The Forbidden Daughter | PJO Book One

seven

Her legs looked like they were tangled in vines, but then she realized they were sprouting snakes, hundreds of vipers darting around, constantly looking for something to bite.

The woman's hair was also made of snakes, like Medusa's. Weirdest of all, around her waist, where the woman part met the dragon part, her skin bubbled and morphed, occasionally producing the heads of animals - a vicious wolf, a bear, a lion, as if she were wearing a belt of ever-changing creatures.

"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 muttered. "What's that language?"

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

"You understand it?" Percy 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.

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

He switched to the monster's voice: "Then I shall enjoy your pain, Briares."

Tyson faltered when he said that name. Ariana had never heard him break 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 towards the stairwell, vipers hissing around her legs like grass skirts. She spread wings that Ariana hadn't noticed before - huge bat wings she kept folded against her dragon back. She leaped off the catwalk and soared across the courtyard.

They crouched lower in the shadows. A hot sulphurous wind blasted my 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."

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

"Who?" Perfy 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 Gaia and Ouranos's earlier children - the Cyclopes and the Hekatonkheires."

"The Heka-what?" He asked.

"The Hundred-handed Ones." Ariana 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." Percy said. "Unless you're a mountain."

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