Heart Pierced - Kayla Knowles (1)

XXVII. The Agony Of The Shocked

Then I heard Silena's voice, and believe me, I felt bad even more than before. Curse this war, curse that traitor Luke.. curse Zeus for being a fucking idiot and making the Gods seem like heartless people, I thought angrily.

"Where's Charlie?!" she asked, anxiously.

Percy looked down at the ground in what I knew was shame. He couldn't bring himself to tell Silena the awful truth about what happened. For better or for worse, Chiron did it for him.

"Silena, my dear. Why don't we take this to the Big Ho.." he started, and that's when she got the hint. That her boyfriend was dead, and gone for good. She let out a guttural moan of pain and sadness. "No. NO!"

Her legs gave out from underneath her, and she fell to the ground sobbing. Nobody said a word, and for a while, there was a good long silence, punctuated only by the sobs of the Aphrodite girl who had lost her boyfriend to a war that shouldn't have happened at all. Luke was correct in what he believed - before Kronos came along, but it never - and would never - justify any of this at all, no way in hell.

In a way, the unspoken words were deafening if I had to be honest. We - I mean camp for this matter - had been a rather shaky mess since the Battle Of The Labyrinth last summer. The ones that didn't really suffer from it to the extent of others were me, Beckendorf, and both Austin and Caeli. The couple was supposed to go back to college at the end of the summer - but after the fight, the two dropped out of college to help out with camp in the fight against Kronos and brought in some fellow demigods that they knew to help out, which was nice to say the least.

More importantly though, Beckendorf was the guy who could fix just about anything - and I don't mean anything that fell under the realm of Hephaestus' domains. Camp morale, friendships, relationships.. you name it. But now, he was gone.. and with his passing, a good bit of the fire inside of us that drove us to keep going was gone too.

I was too busy with my own thoughts apparently because out of nowhere..

"COLTON! KAYLA!"

Everything went black.

- — - — - — - — -

When I awoke, I was standing in a place that was unfamiliar to me. It looked like a throne room, but unlike the one in Olympus or even the one I'm told Kronos had on Mount Othrys. The room had Greek pillars holding up the ceiling on either side of the room, rising high up.. very high. Roman arches dotted the ceiling, spawning off of the pillars to hold it up. The room was colored in shades of red, black, and grey.. with shiny gems dotting the walls at intervals. Torches hung on the pillars illuminated the room, especially around the throne itself.. upon which Typhon sat. 

They say that to those of the world of the gods who saw him, Typhon was a shadowy figure composed of dark clouds. Believe me, even with a human-like figure, he definitely lived up to that description right now. It was hard to look at him for even a few moments before you had to turn your eyes away so you wouldn't go insane.

I felt a tug on my arm to my left. I turned, and right next to me, looking at me with scared, pleading eyes, was Kayla. I pulled her into a hug, and then turned my head back towards Typhon. "What do you want?" I hissed. "Where are we?"

"We are merely inside a dream space, my chosen one.." Typhon said calmly, his voice sounding like a eerie, awful screech that for some reason you could just slightly tolerate somehow. "And as to what I want.. I would like to talk with both of you. Both my chosen one and you, Kayla Knowles, daughter of Apollo."

He wanted to talk with both of us?

I will admit, I was not expecting Typhon to want to talk with Kayla.