After sixteen years, I did not expect to be chased by two metal cows with my aunt sally, little cousin Percy Jackson, and Percy's best friend- Grover Underwood.
but the one thing I never saw coming,
Was Luke castellan.
And the war, duh.
along with t...
yaalllll, I really tried but I did not know how to include luke in this chapter, but I didn't know how without little input here and there. so I made up for at the end but if you have an idea for where I can try to put more of him in, PLEASE COMMENT, THANK YOOUUUU!
5305 words
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imagine the largest concert crowd you've ever seen, a football field packed with a million fans.
Now imagine a field a million times that big, packed with people, and imagine the electricity has gone out, and there is no noise, no light, no beach ball bouncing around over the crowd. Something tragic has happened backstage. Whispering masses of people are just milling around in the shadows, waiting for a concert that will never start.
If you can picture that, you have a pretty good idea of what the Fields of Asphodel looked like. The black grass had been trampled by eons of dead feet. A warm, moist wind blew like the breath of a swamp. Black trees – Grover told me they were poplars – grew in clumps here and there.
The cavern ceiling was so high above us it might've been a bank of storm clouds, except for the stalactites, which glowed faint grey and looked wickedly pointed. I tried not to imagine they'd fall on us at any moment, but dotted around the fields were several that had fallen and impaled themselves in the black grass. I guess the dead didn't have to worry about little hazards like being speared by stalactites the size of booster rockets.
Annabeth, luke, Grover, percy, and I tried to blend into the crowd, keeping an eye out for security ghouls. I couldn't help looking for familiar faces among the spirits of Asphodel, but the dead are hard to look at. Their faces shimmer. They all look slightly angry or confused. They will come up to you and speak, but their voices sound like chatter like bats twittering. Once they realize you can't understand them, they frown and move away.
The dead aren't scary. They're just sad.
We crept along, following the line of new arrivals that snaked from the main gates towards a black-tented pavilion with a banner that read:
JUDGMENTS FOR ELYSIUM AND ETERNAL DAMNATION
Welcome, Newly Deceased!
Out the back of the tent came two much smaller lines.
To the left, spirits flanked by security ghouls were marched down a rocky path towards the Fields of Punishment, which glowed and smoked in the distance, a vast, cracked wasteland with rivers of lava and minefields and miles of barbed wire separating the different torture areas. Even from far away, I could see people being chased by hellhounds, burned at the stake, forced to run naked through cactus patches or listen to opera music. I could just make out a tiny hill, with the ant-size figure of Sisyphus struggling to move his boulder to the top. And I saw worse tortures, men getting their penis cut off and their balls being boiled while they're still attached.
