it would shatter or echo forever.

“How?” Nico whispers. “I saved his soul, but his body’s still dying. Even Chiron doesn’t know how to fix it.”

Aphrodite pulls back, and something in her changes again—subtle, shifting. And then, she tells him.

Not directly. Not like a healer. But in the language of myth and meaning—of rituals older than Olympus. Wolfsbane drawn only by blood freely given. Crocus that blooms when grief is named aloud. Bark peeled from trees that died upright, roots rising only for those who kneel without pride.

Not a cure. A path. Not instructions. A trial.

“Care for him,” she says, “as he once cared for you. Quietly. Steadily. Not for proof. Not for praise. But because you choose to stay.”

She reaches out, her fingers grazing his jaw—light as breath, cool as memory.

“If you do it for show,” she says, “nothing will grow. The crocus will stay closed. The bark will splinter. The roots will turn to rot. It has to be tended. It has to be real.”

Nico doesn’t move. Barely breathes. But he understands her. She’s not just speaking in metaphor—she’s warning him.

Every step he takes from here, every ingredient he gathers, every offering he makes… it must be laced with intention. Not obligation. Not desperation. Love. That old, dangerous magic. The kind that creates as easily as it destroys.

He doesn’t know if he can do that for Will.

He doesn’t even know if he wants to.

But he thinks of Hazel—bright-eyed and unshaken, all sun through ash. Of Bianca—whose absence shaped him more than her presence ever did. Of Jason, steady and relentless. Of Piper and Percy and Annabeth, who stood beside him when the sky cracked open. Who are still standing now.

Maybe he can do it for them.

Maybe, if he tries hard enough, he can unearth some old, stubborn tenderness for Percy—long buried but not entirely rotted. Maybe that will be enough.

Because he has no love for Will Solace.

“It doesn’t matter,” she adds, softer now, “if the meaning began as a lie. What matters is what you grow it into.”

And Nico, for the first time in hours, dares to hope that he might be capable of planting something that won’t die.

She hugs him—unexpected, warm, and devastating. Her arms fold around him like a ribbon pulled tight, and her scent envelops him again: sun-warmed figs, ocean spray, and grief-wet roses. It strikes like a memory that doesn’t belong to him but aches all the same. Familiar, intimate, unbearable.

When her lips brush his temple, her voice is soft steel wrapped in velvet.

“You better pull this off, darling,” she murmurs. “Because the next time Zeus calls judgment, not even I will be able to stop him.”

She doesn’t let go. Her hand settles lightly against the back of his neck, her breath cold now beneath all that warmth. Her voice dips lower, edged and dangerous.

“You’ve done more than bend a rule, Nico. You’ve cracked a foundation.”

He goes still, heart thudding once—loud, then quiet.

“You’ve felt it,” she continues. “The way the room shifted. The thrones turned. That silence after the vote? That wasn’t peace. It was pressure. It was fault lines holding still just long enough to count the seconds before they break.”

Her fingers tighten, just slightly. She doesn’t sound angry. She sounds like someone who’s watched empires fall and still found the poetry in the ashes.

“Zeus doesn’t just care that you broke the law,” she says. “He cares that you broke the illusion. That Olympus is whole. That the gods speak with one voice. He’s been clinging to that fantasy since the war with Gaea ended.”

She leans back just far enough to meet his eyes. They shimmer, shifting like sea-glass under a storm: cobalt, black-edged, then that aching green he’s never quite been able to name.

“You’d think victory would bring us closer,” she says. “But it’s done the opposite. We’re more divided than ever. Apollo is gone. No one says it out loud, but some of us blame Zeus for that. For what he allowed. For what he demanded.”

Nico’s breath catches.

“A god disappeared,” she says, “and Olympus kept moving like he never mattered. Zeus calls it balance. But some of us call it rot.”

Her gaze sharpens, her beauty tilting toward something terrible—like a glass rose with thorns blooming inward.

“And now you’ve made them look at it. You reminded them that loyalty can shift. That power doesn’t always flow toward the center. You gave them a story. A love too wild to be controlled.”

Her hand lifts to his cheek, gentle but deliberate.

“And worse, you made them choose sides.”

Nico doesn’t answer. He can’t. The words bloom in his chest like something poisonous and radiant.

Aphrodite smiles—slow, knowing. “That scares him more than anything.”

Then she steps away, and the spell breaks like glass.

Sound returns in fragments: Jason laughing tiredly at something Percy mutters, Piper grumbling about the storm, the sharp hiss of Mr. D cracking open another can of soda. The world moves on, unaware of what just passed between them. No one turns. No one heard. But her words linger, clinging to Nico like salt in a wound—like prophecy whispered in the silence between heartbeats.

He stands alone in the middle of it all, wrapped in a lie spun too tightly to escape. A lie that’s already grown teeth. Because now it isn’t just something he said to survive.

Now it’s the story he has to prove to Olympus—because if the illusion falters, the gods won’t give him another chance to explain.

They granted him time, not mercy. Delay, not pardon. And Nico knows what waits on the other side of that delay. He remembers it. He’s lived it. The smell of scorched earth. The sound of thunder cracking a city in half. The way his mother screamed just before lightning turned her into ash. That’s what happens when you challenge Zeus and lose.

Only this time, it won’t just be him. If he fails—if this fiction unravels—the punishment will spread. To his friends. To Hazel. To anyone who stood beside him when Olympus began to divide.

Because that’s the part no one wants to say out loud: the gods are no longer united. The vote was not a judgment. It was a fracture. And Nico’s lie is now the wedge driven straight into the heart of divine power. If he can’t hold it together—if he can’t make them believe in a love he barely understands—then Olympus will break something else instead.

He swallows hard, not just from fear—but from the silence that follows it. The hollow ache between heartbeats where something like hope could live, if he were someone else.

But Nico knows better.

The lie can’t become truth. Not for someone like him. Not for the boy with shadows stitched into his chest where sunlight should go. Not for the son of Hades, who still dreams of drowning, who was built for silence, not for being seen. Not for the boy who has always been too much and never enough—all sharp edges, all wrong want.

The story will unravel. Not when Olympus decides. Not when the gods deliver judgment. But the moment Will opens his eyes.

Because Nico won’t be able to meet that gaze without flinching. Won’t be able to take his hand and pretend he belongs there. The illusion will split along its seams. He can already feel it fraying—this threadbare thing he spun out of desperation and defiance.

He’s not Aphrodite’s tragic hero. He’s not anyone’s. He’s just a boy who doesn’t know how to be wanted without vanishing in the process.

And when Will sees him—really sees him—

it will all fall apart.

Because no god, no myth, no miracle could ever make someone like Will Solace love someone like Nico di Angelo.

Chapter Text

Will

It always begins with screaming.

Not his own—never his own—but it splits the air behind his eyes like lightning through glass, too bright, too jagged, too fast to dodge. Somewhere, someone is dying again. Somewhere, the sun is setting far too fast, dragging the light down like a body into the sea.

He runs.

The ground rearranges itself beneath him, a battlefield that warps like a record stuck on repeat—ash thick in the air, bronze biting into his palms, panic already blooming in his throat before the fight has even begun. The dream never changes. Lee is ahead of him, always just ahead, always unreachable, backlit like a soldier in myth, shoulders squared as if he could hold up the sky itself with his spine alone. Will shouts his name. He always does. And Lee—gods, Lee—always turns. Smiles like he’s invincible. Says something reckless, something kind. “I’ve got this.”

Then the giant’s club falls.

And the sound it makes is a desecration. A splatter, a snap, a silence that echoes louder than the blow itself. Skull against stone. Gold against bone. A finality so brutal it bruises the air. Will screams. His voice breaks. His knees give. But it doesn’t matter. He’s too late. He is always too late.

The world resets.

Now it’s Manhattan.

Smoke coils from the bridge in long, oil-dark ribbons, and the sky above is choked with war. Michael’s voice cuts through it all, barking orders with that impossible calm he always wore like a dare. Will pushes forward through rubble and mist, chest splitting, eyes burning. He sees Michael at the edge of the arch, grinning like he’s already won, like he already sees what’s coming, like he’s trying to hold his laughter and his tears.

Then the ground gives way.

The bridge groans like a dying god. The air drops. And Michael falls with it.

He doesn’t scream.

He smiles.

And that’s somehow worse.

Again.

Again.

Again.

Will begs. He shouts louder, runs faster, throws light like knives, tears his voice ragged on ancient healing words, reaching for their hands, their armor, their blood—but nothing changes. He’s rewound the moment a thousand times, altered angles, counted steps, whispered prayers with burning lips. It doesn’t matter. The outcome remains etched in stone. Death is always faster.

He watches Lee fall until there’s nothing left but blood and ash and the bitter reek of divine silence. He watches Michael vanish beneath the weight of the city, swallowed by rubble and legacy. And each time, Will is left behind—aching, gasping, hands shaking with light that never arrives in time.

And worse—he starts to wonder if he ever could’ve saved them. If the light in his palms was only ever illusion. If he was just the aftermath, not the antidote. The mourner. The one who stays.

He tries to scream the future into submission. Tries to raise the dead by force of desperation alone. But time is cruel. And memory—worse.

It loops.

And he watches them die again.

And again.

And again.

Until even the color of their blood feels wrong in his memory—too bright, too thick, too full of blame.

Until their last words change, flicker like a damaged reel—until Lee says “you weren’t fast enough” and Michael adds “you could’ve saved me.”

Until Will starts to believe them.

He drops to his knees on the battlefield, gasping in air that tastes like iron and guilt, hands pressed into the churned-up ground as if he could rewrite it by touch. His fingers claw at the dirt, searching for something to anchor him, to prove he isn’t the one responsible—but all he finds is the echo of their absence. A helmet half-crushed. A smear of red. A scrap of sun-bleached cloth.

He tries to heal the dead.

Over and over and over.

But all that ever ends up in his hands is ruin.

And still, the dream resets.

Suddenly, the world shifts.

No longer the battlefield—but something worse. The infirmary. Endless corridors pulsing with golden light too bright to be kind, humming with the twin stench of antiseptic and scorched flesh. It smells like hope gone sour. Like healing turned hollow. The beds are full. They’re always full. The screams echo down the halls, overlapping, indistinct—until they blur into the sound of wind through a graveyard.

Will’s hands are already slick with blood. Again. Always.

He doesn’t know the name of the camper on the table. Doesn’t ask. There’s no room left in him for names. Just numbers. Movements. The muscle memory of survival. His fingers work on their own now—pressing gauze into open wounds, whispering incantations until his voice gives out, forcing fractured ribs back into alignment with the crack of divine light. There’s a rhythm to it, a ritual. He clings to it like a drowning man to driftwood.

Left to right. In threes. Always in threes.

One, two, three. Tie off. One, two, three. Tie off.

It steadies him. Not calms —never that—but steadies, the way a blade does before it slips.

He doesn’t look up. Can’t.

Not at the body in bed four.

Lee.

Not at the empty cot in the back, the one the others avoid like it’s cursed.

Michael.

His chest tightens, but his hands don’t stop. They can’t. If he stops, everything unravels. If he misses a stitch, if the knot slips, if the gauze isn’t folded just right, then the magic breaks and the bleeding never ends.

And still—it never ends.

He blinks, and suddenly the floor is slick. Red. Reflective. The blood has pooled under his boots, creeping outward like it knows his name. He lifts his hand—another wound, another body—but this one won’t close. The light flickers. The skin splits. The boy on the table isn’t breathing. He doesn’t have a face anymore. Just hollows where his eyes used to be, as if the world erased his expression for daring to die too young.

Will’s hands start to shake. He clenches them into fists. He loosens them. He shakes them out. He washes them—once, twice, six times, until the skin is raw and stinging and still, still he swears he can feel the blood there. Beneath his nails. In his fingerprints. Behind his teeth.

Time buckles.

Someone is calling his name, but it sounds distant. Muffled. Like it's coming from beneath the surface of a lake he’s drowning in. His ears ring with the scream of dying, the moment before death, the hush that lives between the heartbeat and the silence.

He stumbles forward. Another cot. Blonde hair. Curly. Pale.

Familiar.

No.

No—not him. Not now. Not again.

He reaches, panicked, already pleading, already breaking—but the body shifts before his hand makes contact, shifts into Lee, caved-in and broken and still smiling the way the dead sometimes do, like they don’t know how to stop.

Will gasps. Stumbles back. The light above him flickers.

The infirmary collapses. Becomes battlefield. Becomes flood. Becomes fire. The memories flicker like film melting in its reel.

He’s thirteen, reaching out for Michael’s arm as the sky rains shrapnel. Twelve, watching Lee’s spine snap like a matchstick beneath a giant’s club. Fourteen, pressing into someone’s chest again and again and again, mouthing prayers to Apollo even as he feels the last breath sputter out under his palms.

Always his knees. Always blood. Always the same echo from above.
No answer. No warmth. Only silence.

He reaches for healing—for the light in his bones, the god in his blood—and finds nothing. No power. No pain. Just absence. Just the cold static of a radio with no signal.

Something in him is coming apart. Not all at once, but thread by thread. Like a stitch unraveling. Like a breath held too long.

But his hands keep moving.

Count. Press. Scrub. Suture. Count again.

Because if he stops—if he falters—if he loses the rhythm, even once—

They’ll all die.

And this time, it will be his fault.

The world fractures.

He’s somewhere else.
Not his memory.
Wrong.

The air is thick—too thick. Not smoke, not fog, but something older, heavier. Grief condensed into atmosphere. It clings to his skin, clogs his throat, sinks into his lungs like dust made from bone.

He’s underground. Stone walls twist in impossible directions, spiraling inward like a maze designed to be survived, not escaped. The Labyrinth—just like Annabeth described it. Only worse. It pulses underfoot like it has a heartbeat, alive and watching. The floor tilts with each breath. Doors vanish. Corridors twist behind him like they’re laughing.

Something is breathing with him. Not from lungs. From the walls.

And then—he sees the boy.

Small. Gaunt. Eyes like bruises pressed into marble.

Will reaches for him, instinctive, desperate—but the boy flinches, slips backward into shadow, and reappears twenty feet away without a sound. He’s not alone. Ghosts cling to him like fog, their mouths moving in silent liturgies, whispering in languages Will doesn’t know but still somehow understands: pain, loss, exile.

The boy is calling a name. Not Will’s. A girl’s.

Bianca.

The word is a wound. It echoes. And the walls breathe it in.

Then—he’s somewhere colder. Not winter-cold, not frostbitten or storm-swept, but something deeper, more final. The kind of cold that comes from being sealed away, from metal and magic pressing against skin until skin forgets it was ever meant to feel warmth.

The bronze jar folds him in like a secret, his body forced into a shape too small to be human. Knees to chest, spine to iron. Each breath is a battle. The air is stale, bitter, wrong—as if it’s already been breathed too many times. As if it’s remembering other lungs. Other screams. There’s not enough of it. There’s not enough of anything.

He tries to move, to stretch even a single finger, but the jar presses in from all sides. It doesn’t just confine—it consumes. The metal hums with old magic and older grief, pulsing like a heartbeat too far gone. He opens his mouth to scream, but the sound dies before it can form. His throat burns raw with the effort, with the silence that follows, as though the space itself has devoured language.

There is no sky. No ceiling. No light. Just a void made of brass and death and memory. Just the weight of himself, compacted and dissolving.

Time ceases to pass. Or maybe it races. He can’t tell. He’s too thirsty. Too hungry. His tongue has turned to paper. His lips are split, his head light and aching with the absence of everything a body needs to survive. He can feel it happening—his thoughts losing edges, his memories slipping from their moorings. He clutches at them, but they bleed through his fingers like smoke.

And somewhere—tucked between rib and ache, between the starvation and the static—there is a taste.

Pomegranate.

It arrives without warning, sweet and dark and wet in his mouth, though he doesn’t remember eating anything. The seeds burst like prayers. Or curses. Juice as red as blood, as binding as spellwork. He doesn’t know why he tastes it, doesn’t know why the thought of pomegranate makes his chest seize and his stomach turn, but the flavor anchors something inside him—something ancient, something exhausted. Something that has survived too long on too little.

One seed. Then another.
For every day. For every piece of himself Nico had to swallow just to keep going.

Will can feel the hunger now—not just of the body, but of the soul. The kind that empties you from the inside out and tells you it’s your fault for being hollow. The kind that tells you misery is your inheritance. That it’s the only thing you’ve ever really belonged to.

And still, the jar holds him. Smothers him. Drowns him in its silence. He can’t breathe. He can’t scream. He can’t remember his name.

He’s dying. No. Worse. He’s unraveling.

And somewhere, just beyond the curve of the metal, he swears he hears a voice whispering through the cracks in the world: “You are perfect like this.”

Will thrashes, but there’s no space to move.

No way out.

No end but forgetting.

Then—

A different voice.
Not Will’s. Not the shadows’.

Older. Mocking. Splintered with the weight of centuries.

“Your grief makes you weak,” it hisses.

The air tightens. The walls shudder.

And from the darkness, he steps forward—tattered robes dragging over stone, skin like parchment peeling from a tomb. Regal in bearing. Rotting in truth. The crown of Crete sits skewed on his skull, bone gleaming through thin, graying skin. His eyes burn with something older than cruelty. A hunger for power. A need to be obeyed.

Minos.

Will doesn’t know the name, but his body knows the threat. His breath stumbles. The shadows recoil. The dream—the memory—tightens its grip.

And there, at the center, stands Nico.

Younger again. Smaller. Paler. A boy made of grief and silence, wrapped in shadows that never asked for permission. He doesn’t look at Minos. Not yet. But Will sees it—the stillness, the resignation, the familiar weight of shame curling in his shoulders.

“You’ve lost so much,” Minos croons, circling Nico like a vulture around a dying thing. “Bianca. Your home. Your place among the living.”

He leans in closer, voice coiling around Nico’s spine like a leash.

“You don’t belong to them. They don’t want you. But I do. I can teach you. I can make them regret everything.”

Will’s stomach turns. The air is thick with rot and persuasion.

He knows this story. He knows this kind of predator.

“Let it go,” Will pleads, stepping forward, reaching across the boundary of dream and memory. “Don’t listen to him. He’s using you.”

But Nico doesn’t move.

Or maybe he can’t.

His hands are clenched. His jaw is locked. His eyes flicker—not toward Minos, but toward the dark behind him. Toward the Labyrinth that swallowed him whole. Toward the voice that once promised he could bring Bianca back.

Will sees it now—sees the lie etched into the seams of Nico’s soul. Sees how Minos had whispered into every crack and fracture, filling them with revenge and resurrection and ruin.

“I know how it feels,” Minos says, almost tender now. “To be forgotten. To be buried. To be left to rot in your own grief. But you—” he touches Nico’s shoulder with a hand that shouldn’t hold warmth, “—you don’t have to rot alone.”

Nico flinches, but he doesn’t pull away.

Will lunges forward, heart hammering, every instinct screaming—but the memory won’t let him intervene. It slides cold around his limbs, paralyzing him with the weight of what already happened . His voice turns brittle in his throat.

“Nico—he doesn’t care about you. He only wants to use you—”

But the shadows swallow his words.

And Nico, trembling, furious, silent, lifts his eyes at last.

“I’ll do it,” the boy whispers. “Just tell me how.”

And the ground breaks open beneath them.

The world shatters.

Now it’s fire. Now it’s ash. Now it’s void.

Tartarus waits below—because that’s where revenge leads. Because that’s where the dead go when they trust the wrong king.

Will’s never been here, but he knows hell when he sees it. The sky bleeds in colors no mortal tongue was meant to describe—reds too old for blood, too deep for war, ancient hues scraped from the marrow of dying gods. There is no sun above him, only the memory of one, some celestial scream etched into the clouds. The air hangs thick with rot and ozone, buzzing with a taste like scorched bone and copper. Every step cracks the ground like glass beneath his feet, the earth splintering with the sound of something sacred breaking. The terrain moves in contradictions—mountains shaped like ribs, valleys carved like wounds, rivers that don’t flow but breathe. The stars here are not stars. They are eyes. They are watching him.

He stumbles forward, pulled by something older than thought, and that’s when he sees him.

Nico.

Collapsed in the center of a cratered plain, his knees dug into the stone, shoulders trembling under a weight no body should have to bear. Around him, the shadows churn—a vortex of smoke and memory and things with teeth, their voices slithering through the air in languages long dead. Will can’t hear what they’re saying, but he knows. It’s all the things Nico never said aloud. The fears he locked behind his ribs. The guilt he wears like armor. They cling to him like lovers, curl around his wrists, whisper into his mouth until his jaw clenches. His hands are over his ears. His eyes are shut so tightly they flicker. His mouth moves in silence.

Make it stop.

Will tries to run, but the air thickens around him, dragging at his limbs like grief made physical. Tartarus doesn’t want him here. The dream doesn’t want him here. This is not a place for healing.

And then she emerges.

He doesn’t know her name, not at first, but his soul recoils the moment she steps from the smoke. She doesn’t walk so much as seep forward, slipping from the folds of the dark like rot blooming in damp stone. Her face is a mask of decay—no eyes, only pits of wine-colored shadow; no mouth, only a tear in the veil of her skin that breathes smoke and laughter and the scent of mildew and blood. Still, Will knows her, in the way grief knows breath, in the way despair curls under fingernails when the world has stopped trying to be kind.

Akhlys.

Goddess of misery. Patron of pain. Mother of that thin, aching edge of despair that lives behind every smile.

She kneels before Nico as if he’s something divine. Her voice, when it comes, is a rasp made of bone and silk. “You,” she whispers, and it’s almost gentle. “You are perfect.”

Nico doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t speak. Just breathes in short, ragged gasps, his frame shuddering like he’s trying not to shatter completely. Tartarus shifts around him, pulsing in time with his heartbeat, like the pit itself is tuned to his agony.

“So much sorrow,” Akhlys croons, dragging a translucent fingertip along his jaw, her touch leaving trails of shadow. “So much death on such small shoulders. There’s nothing left to break. You’ve done it already.”

Will wants to scream. To shove her back, to throw himself in front of Nico’s shaking body, to burn the shadows off his skin with light—but he can’t move. Something in the air grips him, binds him in place like a held breath. His hands won’t lift. His voice won’t rise.

“Let me show you,” she says, and then the world begins to bleed.

The memories pour out of her like smoke, like tar, like oil slicking across fire. They wrap around Nico and drag him under—Will watches Nico fall apart again. Watches him scream and scream and scream until there’s no sound, only the glint of teeth and the copper sting of blood, and the ache of being known by no one. The shadows curl inside his mouth and stitch him shut.

Akhlys watches, weeping with joy. “So beautiful,” she murmurs. “You belong to this. You could stay here forever. There’s nothing for you up there but more breakage.”

Will strains against the air, his chest on fire, breath caught like glass in his throat. “No,” he rasps, barely able to hear himself. “He doesn’t belong to you. He left. He got out.”

But his voice scatters like ash. Useless. Forgotten.

And in the distance, something laughs.

Low and long and ancient.

Not cruel, but certain.

Because even here—even in the deepest pit of the world—some part of this place remembers Nico. Remembers the boy who survived. The boy who crawled free. The boy who did not stay.

And still—Tartarus wants him back.

Will’s knees buckle beneath him. He can’t bear it. Can’t stand to watch another piece of Nico carved open by gods who only know how to take. But even as he falls, something inside him rises. Something slow, and furious, and bright. He understands now.

Nico didn’t survive Tartarus.

He endured it.

And then—

the dream fractures again, not with a shatter but a shimmer, edges curling inward like heat-blistered paper, the world peeling back to reveal something brighter. Too bright.

He’s there.

A boy, younger than before—small, sharply dressed in a way that feels like someone else’s idea of what children should look like. Polished black shoes, a stiff collar, a navy tie knotted too tight against his throat. His hair is slicked back with so much pomade it barely moves when he turns his head, but his eyes—wide, dark, full of something ancient and too-large for a ten-year-old—are restless. Always searching. Always afraid of being left.

He clutches a hand. Bianca’s.

She smiles down at him, calm and steady and soft in the way only older sisters can be, and for the briefest moment, there’s stillness. A kind of hush. That fragile stillness right before a storm—the kind where you can hear your own breath and believe, just for a second, that everything might be okay.

Then the lights hit.

A swell of color—blinding, pulsing, pink and gold and unnatural. The air bursts into sound.

Slot machines scream with spinning reels. Laughter bubbles from a dozen unseen mouths. A bell rings in the distance, loud as a war cry. A man in a gold tuxedo glides past on a hoverboard, holding a tray of glittering drinks shaped like giraffes and dolphins and something vaguely amphibian. Gold coins spill across polished marble. A band plays big-band jazz from nowhere, everywhere. Music loops endlessly, jarringly cheerful, like a children’s toy playing itself to death.

The Lotus Hotel and Casino.

Will doesn’t know how he recognizes it—only that he does. Down to the scent.

Not quite flowers. Something too sweet. Too chemical. Like petals doused in perfume, drowning in honey, layered over something old and rotting beneath. It’s not real joy. It’s a counterfeit, and it clings to the back of his throat like sugar and ash.

Bianca and Nico blink into the lights, disoriented. One moment of hesitation. One breath.

Then hands descend—warm, manicured, perfumed—ushering them inside. A lotus blossom is pressed into Bianca’s palm. Another tucked behind Nico’s ear, nestled between perfect curls. Their eyes glaze just slightly. Their shoulders loosen. The spell begins like a hum behind glass.

Time stretches.

Slows. Then skips. Then spins.

They are laughing now, giddy with something that isn’t quite joy. Their voices echo off mirrored walls. They dance in a ballroom that never ends, eat food that tastes like nostalgia, watch endless television on screens bigger than dreams. Will sees the days pass. Then weeks. Then longer. Seasons blur. Calendars mean nothing here.

They are too happy. Blissful in a way that feels like being erased.

Nico’s fingers slip from Bianca’s. Not carelessly. Not intentionally. But they do.

And then the cracks appear.

First a flicker in his eyes. A twitch in his mouth. The vague sense that something is wrong—something doesn’t fit. He stares at the television too long. Flinches at the sound of a date. One day, he tugs at Bianca’s sleeve, urgent now, his voice quieter than the music flooding the lobby.

“This isn’t right,” Nico whispers, his voice barely cutting through the casino’s endless cheer. “We were going somewhere. There was… a war. Our mother—”

The words crumble in his mouth like brittle parchment, turning to dust on his tongue. He tries to hold onto the memory, but it slips through his mind like water through cracked hands—formless, fading.

Bianca blinks, her brow creased with faint confusion. “Were we?”

Will feels the shift like a fault line cracking open. That blankness. That flicker of forgetting. The spell burrowing deeper.

Nico panics. His fingers tighten around her sleeve, tugging with quiet desperation. “We have to go. Something’s wrong. We don’t belong here—”

But the doors curve away from them. The hallways stretch and fold back in on themselves. The clocks on the walls don’t tick. The mirrors reflect strangers. The music never stops. Time is no longer linear—it is soft and looped and devouring.

Everyone is smiling.

And Will watches, powerless, as Nico begins to come apart—not loudly, not visibly, but in the most devastating way: from the inside out. His body stays still. His face doesn’t contort. But something behind his eyes starts to tremble. Not fear of what he’s forgotten—fear that he’s forgetting how to remember at all.

Bianca, sensing something, finally sees through the cracks. The smile she’s worn too long breaks. She takes Nico’s hand with sudden urgency.

They run.

Down corridors strung with crystal lights and laughter. Past the man in the gold tuxedo who hovers beside a tray of drinks shaped like swans. Past the staff with eyes too bright and hands too soft. Past a girl who tries to press a lotus flower behind Nico’s ear again, as if nothing is wrong.

The doors swing open like jaws.

And the world outside slams into them.

Light stings their eyes. The sun bears down like a weight. The air tastes different—fouler, sharper. The streets hiss with cars Nico doesn’t recognize, machines that hum instead of rattle, advertisements pulsing in neon for devices that didn’t exist when they first stepped inside.

Everything is wrong. Everything is new. The city has changed.

And they don’t know how long they’ve been gone.

“How long were we in there?” Nico asks, the question thin and shaking.

Bianca doesn’t answer.

Because there’s no answer to give.

Their mother is already dead. The life they once knew has eroded into myth. The years have slipped past them, and the world has aged without their permission.

They are strangers now—two children dragged into the wrong decade, standing bewildered on a sidewalk that smells like ghosts and gasoline, their hearts pounding out of sync with history.

Then—heels on pavement. A sharp, deliberate sound.

A woman approaches.

She’s tall, composed, dressed in a charcoal suit too crisp to wrinkle. Sunglasses hide her eyes. Her smile is smooth, practiced, wrong in a way Will can’t name. In one hand she carries a briefcase, the other outstretched as if in welcome.

Will knows her, even if Nico doesn’t.

Alecto. The Fury.

Disguised as a lawyer. Mrs. Dodds, she says, sent to retrieve them. There’s a school, she explains. Somewhere safe, somewhere quiet, somewhere temporary. Just until things are settled.

Will watches her lay a gentle hand on Bianca’s shoulder. Watches the way Nico flinches, instinct curling his spine like a struck match.

But they follow her.

Because there is no one else to follow.

And the worst part—the part that truly claws under Will’s ribs—isn’t that they leave with a monster in disguise.

It’s that no one stops them.

No one even notices they’ve returned.

The world continues on, untouched and unaware, as two forgotten children are led away into another strange place, another waiting danger, another door that might never open again.

Bianca squeezes Nico’s hand. Her grip is still strong. Still here.

But not for long.

And Nico, quiet and pale beneath the too-bright sun, is already receding. Not physically. Not yet. But spiritually, emotionally, invisibly. The boy standing there with his sister’s hand in his and a century behind his eyes is already slipping.

He is already halfway gone.

There’s a flash—

And the dream curls inward, burning at the edges like old film catching fire. The world reforms not from thought, but from memory. Not Will’s memory, but it wraps around him anyway—heavy, electric, sacred. The kind of grief that leaves fingerprints on the soul.

The hotel is elegant but worn, with marble floors and golden sconces, a lobby that smells faintly of perfume and time. It’s the 1940s, though the dream doesn’t say so aloud. It hums in the silk of the furniture, the sweep of Maria di Angelo’s dress as she sits, composed and luminous, on a velvet sofa.

She’s in black. Veil, gloves, everything—but there’s light in her still. Pride in her posture. A smile as she watches her children play. Nico and Bianca—so young it hurts—are chasing each other around the columns, laughter bouncing off the high ceiling like prayer. Nico clutches a Mythomagic card in one hand, rattling off facts to no one, demanding answers from the air. He looks like he believes he’s invincible.

Hades is seated beside Maria, speaking low and fast, his voice strained, his hands restless. He’s not the terrifying figure from myths—he’s a man afraid of losing everything. Pleading.

Will can’t hear every word, but he doesn’t need to. The feeling is enough. Come to the Underworld. Let me protect you. The prophecy—the danger—Zeus will find them.

But Maria just smiles. Calm. Fierce. She touches his face, kisses him softly, and says she’s going to get her purse. Will watches her walk upstairs with grace and finality, like a promise she doesn’t know she won’t keep.

Then the air changes.

Pressure.

Stillness.

The children freeze mid-laugh. Hades rises, dread darkening his face.

“No,” he says—quietly, then louder. “No—”

But it’s already too late.

The ceiling detonates.

Lightning—not metaphor, not fury—divine retribution—tears through the room in a crackling white arc. Will feels it split the earth, hears the scream of stone, of time, of fate. The building is reduced to flame and ruin in an instant.

But for one breath, he sees her—Maria, turning back at the top of the stairs. Reaching, not for safety, but for her children.

Then she’s gone.

Hades erupts through the smoke a heartbeat too late. He throws himself into the wreckage, shields the children, catches them up in his arms. His cloak is torn. His hair singed. His expression—Will will never forget it. A god, stripped bare.

He cradles Maria’s broken body, screaming her name into the ruins.

And then the Fury appears.

Alecto, all wings and fangs and silence.

“You cannot bring her back,” she says, and Will feels the words like icewater down his spine. “You of all immortals must respect the laws of death.”

Hades does not argue. His grief hardens into something colder. He wipes his face with a shaking hand, then gathers Nico and Bianca close.

He tells Alecto to take them.

Wash their memories.

Send them where time stands still.

Hide them.

And Will sees it—sees the Lethe rise like mist. Hades presses two fingers to Nico’s temple. A shimmer, a glow. Nico flinches. Then stills. His face softens into something blank, unaware. But the grief doesn’t leave. Will can feel it trembling beneath the skin.

The memory is gone.

The wound is not.

And that’s the part that breaks Will—because he knows that kind of forgetting. Not true. Not complete. The kind that buries itself deep and waits to rot you from the inside out.

When Will turns, Nico is standing beside him—older, silent, his expression carved in ice. He’s watching the dream unfold like he’s outside his own skin.

Will wants to speak. To reach out. To say something.

But there are no words.

Because the hotel is ash.

Maria is gone.

And Nico—who should’ve been a child a little longer, who should’ve known lullabies and stories and the soft safety of a mother’s hands—was left with silence.

With grief.

With a father who came too late.

And gods who never cared.

And Will understands, more than ever, this—this loss—was always the first move. Every play after was Nico trying not to lose again.

Then, impossibly, something blooms at Will’s feet.

A crocus.

Small. Pale violet. Fragile in the ash.

Will stares. Reaches. His hands tremble, fingers twitching toward the stem like it might hold an answer, or a promise, or maybe just proof that something good can survive here.

But then the shadows twist again—dragging him backward, inward, somewhere colder.

He is no longer in Nico’s nightmare.

He’s back in his own.

The battlefield unfolds beneath him like a wound that won’t close. The infirmary breathes around him, sterile and screaming. The bridge cracks open with memory. It’s all the same place now—war dressed in different clothes.

His brothers always die.

Lee, grinning too wide beneath an open sky, his head snapping sideways like a vase dropped from too high. Michael, shouting across the bridge with false confidence, disappearing beneath concrete and divine silence. Then a camper in the infirmary—twelve, maybe thirteen—too small for the cot, too pale to save. Will’s voice rips through the smoke: Clear! Clear! But the chest doesn’t rise. The soul doesn’t stay.

He’s reliving them all at once.

Time collapses.

Every face he’s ever lost overlaps like transparencies—Lee’s crooked smile bleeding into Michael’s last breath, one child’s scream tangled in another’s stillness. The names blur, the voices dissolve. Every death echoes inside him, not as memory, but as static—unbearable and unceasing. A constant, aching frequency of loss.

Blood on his hands. Always his hands.

So much of it that he forgets whose it was first. So much red that it stains everything—his dreams, his ribs, his voice. The smell of it follows him like a shadow, metallic and sharp. The feel of it never leaves. It clings beneath his fingernails. It hums in his pulse. It sinks into the lines of his palms, older than fate.

One moment, it’s Lee’s temple—caved in and steaming, a flash of gold swallowed by silence. The next, it’s Michael’s body vanishing mid-laugh as the bridge gives out beneath him, the air fracturing with a sound like bone splitting under divine weight.

Then it’s another child. A name he didn’t learn. A face he won’t remember. Just a cot, a wound, a flatline. Three crashing at once. Only two hands. And he was too slow.

He does the math in his head like it’ll save him. Like numbers might offer salvation where prayers failed.

Five compressions per second.

Four seconds without oxygen.

Three campers crashing.

Two hands that won’t stop shaking.

One boy he couldn’t save.

And still—his hands keep moving.

Because they have to. Because if he lets them still, even for a second—if he lets the grief settle, if he lets the panic crack him open, if he lets the silence in—then someone else will die.

The tether will fray. The flower will burn. The shadows will creep forward again, slow and sure and patient.

And worse—far worse than any nightmare—

Kayla.

Austin.

He sees them, too. In the corners of his vision. In the places between breaths. Their faces pale. Blood seeping through uniforms. Their hands limp in his. Their names next on the chart. Their voices gone.

It’s not real. Not yet. But it could be. And that’s enough.

He imagines Kayla’s hand slipping from his, her laugh fading into the quiet of the infirmary. Imagines Austin’s voice gone still, his warmth turned cold. His siblings—the only ones left—dying because he was too slow, too tired, too late.

The image guts him.

He grips it anyway. Clings to it like a blade against the chest. Because fear keeps him awake. Because love demands vigilance. Because the moment he forgets what he stands to lose is the moment he loses it.

So his hands keep moving.

Pressing. Stitching. Scrubbing. Counting.

Because if he stops—even for a blink, a breath, a heartbeat—the world he’s barely holding together will finally come apart.

And as the dreams close in—his trauma and Nico’s folding over one another like twin pages in the same terrible book—Will keeps going.

He has to.

Because now he isn’t just trying to save the world.

He’s trying to save him.

He falls—not a stumble, not a metaphor, but a true plummet. As if the dream itself has dropped out from beneath him, gravity reclaiming him with brutal certainty. There’s no sky to catch him, no bottom to brace against—just endless descent, cold and breathless, like being swallowed by the dark between stars.

Then—impact.

The floor rises to meet him with a force that fractures everything: sound, shape, thought. His vision shreds at the edges. The world reforms crooked and trembling.

He’s somewhere else again. And it’s wrong.

The air is too still. The kind of silence that hums with anticipation, charged like a storm caught between inhale and release. Before him stretches a long, lacquered table, dark as obsidian beneath the illusion of moonlight. At its center sits a shallow bowl of stones—black and gleaming like polished sorrow. White pieces glint in concentric patterns across the surface, laid with precision that feels like a sentence: deliberate, devastating, irreversible.

Black and white. Balance and imbalance. Justice and cost.

And across from it all—Nico.

He’s pale and unreadable, his expression carved into unnatural calm. His fingers move with slow, ritualistic grace, as if each gesture has already been rehearsed. His sleeve is stained. His hair damp—rain, sweat, or something more metaphysical. He looks both impossibly young and terribly ancient, as though time has been eroding him from the inside.

Opposite him sits Nemesis.

She does not move. She doesn’t have to. Her stillness is gravity. The kind of presence that doesn’t announce itself—it simply is. Her eyes gleam like scales in the dark, patient and pitiless, weighing every hesitation, every breath, every sin. Her gaze doesn’t judge; it calculates.

The board pulses faintly beneath them, shifting at the edges. It’s not wood. Not stone. It breathes like skin. Quivers like memory. It’s alive in a way that feels deeply wrong—rearranging itself between moves, rewriting the laws of fairness mid-sentence.

Will’s chest tightens.

“Nico,” he calls, the name raw in his throat.

There’s no response. His words drift across the table like oil on water—shimmering, weightless, instantly dissolved. The dream has no use for language. It’s moved beyond meaning.

“Nico, you can’t—please—” Will tries again, louder this time, each word jagged like broken glass. “You have to stop—”

But Nemesis reaches forward and places a black stone with perfect, clinical finality. A corner trap. Unforgiving.

Nico’s mouth tightens—not in protest, but in recognition. As if he’s seen this play before. As if he knows how it ends.

Will lunges, hands slamming down on the table, but they pass through like smoke. No impact. No sound. His desperation breaks against the surface and vanishes.

Then—a hand on his shoulder. Cool. Dry. Anchoring.

Will spins, breath catching. But it’s not a threat.

It’s a boy in flannel pajama pants and a rumpled t-shirt, hair tousled like he just woke from another dream entirely. His eyes are steady. Ancient, in a quiet way.

Clovis.

Son of Hypnos. Dreamwalker.

He doesn’t smile. Doesn’t blink. Just watches the board with the detached exhaustion of someone who’s seen too many endings.

“There’s no point trying to reach him right now,” Clovis murmurs, voice soft but unshakable.

Will reels, heart pounding. “What is this? Why is he—?”

“It’s balance,” Clovis answers, tilting his head with slow solemnity. “Or the lack of it. He upset something sacred. And Nemesis doesn’t forget.”

Will swallows hard. “They’re playing a game—”

“No,” Clovis says, the word falling like a gavel. “They’re playing you.”

The table ripples. The pattern of the stones rearranges itself again, not chaotically, but with the quiet violence of inevitability. Nico’s hand hovers above the next move. His fingers shake.

Will whispers, “But he saved me.”

Clovis nods, and there’s no triumph in it—only sorrow. “Yes. And now the world wants its due.”

Will’s lungs won’t expand. His chest feels tight, his breath shallow. The dream presses closer, closing in like a coffin lined with mirrors.

Clovis glances at him, voice gentler now. “He doesn’t know you’re watching. And you shouldn’t be. Not yet.”

The board begins to glow—veins of black fire threading through the grain, spreading slow and inevitable. The air thickens. The edges of the dream catch fire like paper curling beneath a match. Somewhere, a ticking begins—not a clock, but something older. A countdown. A reckoning.

Clovis steps back.

“It’s time to wake up, Will.”

Chapter Text

Will

The world doesn’t return all at once.

It bleeds in slowly—like water seeping through a crack in the ceiling, like light filtered through a veil too worn to block out the ache. Sensation comes in fragments, jarring and incomplete. The fabric of reality reshapes itself in pieces, too loud in one moment, too far away in the next.

Sound arrives first.

Thick. Muffled. The kind of underwater murmur that presses in from all sides, heavy and distorted, like the sea is holding its breath and dragging him under with it.

A voice cuts through—sharp and raw, frayed at the edges.

Kayla.

She sounds like she’s been trying not to break for days, and failing. There’s too much strain in her tone, like something cracked beneath the surface a long time ago and never healed.

Another voice follows. Closer. Frantic in its restraint.

Austin.

Panic laced with practiced calm, the kind you wear like a uniform when you don’t get the luxury of falling apart. But Will hears the tremor anyway. The slip beneath the shell.

He wants to answer. Desperately. Wants to whisper I’m here or it’s okay or please stop shouting, it’s too much. Anything. Just a word. But nothing moves.

His body is a locked room. His eyelids, iron doors. His limbs, dead weight.

He can’t even twitch a finger.

All he can feel is pain.

Not clean. Not clinical. Not the kind of pain that’s simple and sharp and explainable.

No, this is different. This is pain with memory. Pain with depth. A wrongness that thrums in his bones like a second pulse, slow and electric and ancient. Every muscle feels soldered in place, every nerve ending humming with static. Something beneath his skin remembers dying.

And then—

Memory hits.

Like a current. Like a blade.

The woods. The scent of ozone and damp earth and something older, something wild. Lou Ellen’s scream slicing through the dark. Cecil’s voice, sharp with fear. Nico, spinning toward him with eyes already wide—already too late.

And then the pain—real, immediate, blooming behind his ribs like something tearing free. The flash of fangs, the heat of blood soaking through his clothes, the crackling blur of magic too old, too wild to name. But it isn’t the bite that undoes him. It’s what follows.

The absence. Not just of sensation, but of self. Of language. Of shape. Of Will.

He remembers slipping, thought by thought, unraveling slowly—not like falling asleep, but like being erased. A fog blooming in his chest, a thick mist winding through his mind until even breath became a foreign thing, until even his name had no weight.

He was disappearing.

And then—something caught him. Not hands, not gods, not anything he could touch or name. But something older. Something true.

Tethered him, not like a chain, but like a promise made in blood. Anchored him somewhere between breath and silence, between life and the abyss. The moment between heartbeats. The space between falling and being caught.

He still feels it.

A pressure beneath the breastbone. Gentle, but unyielding. A presence where absence should have been. Not heavy. Not painful. Just constant. As if someone had pressed a thumb into the center of his chest and left it there—not to hurt, but to remind.

The world begins to settle around him.

Slowly. Reluctantly. Like the earth itself is unsure whether to let him return.

But he’s breathing.

It hurts—gods, it hurts. Every inhale scrapes raw down his throat, like dragging glass through lungs not yet ready to work again. The rhythm is shallow, unsteady, each breath a test of endurance. But it’s real. Painfully, undeniably real.

His eyes crack open—just barely. The world beyond his lashes is dim and wavering, shadows warping against a low ceiling flickering with torchlight. Somewhere to his right, something shifts, a blur of movement edged in warmth and panic.

His throat burns. His ribs ache. His body feels hollowed out and repoured with molten lead—every joint stiff, every muscle bruised with memory. It’s like he’s been scooped clean, then stitched back together with fire.

He blinks once. Then again.

Slowly, his gaze drifts sideways, drawn by instinct rather than thought. It lands on the altar shelf beside the cot.

And stills.

Laurel branches sit there, as they always do—symbols of life, of healing, of Apollo’s favor.

But something’s wrong.

The laurel branches are curled at the edges, their once-vivid green gone sallow and sickly. They look brittle. Starved of light. Dead in that quiet, accusatory way only sacred things can die.

Will’s chest tightens—not from pain, not exactly, but from the sharp, clenching pressure of dread coiling beneath his ribs.

This is wrong. This is late.

How long has he been unconscious?
What day is it?
What’s the state of the infirmary—are the cabinets still organized? Have the potions expired? Who’s monitoring patient rotations? Are the salves labeled correctly? What if the ambrosia’s been left open too long and spoiled? Have they diluted the antiseptic properly? Gods, he can’t even see the chartboard from here—

Panic flares like a match against raw skin.

He tries to sit up. The attempt is laughable. Pain lances down his spine, clean and merciless, a punishment for daring to move, to question, to want control over a body that no longer feels like his.

So instead, he turns inward.

One-two-three-four-five.

One-two-three-four-five.

One-two-three-four-five.

The count is mechanical, familiar. A metronome in the chaos. He clings to it like a spell—like if he can just make the rhythm stay even, maybe the world will follow suit. Maybe the frayed edges of everything else will realign.

But they don’t.

The room remains too loud, too bright, too far away and far too close. His body still aches like it remembers dying—and isn’t entirely convinced it didn’t.

Then—movement.

Kayla is there in a heartbeat. A sharp, ecstatic gasp escaping her like she’s just surfaced from drowning.

Austin crashes forward behind her with a choked sound that might be a laugh or a sob. “You’re awake,” he breathes, his voice cracking wide open. “Oh gods—oh thank the gods—”

“Will—Will, hey, you’re here, you’re back—oh my gods—Austin, get Chiron—no, wait, don’t leave him—”

“I’m not leaving him!”

They’re both speaking over each other, voices like broken instruments trying to play a symphony of panic and joy and sleepless nights all at once. Kayla is reaching for his hand like she can’t believe it’s real. Austin is hovering, his fingers in Will’s hair like he’s checking for damage, as if any of it will slip through his grip again if he blinks.

But Will can’t focus on their words. He doesn’t even try.

Because they’re here.

And he is, impossibly, still breathing.

His ribs scream with every twitch. His chest feels bruised from the inside. But he forces himself up anyway—shaking, unsteady, teeth gritted against the pain. His arms won’t move right. His muscles tremble like strings pulled too tight. Still, he reaches. Desperate. Clumsy.

Kayla catches on first. She drops down to him without hesitation, arms gentle but firm, anchoring him like she’s done since they were kids. She pulls him close, careful of the bandages, the bruises, the places where healing hasn’t yet begun.

Austin follows a second later, one hand still half in Will’s curls, the other wrapping around them both. His grip is too tight—but Will doesn’t care. He needs it too tight.

Because he’d seen them die. Again and again. Screaming their names into battlefields and infirmaries and floods of blood. Watching them vanish. Slipping into silence. Into smoke.

But now—Kayla is warm against his shoulder. Austin’s pulse stutters where it presses against his wrist.

They’re here. Alive.

Will buries his face in Kayla’s shoulder and exhales like it’s the first breath he’s ever taken. His fingers dig in—not strong, not steady, but full of something more urgent than strength. He doesn't care that it hurts. He doesn’t care that he’s crying.

Because for so many nights, he was certain he’d never wake again.

And worse—he was certain if he did, he’d wake alone.

“I thought—” His voice is barely sound, barely breath. “I thought I lost you.”

Austin swallows audibly. Kayla just tightens her grip.

“You didn’t,” she whispers. “We’re right here, Will. You didn’t lose us.”

Not yet.

And for the first time since the poison, since the shadows, since his world crumbled beneath the weight of silence and dying—

Will lets himself believe it.

The moment doesn’t heal him. Not really. His ribs still throb with every breath, his throat burns like scorched paper, and everything inside him feels too loud—too full—and yet impossibly hollow, like someone carved him out from the inside.

He blinks again, trying to steady the room, trying to steady himself. His tongue feels like it doesn’t belong in his mouth.

“W…water,” he rasps.

The word barely makes it out—cracked, papery, more ghost than voice.

Kayla moves at once. Her hand finds the cup before he finishes speaking, her fingers trembling only slightly as she lifts it to his lips. The water is sharp and cold and real—it cuts through the static like a scalpel. He drinks, slow and shallow, letting it anchor him.

When she lowers the cup, her eyes are wet. Not loud tears. Just the silent kind—grief slipping down her cheeks in clean lines, quiet as breath. She wipes her face with the back of her wrist, then reaches for the nectar.

“Here,” she says, voice catching in her throat. “Try this. It’ll help—”

He gives the slightest shake of his head. He knows that taste. Too sweet. Too rich. Too much.

He’s not ready for it.

Austin shifts closer, placing a hand carefully on Will’s arm. “You’ve been… out,” he says softly, like the truth still doesn’t sit right in his mouth. “A while. Weeks.”

His voice falters. “We didn’t know if—if you were coming back.”

Will flinches. Just slightly. The idea is too big, too sharp to hold. He doesn’t ask how long. He can’t—not yet.

Instead, his breath catches, then breaks. “Nico.”

It’s not a question. It’s everything.

Austin’s expression softens immediately. He glances to the side and gestures, quiet and reverent, toward the other cot.

“He’s right there,” he says. “He’s asleep.”

Will turns his head slowly—too slowly—and sees him.

Nico.

Slumped sideways in the chair, not curled so much as collapsed, like sleep dragged him under the moment he stopped fighting it. His jacket is half-off his shoulder, his curls a mess of static and sweat. Even in unconsciousness, his brow is furrowed. Like some part of him is still awake. Still waiting for the next blow.

Kayla leans down, her voice a whisper like wind through leaves. “He’s been here every night since he got back.”

Will frowns. “Back from…?”

A pause. A glance exchanged between them. Austin arches a brow, silently nominating Kayla to explain.

She exhales. “Okay,” she begins, carefully, “and don’t panic—but after the attack, Nico went somewhere. To get what he needed to reverse the poison. Like… a quest. But not a normal one. Apparently Aphrodite told him how. It was creepy. Dramatic. Very ancient-gods-only kind of thing.”

Will’s brows pull together. “Aphrodite?”

Austin nods, his face solemn. “Yeah. She showed up. So did… all of them.”

“All of…?”

“The gods,” Kayla says, eyes widening with remembered disbelief. “Like, full council. Olympus drama. Zeus pulled the divine equivalent of ‘you are in so much trouble,’ and for a minute, we thought Nico was going to get smote. Smited? Smote?”

“Definitely smote,” Austin mutters.

Will’s hand twitches where it lies against the blankets. “Dad?” he asks, hesitant.

The silence that follows is immediate. And telling.

Kayla’s smile falters. “No,” she says, softly. “He didn’t come. We thought maybe—but…”

She doesn’t finish. She doesn’t need to.

Will swallows hard, throat tightening against the weight of it. The room goes still again, quieter than before. The kind of quiet that aches. That mourns what never arrived.

And then—Kayla explodes.

“But—Nico told Zeus he loved you!”

Austin actually squeaks.

“Said it like, in front of everyone,” Kayla barrels on, hands flying in wild arcs as if the memory itself still electrifies her. “Right in the middle of the council. Like, ‘I performed an ancient forbidden soul-tethering ritual because I’m in love with him.’ Verbatim. ”

Will’s brain stutters.

He stares at her. Then at Austin. Then at Nico.

Then back again.

“I—he—what?” he manages, voice cracking like glass under heat.

Austin beams, too delighted to be decent. “Yeah, lover boy. You’ve got a dramatic death mage wrapped around your finger. It’s disgusting.”

Kayla is already wiping at her face, laughing again through what might be the hundredth tear she’s shed today. “It was honestly the most terrifyingly romantic thing I’ve ever seen. Also? Zeus looked like he was about to combust. It was amazing .”

Will can’t seem to get air.

Kayla and Austin are still talking, their voices tumbling over each other in fits of gleeful chaos, but he can’t hear them. Not properly. Not now. Their words melt into the background, become soft and formless, like birdsong, like breath, like the memory of something you never dared name.

Because now that it’s been said— Nico loves you —the words crack something open in Will that he thought he’d buried years ago. Something sealed tight beneath all the fear and the pressure and the grief.

And Will remembers.

The Battle of Manhattan comes rushing back in jagged fragments—smoke, blood, ash thick in the air, the sickening lurch of the world tipping sideways beneath his feet. The sky had been smeared gray, trembling with every tremor of divine power. His hands were too small, too frantic, already slick with someone else's blood. His brothers were gone. Or going.

Then Nico appeared—not with a roar, not with vengeance, but with the quiet certainty of a storm that didn’t need to announce itself. Shadows coiled around him like instinct. Hades, Persephone, and Demeter trailed behind as if even gods deferred to him now. Nico raised the dead with his hands and turned the tide without ceremony, his silence sharper than any war cry.

And Will—mid-battle, mid-blood, knees trembling under the weight of loss—looked up and saw him.

A boy only barely younger than he was. Gaunt, silent, unafraid. A figure carved from night and grief, moving with the surety of someone who had long ago made peace with being feared. He was beautiful in the way a storm is beautiful from a distance—impossibly precise, untouchable, terrifying only because you couldn’t look away.

Will’s heart had stuttered. Just once. Just for a second.

Then the fighting surged again, the wounds reopened, the screaming resumed. Nico vanished into the chaos like a ghost obeying no call, and Will buried the feeling before it could take root—because half his cabin didn’t make it, because he was stitching boys back together with shaking hands, because there was no room for love when you were elbow-deep in death. Because ghosts didn’t stay.

Not until Gaia.

Not until the war ended and the rubble cooled, and suddenly, Nico was there again.

Alive. And Will couldn’t stop watching him.

The shadows, the silence, the exhaustion he wore like a second skin. Will kept him in the infirmary for three days—not just because of the concussion or the bruised ribs or the fact that his vitals set the monitors into seizures—but because Will needed to see what was left. To know what was real.

And it turned out everything was.

The darkness. The dry wit. The fierce, invisible thread of loyalty. The way he only let people close if he was sure they’d leave.

Will hadn’t meant to fall again. But gods, he had. Hard.

And now—Kayla is squealing something about Nico being his boyfriend while Austin is making jazz hands like this is a musical and not Will’s post-death emotional spiral.

“I—he’s not—we’re not—” Will tries, but the words collapse on his tongue. He’s blushing so furiously it burns all the way up his neck.

“Yet,” Kayla cuts in smoothly, her grin the picture of smug little-sister satisfaction as she passes him another cup of water.

“Oh my gods,” Austin groans dramatically, flopping onto the foot of the bed like he’s being crushed under the weight of secondhand romance. “He saved your soul, dude. He tethered your actual essence. That’s like... peak relationship goals. What’s next? Matching funeral plots?”

Will groans into the rim of the cup. “I literally just came back from the dead. Can we not plan my next one?”

“Too late,” Kayla chirps, wiping her cheeks and still laughing softly. “You’re dating a death lord now. We absolutely get spooky couple privileges.”

Will shakes his head, still aching, still dizzy—but he’s smiling. He can’t help it.

Because he’s alive.

And maybe—just maybe—he’s loved.

He glances at the chair beside him where Nico is still slumped, fast asleep. And Will’s heart catches in his chest.

There’s a smudge of ash still clinging to Nico’s cheek, faint as memory. His hands are tucked near his chest, fingers curled loosely, one twitching faintly in sleep. The blanket’s slipped halfway down, revealing a sliver of sock printed with tiny skulls and something about the sight makes warmth bloom in his chest so suddenly it almost hurts.

This boy. This myth wrapped in mortal skin. This impossible, stubborn, reckless, beautiful boy has been here every night. Has fought gods and monsters and grief and his own haunted history just to bring Will back. Has fallen asleep at his side like it means nothing, like it means everything.

He wants to reach out. To brush the ash from Nico’s cheek, to press two fingers to his pulse just to feel the beat beneath his skin—proof that he’s still here, still real, still his. But he doesn’t. Not yet. Because this moment isn’t for touching. It’s for witnessing.

So Will watches. The rise and fall of Nico’s chest. The flutter of his lashes. The tension in his brow that hasn’t released, even in sleep. The way his fingers seem to be holding onto something invisible, something he doesn’t want to lose.

And Will thinks, with an ache that feels like truth:

I would tether myself back a thousand times for this.

“I’m going to die,” he whispers, voice raw.

Austin snorts beside him. “Bit late for that, buddy.”

“No, I mean—” Will glares, half-laughing, half-horrified. “Emotionally. I’m going to emotionally combust.”

Kayla pats his forearm gently, eyes still a little wet. “Yeah, we figured.”

Then—Nico stirs.

Not much. A crease between his brows, a twitch of his fingers against the blanket. A shift in his breathing, a tension pulling taut like he’s reaching for something, even now.

Will stops breathing.

And slowly—like it costs him something to break the surface—Nico opens his eyes.

Black. Bleary. Beautiful. And they land—instantly, unerringly—on Will.

Will forgets to breathe.

For a moment, Nico just looks at him. No words. No movement. Just a slow, dawning sort of recognition. Then—

“…You’re awake,” Nico mumbles, voice rough with sleep, too quiet to be anything but real.

Will lets out a laugh that’s mostly a sob. “Yeah. So are you.”

Nico shifts, slow and stiff, dragging himself upright in the chair with the kind of effort that makes Will ache just to watch. He braces a hand on the cot’s edge, blinking like the torchlight hurts, curls crushed flat on one side from sleep. His jacket slips lower. There are dark circles under his eyes, new ones layered over old. He looks utterly, profoundly wrecked.

And somehow— still the most beautiful thing Will has ever seen.

“You shouldn’t be up,” Will murmurs, frowning. “You look—exhausted.”

Nico snorts. A dry sound. Barely a breath. “You look worse.”

It’s not cruel. Just factual. Blunt in that Nico way that’s never quite gentle, but always honest. Will huffs a laugh and leans his head back against the pillow, warmth flickering through his chest like someone just struck a match there.

“Fair,” he admits.

Nico blinks slowly. His voice softens. “Can I… have a minute alone with him?”

Will doesn’t even get the chance to nod before Kayla gasps with mock betrayal. “ Alone ?” she says, clutching her chest dramatically. “Already kicking us out? We just got him back!”

Austin groans, rubbing his temples. “I don’t know if we should leave you two unsupervised. What if Will has a relapse and Nico tries to tether him again just for fun?”

Kayla’s already grabbing her water bottle. “Gods, you’re right. They’re going to do necromantic flirting and we’re going to walk in on, like, shadow-spooning or something.”

Will levels them both with the flattest, oldest-sibling stare he can manage—which is impressive, considering his pulse still feels like it’s being run through a blender.

Kayla lifts her hands in surrender. “Okay, okay. No shadow-spooning. We’re going.”

Austin pauses long enough to press a warm palm to Will’s shoulder. “Shout if you need us.”

Will doesn’t say thank you. Just squeezes Austin’s wrist once, brief and tight. Then the two of them are gone—trailing laughter and whispered commentary out into the hallway, leaving behind silence, torchlight, and the ache of something still half-finished.

And then it’s just them.

Will and Nico. Alone.

Will opens his mouth—because he has to. Because if he doesn’t, everything inside him will spill out in the wrong order. He needs to thank Nico. Needs to ask if he’s okay. Needs to say something about the ritual, about the dream, about what Kayla said— because I’m in love with him —but the words catch in his throat like glass.

He doesn’t get the chance.

Nico’s already speaking, low and tense, his eyes darting to the door like he expects someone—something—to crash through it any second.

“I don’t have long,” he says. “They’re giving us space, but it won’t last.”

Will frowns. “Nico, what are you—?”

“I need to explain,” Nico cuts in, voice coiled tight with urgency. “You know about the ritual. The tether. I did it. I saved you. But… it broke a lot of rules.”

Will nods slowly. “Yeah. Kayla and Austin said the gods were pissed, but—”

“I lied,” Nico says.

The world tilts.

Not dramatically. Not with some cinematic gasp. Just—tilts. Like gravity picked a different center. Will’s breath doesn’t catch; it disappears. His body doesn’t tense; it hollows. A quiet, sudden devastation.

Nico’s voice stays even, but his hands twitch at his sides. “They wanted a reason. A justification. The kind of excuse that makes something ancient and dangerous suddenly romantic and noble.” A pause. A breath. “So I told them I was in love with you.”

Will’s stomach drops.

It sinks like stone. Slow and irreversible. There’s no drama in it, only weight—dense and endless, the kind that anchors ships and drowns them just the same. He stares at Nico and tries— gods, he tries —to reshape the words, to find some other meaning, to twist them into a version that doesn’t sound like what it is.

“You lied,” Will says.

It comes out too soft. Like the word might collapse under its own weight.

Nico’s jaw is rigid now. “I had to. It was the only way to keep them from—” His hand gestures vaguely toward Will’s chest, where the tether still burns faintly beneath his ribs. “From tearing you apart. From smiting me. They would have destroyed us both.”

Will doesn’t speak. He can’t.

The world folds in on itself—not all at once, but slowly, like paper softening in water. Everything feels distant, muted. The walls pull back, the ceiling breathes too loud, and the air thickens until even sound refuses to move. There’s a hum in his ears now, low and constant, like the buzz of fluorescent lights in a place where something sacred has just died.

Because this has to be a dream. Another fever vision. Another punishment carved from memory. But no—now it’s just strategy. A move on the board. A story dressed in love to satisfy gods who only understand sacrifice.

He sees it again—the way he saw it in the dream. Nico seated across from Nemesis, pale and steady, placing black stones on a living board that pulsed with consequence. Every move deliberate. Every excuse a bargain. Every word another step in a game where the stakes were love and the currency was truth.

I lied.

The words repeat in his head, relentless, each echo a deeper bruise. I lied. I lied. I lied. He drops his gaze to his hands, now visibly shaking, fingers twitching where they clutch the hospital sheet. His skin feels too thin. Too distant. His palms ache like he’s been holding something sharp too long without noticing. A tremor moves through him that he can’t stop. His lungs feel small. Brittle. His chest so tight it’s like he’s bracing for impact that already came.

His throat burns. His mouth tastes like scorched iron—like ash clinging to the back of his teeth. And for a moment, he’s not sure if he’s going to throw up or disappear.

He nods. Once. Just once. It takes everything.

“Of course,” he says, and the sound doesn’t belong to him. It’s not his voice. It’s someone else’s—calm, clinical, already moving on. A mask with perfect edges, polished to hide the ruin underneath.

Nico shifts beside him, and the movement hits Will like a bruise. “I’m sorry I dragged you into this,” Nico says, low and tense.

Will almost laughs. It gets stuck somewhere in his chest and dies there. 

He lifts his eyes. Keeps them blank. Still. Controlled, like a careful stitch over something gaping. “So what now?” he asks, and his voice is too thin. Fragile. Like spun glass trying to pass for steel.

Nico exhales and looks away. “Now? We convince them. That it’s real. That we’re in love.” He pauses, jaw tight. “Zeus has demanded trials. Proof.”

The words don’t strike like lightning. They settle like snowfall. Cold. Quiet. Suffocating in their accumulation.

Will breathes out slowly, as if he can exhale his heart back into rhythm, but the pressure doesn’t ease. His vision blurs—not from tears, not yet—but from sheer weight. His spine curls forward, instinctive, protective. His fingers dig deeper into the sheet, like maybe if he anchors himself here, he won’t vanish entirely.

“Right,” he whispers. “We fake it.”

And that’s when it happens—not with a crack or a cry, but with the slow, invisible agony of something breaking quietly inside him. Something stretching too far and giving way. Like a tendon snapping in the dark. Like light going out behind glass.

Because now he’s tethered—his soul wrapped around Nico’s in something vast and ancient and inescapable—to someone who doesn’t love him.

And worse—he does.

He loves Nico. With every piece he never meant to hand over. With every breath he bled out on that battlefield. With everything left in him after the gods were finished taking.

And that love—that love stays.
Even now.