SANITY; heroes of olympus

04.1

And she went on and on, and Percy listened and listened silently, smiling as more life filtered into her words, her tone, her eyes, even if he could not see them.

And that night, Andromeda fell asleep with her legs curled to her chest, Percy laying behind her with less than three inches between them.

But, as they would eventually come to learn, three inches apart was nothing compared to what it would be like to be nearly a world apart.

—🌓—

Nine days.

As she fell, Andy thought about Hesiod, the old Greek poet who'd speculated it would take nine days to fall from earth to Tartarus.

She hoped Hesiod was wrong. She'd lost track of how long she had been falling—hours? A day? It felt like an eternity.

It felt almost like a bout of deja vu as she tumbled through the air, as it felt like a coffin folding around her. It reminded her of her fall from the St. Louis arc when she was twelve. Now she was almost seventeen, and history was repeating itself with strange vividness.

The air grew hotter and damper, as if she were plummeting into the throat of a massive dragon. Her shoulder—the one where she had been stabbed the previous summer—throbbed and ached, almost as if she were back to square one with recovery. She couldn't tell if she was still covered in spider webs or not, but that tug around her leg seemed to disappear for a brief moment.

She had to come up with a plan, Andy knew that for sure. If she didn't, she would most likely fall to her death or somehow make it to Tartarus, but be too injured to keep herself alive. Either way, the situation wasn't ideal.

She couldn't fly like Jason and she couldn't summon water like Percy should she land in a river of some sort. She couldn't shift into another form like Frank and she had no way to slow her fall, not one bit.

She didn't want to die this way, not when there was still so much left to do. Gaea was still focused on tearing the world apart and Annabeth had gone through what was thought to be nearly impossible lengths to find the Athena Parthenos. They had fought giants and gods to reach this point, they couldn't give up now, not even when Andy was no longer with them.

They had different goals to achieve now.

Suddenly, the chute she'd been falling through opened into a vast cavern. Maybe half a mile below her, Andy could see the bottom. For a moment she was too stunned to think properly. The entire island of Manhattan could have fit inside this cavern—and she couldn't even see its full extent. Red clouds hung in the air like vaporised blood. The landscape—at least what she could see of it—was rocky black plains, punctuated by jagged mountains and fiery chasms. To her left, the ground dropped away in a series of cliffs, like colossal steps leading deeper into the abyss.

The stench of sulphur made it hard to concentrate, but she focused on the ground directly below them and saw a ribbon of glittering black liquid—a river.

There wasn't much she could do, even with a river. She closed her eyes and searched deep within her powers, scanning the river for any sign of life. But there was none. No vines, no seaweed, no roots, no plant life of any kind.