Red and golden flames burned the white-sand beach and lit their rowboat as the sky darkened and the sun blazed beyond the horizon. The smell of grilling filled the air.
Y/N gulped one more mouthful of the piece of meat he had in his hands. Gravy came out of it like crazy, flooding his hands and chin, but he didn't care. He was too hungry. Who would have bet on monsters tasting so good?
"You know, there is such a thing as restraint," Annabeth said.
He took one more bite. "Hmm?"
She rolled her eyes and sighed. "Didn't anyone ever teach you how to eat properly?" As if to set an example, she took a piece of meat, put it in a made-up plate, and cut it delicately with her knife.
"But it's so good," he said. "I mean, seriously, tell me you've ever eaten anything this good."
She sighed once more.
"I knew it," he decided, and his teeth sank into the meat again.
About an hour later, when he finished eating—Annabeth had stopped after just one piece of meat; Neat, more for me, he had thought—he went to lay down against a dead tree trunk, a sailors' shirt as a makeshift blanket—not very useful, right, but better than his torn Half-Blood Camp T-shirt.
Annabeth came to sit next to him, the other sailors' shirt in her hand. As well the wind wasn't blowing anymore, otherwise they would've been freezing dead on that beach.
Slowly, he let his mind wander, his whole body heavy after eating so much.
"Hey, wake up."
Y/N opened his eyes, and the sunlight reflecting on the sand blinded him at once.
After a fashion, he was able to look around. Annabeth stood in front of him, her hair done in a ponytail, her arms crossed.
"You help me?" she said, and she showed the lifeboat.
Next moment, it was back on the water, its makeshift sail catching the wind, going away from that Salamis island with them on board. It took some time before wind rose and the boat gained some speed.
Droplets of salty water jumped and cooled Y/N's red skin. Next few nights weren't going to be comfortable with such sunburn.
"You think we'll find an island by tonight?" he asked.
"No idea," Annabeth told him. "But if we do, I hope it's not like the last."
They exchanged looks, and it was like an unspoken agreement. Better not to count on luck here.
They had wrapped dried pieces of the Great Drakon in the sailors' shirts. When the sun came to its peak, and its light transformed the ocean into a blinding mirror, they ate them.
They had to wait until the sun began to near the horizon for that boring day to stop being boring. Afterward, Y/N would have preferred it remained so.
As he and Annabeth lay in the bottom of the rowboat to protect themselves from the sun beating down on their sides, a drop fell right between his eyes. At first he didn't mind—water droplets sometimes came into the boat when it split the waves. But soon, it wasn't just one, two, or three droplets. It was an outdoor shower, a downpour.
Y/N tried to wipe the water out of his eyes, but it kept falling down onto his face. "Where are those clouds coming from?"
An instant before, the sky had been orange with bluish highlights as the night approached. Now it was gray-black, filled with puffy clouds ready to unleash their biggest load of water on them.
Annabeth tried to get some cover under the makeshift sail. "A storm!" she shouted just as a bolt of lightning shot through the clouds.
Y/N cursed. "Thank you, Zeus!"
More silver arrows streaked the sky.
He couldn't distinguish colors of things in the darkness, only shapes. The wind, already blowing strong before, was deafening now, hitting the water and lifting bigger and bigger waves. One leaped into the rowboat, smashing onto him. He fell hard to the bottom of the boat. Where's Percy when we need him?
"Y/N!" Annabeth shouted over the storm. It was now so dark he could barely make her out. "We need to bail the water out, otherwise we'll never get out of this!"
"'Cause there's a chance to make it out a storm in a lifeboat?" he said.
He didn't know what was scarier between the lack of answer or the lightning that bolted down from the sky and crashed into the water, lifting a hundred-foot-high column of water.
He stumbled and began to go overboard.
Annabeth caught him by the collar of his T-shirt just before he definitely disappeared into the waves. She pulled him back inside the lifeboat and thrust something into his hands. "Bail the water out!"
It was Percy's knapsack. "How am I supposed to bail anything out with that? In case you didn't notice, it's bitten in half!"
"There's nothing else, Bovine Eyes!"
He began to scoop out the water as best he could. He filled the knapsack with some—maybe the equivalent of a can of Dr Pepper—then threw it back into the sea.
A new wave crashed inside the boat. Seriously?
There still was no island nearby.
How long did this go on? He didn't know. Time worked strangely, it seemed, in the Sea of Monsters.
In any case, at some point, Annabeth shouted, "Land!" and they berthed.
Well, no, they didn't exactly berth. They crashed against a cliff.
More or less, the last thing Y/N remembered was holding onto Annabeth and yelling madly something very heroic, like, "AAAAGGGHHHHH!"
He opened his eyes, and simply sighed.
He was lying on the ground, soaked and alone. Because, why not? Too easy to land on a lost island with a friend. He was almost sure that, just when he would find Annabeth again, a kind of giant monster would show. A classic, that one. Being a half-blood on a quest, truly the height of fun!
Okay, where am I? Y/N wondered as he finally stood up.
This island was totally different from Salamis. Salamis was dead, whereas this one was covered in a huge, dense, tropical forest. Birds whistled without showing themselves, and insect noises came to his ears.
First he set out to walk around the island by the coast, to see if he could find Annabeth a little farther away. But after walking what must be a good quarter of the way around the island, he realized he wasn't close to finding her like that.
So he went into the forest.
It was hard to snake in and out between the vines, the trees, and the roots. It was even harder to work out where he was. Actually, after about twenty minutes, when he tried to get back to his starting point, he realized he was absolutely lost.
"Hey, wait!"
The voice had been a whisper coming to Y/N, but he stopped, listening.
"I saw something," came another voice.
"Great. Well, I say we get out of here, okay?"
"I want to see what it is."
"And I don't. The more we avoid getting into trouble, the better. Don't tell me you've already forgotten what happened yesterday—"
"You think I'm about to forget giant piranhas?"
Y/N stood still and tried to watch through the vegetation. He could hear twigs snapping under the footsteps of the two people.
And then these two people came from behind a tree.
For a moment they all stood still, speechless and wide-eyed.
"How . . . ?" was all Y/N could think to say.
"Y/N!" Ethan jumped and hugged him.
"How did you get here?" Percy asked.
"What about you?" he said. "We thought you were dead."
"We?" Percy repeated, his eyes widening and sparkling with hope. "You mean, Annabeth and Tyson are here, too?"
"Annabeth is here, yes," he told him apologetically. He didn't say a word about Tyson, and Percy looked down painfully. Not everyone had been as lucky as them when they had passed between Scylla and Charybdis.
Y/N told Ethan and Percy about Salamis and the Great Drakon; they were wide-eyed in front of him when he got to the point about the race in the tunnels dug by the monster and how he had killed it.
"But now, tell me—what happened to you after the explosion?" he asked. "Annabeth said that she's seen you sixty feet high, held by Scylla."
"Only sixty feet?" Ethan said. "I thought she was taking us six hundred feet high. I've never screamed so much in my life before."
"How did you get out of it?"
"Percy did it," Ethan said. "He managed to get himself rid of his bag, and we fell into the sea. Well, I had my eyes closed at that moment—didn't want to see myself getting eaten up—but when I opened them again, we were sailing away on one of the lifeboats."
"I just ordered the water to bring the remaining one and take us away," Percy explained. "But yeah, it wasn't a pleasure cruise."
"By the way, where's Annabeth?" Ethan asked.
"Don't know," Y/N said, looking around. "There was a storm yesterday—our lifeboat got crushed against a cliff—and I woke up alone. Speaking of which, how did you get through that storm?"
"I just asked the sea to be nicer around our boat," Percy said.
"Makes sense."
The three of them began walking through the forest, between the vines and the trees.
"So we're lost?" Percy said aloud.
Y/N tapped on his chin with his finger. "Um. . . ."
"We're lost," Ethan decided.
Just as he said that, they came to a clearing. And in front of them, stood a pyramidal temple, almost like one of the Maya's but . . . Greeker? Undeniably there was something Greek there. The columns and the white marble, for one thing, or the engravings.
"I don't know about you," Percy said, "but I've seen too many places with monsters not to recognize one."
"Same," Y/N and Ethan said in unison.
"I propose a vote," Y/N continued. "Who's for a strategic retreat?"
They all raised their hands and started to turn away.
"Y/N!" It was Annabeth. She was striding down the temple's stairs, a smile on her face. "I was wondering when you would finally get here. Wait till you see what I found—"
She stopped short when she noticed Ethan and Percy.
Before she even opened her mouth, Percy said, "It's a long story."
"Which," Ethan said, "among other things, implies being close to death several times. But that's a classic, now, isn't it?"
They told Annabeth everything.
After a fashion, she turned to Y/N and said, "Anyway, I said I found something. Come on."
"Shouldn't we get away from this place instead?" he said, glancing at the temple. "It looks fishy, if you ask me."
"Don't worry. I've already looked around—there's nothing dangerous. Come on."
They followed her and climbed the steps to the top of the temple before going inside and embracing the cool of the shadow with open arms.
Annabeth led them, and they entered what looked like a throne room.
"Wow. . . ." Y/N, Ethan and Percy said.
"I would have changed that," Annabeth remarked. She pointed at some of the carvings on the walls and at some of the columns that were too wide, in her opinion. Matter of factly, she pointed at many other things. She actually pointed at the entire room.
"Else, it's not bad," she finished.
"Why did you bring us here?" Y/N wondered.
She started to stride off to the back of the room, and he followed her with Ethan and Percy. "There's a secret room in the back. Be careful not to step on the cracked cobblestones. I made the mistake myself and almost—"
Click!
Y/N wheeled around. He faced Ethan, who slowly lowered his eyes and looked down at his hoof, which, as you could imagine, was on one of those cracked cobblestones.
Ethan facepalmed and said, "Oops. . . ."
A mechanical sound filled the room. Followed by shouts from deep down the temple.
"Bets taken here," Y/N said. "What will kill us first—traps or monsters?"
"RUN!" Percy yelled.
No need to be told twice.
Just as they all rushed toward the entrance, a volley of arrows shot out of the walls. They barely had time to get out that a huge rock ball came chasing them down the stairs.
Running the steps down four by four, they threw themselves out of its path, which went rolling in the jungle, crushing everything on its way.
Ethan bleated. "Can someone tell me how long we've been in Indiana Jones?"
"That'll be for later," Y/N interrupted. "Keep running!"
He had spotted from whom the shouts had come inside. Monsters were hurrying out of the temple. They were Laistrygonians, like those at Percy's school, but these ones were wearing Maya clothes as you'd imagine from movies and such.
Y/N, Annabeth, Ethan and Percy dashed into the forest, leaping over roots, weaving in and out between trees, nearly getting tangled in the vines.
"I knew we should never have gotten inside!" Ethan shouted.
"Where's your boat?" Y/N yelled.
"I don't know!"
"This way," Percy said urgently.
They ran as fast as they could, hearing cries of hungry giants behind them.
Suddenly they shot out of the forest. Ethan and Percy's rowboat was there, twenty yards on their left.
They immediately ran toward it, when four giants surrounded them, shouting in incomprehensible language.
"Sorry, we don't understand anything," Y/N said. "And we don't have time."
His sword was already in his hand. He leaped forward. Annabeth, Ethan and Percy didn't wait for a second to join the fight.
Y/N and Percy slashed with their swords, Annabeth thrust her knife, and Ethan kicked with his hooves, which proved to be entirely sufficient to smash Laistrygonians bellies.
Three of the giants shattered into greenish smoke, and the fourth ran away, wailing and holding its stomach.
They didn't wait and jumped into the lifeboat. Y/N was barely halfway in it when Percy ordered the sea to carry it away. A huge wave came out of nowhere and pushed them.
No sooner said than done, they were in the middle of the ocean again, the Maya island reduced to a tiny dot in the distance.
"Anyway, it's nice to see you again," Ethan told Y/N. "Too bad the Sea of Monsters has such an apt name."