The Truths Spoken In The Sea Of Lies

Briares and Kampê

A trident throw.

A trident strike.

Rhea's might

***

The good news: the left tunnel was straight with no side exits, twists, or turns.

The bad news: it was a dead end.

After sprinting a hundred yards, they ran into an enormous boulder that completely blocked their path. Behind them, the sounds of dragging footsteps and heavy breathing echoed down the corridor. Something—definitely not human—was on their tail.

Rhea turned to her brother. "Tyson."

"Yes!" He slammed his shoulder against the rock so hard the whole tunnel shook. Dust trickled from the stone ceiling.

"Hurry!" Grover said. "Don't bring the roof down, but hurry!"

The boulder finally gave way with a horrible grinding noise. Tyson pushed it into a small room, and they dashed through behind it.

"Close the entrance!" Annabeth said.

They all got on the other side of the boulder and pushed. Whatever was chasing them wailed in frustration as they heaved the rock back into place and sealed the corridor.

"...We trapped ourselves," Grover said.

They turned. They were in a twenty-foot-square cement room and the opposite wall was covered with metal bars. They'd tunnelled straight into a cell.

"What in Hades?" Annabeth tugged on the bars.

Aidoneus pinched the bridge of his nose, why is his name used as a curse word? He will never get used to it.

The bars didn't budge. Through the bars, they could see rows of cells in a ring around a dark courtyard—at least three stories of metal doors and metal catwalks.

"Someone is crying," Rhea said.

Somewhere above them, deep sobbing echoed through the building. There was another sound, too—a raspy voice muttering something that I couldn't make out. The words were strange, like rocks in a tumbler.

Tyson's eye widened. "Can't be." He grabbed two bars on our cell door and bent them wide enough for even a Cyclops to slip through.

"Wait!" Grover called.

But Tyson wasn't about to wait. They ran after him. The prison was dark, with only a few dim fluorescent lights flickering above.

"I know this place," Annabeth told me. "This is Alcatraz. My school took a field trip here. It's like a museum."

"Freeze," Grover warned.

But Tyson kept going. Rhea grabbed his arm and pulled him back with ease.

"Wait," Rhea told him before she pointed at Grover who was pointing at something, her own eyes not leaving the monstrosity in front of her.

Tyson looked where Grover was pointing, and he whimpered.

On the second-floor balcony, across the courtyard, was a monster more horrible than anything they'd ever seen before.

It was sort of like a centaur, with a woman's body from the waist up. But instead of a horse's lower body, it had the body of a dragon—at least twenty feet long, black, and scaly with enormous claws and a barbed tail.