Sea Green Eyes

Chapter 64

Damasen scraped his bowl. His face was covered with old poison burns, gouges, and scar tissue, so it looked like the surface of an asteroid. "Yes," he said. "And Tartarus is my father." He gestured around the hut. "As you can see, I was a disappointment to my parents. They expected... more from me."

Olympian gods were hard enough to imagine as parents, but at least they resembled humans. The old primordial gods like Gaia and Tartarus... it was comprehendible.

"So..." Cressida said. "I have some experience defeating evil mothers -"

Castor cleared his throat loudly and Cressida rolled her eyes at him before continuing on.

"You don't mind us fighting your mom?"

Damasen snorted like a bull. "Best of luck. At present, it's my father you should worry about. With him opposing you, you have no chance to survive."

As much as Cressida would love to stop eating, her body wouldn't let her especially because she didn't know when she'd get a chance to eat something again.

"Opposing us how?" she asked, her mouth half-full.

"All of this." Damasen cracked a drakon bone and used a splinter as a toothpick. "All that you see is the body of Tartarus, or at least one manifestation of it. He knows you are here. He tries to thwart your progress at every step. My brethren hunt you. It is remarkable you have lived this long, even with the help of Iapetus."

"Yeah well, Cress never has done well with doing what she'd told," Castor remarked and she shot him a look.

"Yeah, well, who raised me? You have only yourself to blame, Cas."

"Pollux is responsible for at least half of you. And that would be the bad half."

"I don't have a bad half! All of me is amazing, thank you."

Bob scowled when he heard his name. "The defeated ones hunt us, yes. They will be close behind now."

Damasen spat out his toothpick. "I can obscure your path for a while, long enough for you to rest. I have power in this swamp. But eventually, they will catch you."

"My friends must reach the Doors of Death," Bob said. "That is the way out."

"Impossible," Damasen muttered. "The Doors are too well guarded."

"But you know where they are?" Castor prompted.

"Of course. All of Tartarus flows down to one place: his heart. The Doors of Death are there. But you cannot make it there alive with only Iapetus."

"Then come with us," Cressida blurted. "Help us."

"HA!"

Cressida jumped. In the bed, Percy muttered deliriously in his sleep, "Ha, ha, ha. Funny. Cress."

"Go back to sleep, Fish Face," Cressida said.

"Fish. I like swimming with fish," he murmured and Cressida rolled her eyes.

"Daughter of Dionysus," the giant said. "I am not your friend. I helped mortals once, and you see where it got me."

"I remember," Cressida said. "You were born to oppose the god of war."

"Bad story," Bob explained. "Good giants have bad stories. Damasen was created to oppose Ares."

"Yes," the giant agreed. "Like all my brethren, I was born to answer a certain god. My foe was Ares. But Ares was the god of war. And so, when I was born—"

"You were his opposite. You were peaceful," Cressida filled in.

"Peaceful for a giant, at least." Damasen sighed. "I wandered the fields of Maeonia, in the land you now call Turkey. I tended my sheep and collected my herbs. It was a good life. But I would not fight the gods. My mother and father cursed me for that. The final insult: One day the Maeonian drakon killed a human shepherd, a friend of mine, so I hunted the creature down and slew it, thrusting a tree straight through its mouth. I used the power of the earth to regrow the tree's roots, planting the drakon firmly in the ground. I made sure it would terrorize mortals no more. That was a deed Gaia could not forgive."