The Path Of Glory (Annabeth Chase x Male Reader)

65. How To Do A Jailbreak

"It's her," Tyson whimpered.

"Get down!" Grover said.

They crouched in the shadows, but the monster wasn't paying them any attention. It seemed to be talking to someone inside a cell on the second floor. That's where the sobbing was coming from. The dragon woman said something in her weird rumbling language.

"What's she saying?" Percy asked. "What's that language?"

"The tongue of the old times." Tyson shivered. "What Mother Earth spoke to the Titans and . . . her other children. Before the gods."

"You understand it?" Annabeth asked. "Can you translate?"

Tyson closed his eyes and began to speak in a horrible, raspy woman's voice. "You will work for the master or suffer."

Annabeth shuddered. "I hate it when he does that."

Like all Cyclopes, Tyson had superhuman hearing and an uncanny ability to mimic voices. It was almost like he entered a trance when he spoke in other voices. It brought back bad memories.

"I will not serve," Tyson said in a deep, wounded voice.

He switched back to the monster's voice: "Then I shall enjoy your pain, Briares." Tyson faltered when he said that name. He usually never broke character when he was mimicking somebody, but he let out a strangled gulp. Then he continued in the monster's voice. "If you thought your first imprisonment was unbearable, you have yet to feel true torment. Think on this until I return."

The dragon lady tromped toward the stairwell, vipers hissing around her legs like grass skirts. She spread wings that she had kept folded against her dragon back until now. Then she leaped off the catwalk and soared across the courtyard. They crouched lower in the shadows. A hot sulfurous wind blasted Annabeth's face as the monster flew over. Then she disappeared around the corner.

"H-h-horrible," Grover said.

"I've never smelled any monster that strong," Ethan said.

"Cyclopes' worst nightmare," Tyson murmured. "Kampê."

"Who?" Percy asked.

Tyson swallowed. "Every Cyclops knows about her. Stories about her scare us when we're babies. She was our jailer in the bad years."

Annabeth nodded. "I remember now. When the Titans ruled, they imprisoned Gaea and Ouranos's earlier children—the Cyclopes and the Hekatonkheires."

"The Heka-what?" Percy asked.

"The Hundred-Handed Ones," she said. "They called them that because . . . well, they had a hundred hands. They were elder brothers of the Cyclopes."

"Very powerful!" Tyson said. "Wonderful! As tall as the sky. So strong they could break mountains!"

"Cool," Ethan said. "Unless you're a mountain, of course."

"Kampê was the jailer," Tyson went on. "She worked for Kronos. She kept our brothers locked up in Tartarus, tortured them always, until Zeus came. He killed Kampê and freed Cyclopes and Hundred-Handed Ones to help fight against the Titans in the big war."

"And now Kampê is back," Annabeth said.

"Bad," Tyson summed up.

"So who's in that cell?" Percy asked. "You said a name—"

"Briares!" Tyson perked up. "He is a Hundred-Handed One. They are as tall as the sky and—"

"Yeah," Annabeth interrupted. "They break mountains."

She looked up at the cells above them. Either she didn't know how tall the sky was, or these cells were far bigger than they appeared.

"I guess we should check it out," she said, "before Kampê comes back."