The Daughter of the Sky // Wattys 2016

Chapter 7

   "So...the horse can talk?"

   "He's not a horse for the thousandth time. He's a centaur and they can kick really hard so I'd watch it if I were you. Jeez, Ri. For a Greek you kind of suck."

   I smirked at Danny's sheepish insult. "None taken, cripple."

   "I'm not a cripple," he looked at me like Stacy Knoxville had just punched him in the gut.

   "Danny, um, not to sound mean, but you use crutches. You have a limp. The muscle thing?"

    "You'll see," Danny smiled to himself, like he knew some secret and I didn't.

    I let it go. I was exhausted too. There was so much new information I had to retain, I didn't know if I could remember it all. My brain felt like it had run a marathon.

   About twenty minutes later Danny and I had reached the top of the rolling, lush hill. A huge, ten foot tall pine tree rested easily at the crest of it. Beside the tree were two high school aged kids standing on opposite sides of it. They looked like they were guarding the tree and I found myself wondering what was so special about it.

   On the far right of the tree stood two, elegant twenty foot tall white marble Greek style columns with some sort of ancient writing etched into them.

   "Camp Half-Blood," I read effortlessly. Whoa.

   "I can read Greek? Since when can I read Greek? I can barely read English!" I gawked at my newfound ability.

   "You're not dyslexic, Orion. Your brain is wired for Greek. It's part of the whole demigod survival instincts package."

    Then it finally clicked. The imaginary lightning bulb in my head that had been shut off for seventeen years began to flash violently. "Survival instincts. That's why I could fight off the monster, right?"

    Danny nodded. "Yeah. Like for example, you think you have ADHD, but its your fighting instincts kicking in; you can't sit still. You're impulsive. It's your body telling your brain to fight. My guess was you were a child of Athena, but you have a mortal mother. Then I thought you were a child of Ares, but you're too... nice."

    "Gee, thanks?"

    "Trust me, it's a compliment." The sound of thunder rolled gently above Danny and I, almost as if on cue. Strangely enough, there wasn't a single storm cloud in sight.

    "Sorry!" Danny looked at the sky apologetically.

   "What, you're apologizing to Zeus for insulting his kid?" I remembered Ares was a child of Zeus. In fact, he was the God of war. Yeah, I was awake during almost all of our Greek mythology unit, thank you very much.

    "Yeah. Some gods aren't as nice as you'd like to think." He looked jittery and anxious as he walked further up the steep hill.

   I shrugged and continued to follow Danny to the camp entrance. Upon seeing the two columns up close, I stopped dead in my tracks. This didn't make any sense.

   It was empty. The two columns led to absolutely nothing else but acres of useless forest, and there was no way I was peeing in the wilderness.

   "You're kidding. Please tell me this is a joke."

   "What?" Danny acted as if there was nothing wrong.

   I gestured between the two columns frantically. "There's nothing there! It's all... forest!"

  Danny looked through the columns, then back at me as if I was crazy. But then his expression changed quickly, as if something hit him out of the blue. "Di immortales," Danny cursed...in Greek?  "The Mist!"

   "The what now?" I wasn't even given the chance to process the fact that I understood my best friend cursing in Greek.

   Baby steps, Orion, baby steps.

   "There's this thing called The Mist. It works kind of like an invisibility cloak, or a barrier, if you will. It hides mystical things from humans so they don't notice anything out of the ordinary. You're half human, so you can't see through it as well as other mythical creatures can. Don't worry though, you'll get better at seeing through it as time goes on."

    "That's why no one would help me at the beach," I gasped, connecting the imaginary dots in my head. With Danny's help things were slowly starting to make a little more sense.

    "Bingo," Danny clicked his tongue. "Now come on, we're late."

     Sure enough, Danny was right. The Mist was real.

     As soon as we stepped through the entrance columns the entire forest rippled and changed before my very eyes. The lush pine trees began to slowly materialize into a full blown battle camp slash summer camp crossover. It was like being in Narnia, Lord of the Rings, and in the middle of the Trojan war all at once.

    Kids as young as six, to as old as in their early twenties were running around the camp in full traditional Greek armor with real swords, shields, and spears while others were carrying canoes out to a sparkling lake across acres of green, luscious strawberry fields that other campers in bright orange T-shirts were tending to. Some of them played the pipes - a sort of high pitched whimsical sound - next to vines of strawberries. The plants around them began to grow rapidly right before my very eyes. To my right, there was a lineup of about six to eight campers shooting arrows into stuffed dummies across from them. There was a unique and colorful arrangement of cabins in the distance, almost reaching the lake's shore.

   Camp Half-Blood was everything I expected, and nothing I had ever imagined all at once.

   I was so busy gawking at the camp, I hadn't even noticed Danny had changed right before my eyes too. Literally.

    "So, what do you think?" He clapped his hands together, expecting an eager response from me, but I couldn't even speak. It was the car ride all over again, except worse.

    From the waist up, Danny looked the same, or at least I thought he did; he had the same gelled chestnut colored hair, same apologetic brown eyes, but from the waist down he was a white mountain goat. An actual, real life goat with two little hooves, and a furry moving tail. I looked up at his hair again, blinking rapidly as I began to see two charcoal colored horns begin to rise out of the waves of his hair.

    "D-D-Danny," I stammered and frantically began to search for a nice way to explain to my friend what was going on, but I guess things don't happen the way you expect them to when you're having a panic attack. 

    "You're a-a-a goat!" I shrieked, dropping my backpack to the dirt floor below before following suit.

   "Oh Styx," Danny groaned as my entire vision went black.

   Great. I had passed out two times in forty-eight hours, a new record.