Clockwork

53

Lelantos' hands continued grabbing at the dagger but the blade didn't budge. The blade in question seemed to eat at whatever it had embedded itself in, and Percy felt a rush of power.

The silence around him amplified, and he could hear breathing, heartbeats, and sounds of footsteps pushing around millions of grains of sand. Percy dragged the dagger down the front of the Titan, pushing the blade through whatever it ran into.

No more vaguely amused remarks came out of the Titan's throat, just a gurgling sound and a rasped cough that sound almost like laughter.

Colorful images, like he suddenly had thermal vision, started to flash before Percy's eyes. Lelantos was on the ground, dead, with a crooked smile on his face. There was a gaping hole that the dagger had made from the Titan's throat to the Titan's hip bone. The reason Percy hadn't heard the Titan fall was because the sand he had fallen on hadn't moved. It had remained undisturbed as if the Titan didn't even exist.

Percy himself felt weightless, the feeling different than anything he had felt dead or alive. The sand under his feet seemed to turn into solid ground and like the fallen titan, not a single grain of sand was disturbed.

The dagger still burned in his hand, but if Percy's newfound thermal vision was reliable then the dagger should be cool to the touch. Was it in his head?

"You don't even know the power you wield, warrior," a familiar chilling voice said.

Percy's gaze snapped back towards the Titan's body, thinking that somehow the wound had healed and the Titan had resurrected himself. It hadn't, and the titan of air was still dead.

"Yes, yes, you've won, warrior. I'm still dead," Lelantos' voice said. Percy did notice how the titan's voice no longer sounded like it was blowing right past his ear, but instead like it was coming from a corner of his brain. It stayed in one spot, no longer bouncing back and forth from every direction. Not that it would matter if it did. Whatever power Percy had now not only improved his sight in the darkness and let him see details from a distance that should be humanly impossible, it caused a flood of white noise that proved to be more disturbing than Lelantos' voice bouncing around.

"Then are you real?" Or am I going crazy?

"I'd like to think so. You know nothing of the Death Bringer, do you?" 

"Other than the fact that it brings death?"

"What it brings is power. How are you not overwhelmed by it, warrior?" The titan's voice carried genuine curiosity, but it didn't seem like he actually wanted an answer. Not that Percy had one. He assumed it was because he was dead, so sensory overload was the least of his problems no matter how jarring his new sight was or how much all of this noise wreaked havoc on his eardrums. "I will not be here long, warrior. I thank you for the game," Lelantos carried on gleefully, not sounding the least bit upset that he was now a corpse because of the man he was thanking.

Percy didn't know what to say to that, and was going to say something stupidly simple, like "ok," but mumbling caught his attention. Not mumbling from one or two people, but hundreds of voices discordantly chorused from all around him. It was... disorienting, to say the least.

Strangely, there was not one sound from a dog.

"You should get to your companions, warrior. I did promise that they wouldn't get hunted down if you won and well..."

"What?"

"Well, my presence kept the little terrors away. Now, there's nothing to fear from a dead master," Lelantos warned. What he was saying was pretty serious, but that cold, light, and airy tone that gave the impression that the titan was teasing didn't leave his voice. It still sent a chill down Percy's spine hearing it.