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Chapter Text

ACT I: The Mystery

Chapter 1: The Shape of Absence

PoV: Narina

The first thing she felt was weight. Gravity evenly distributed across her limbs, spine, and skull.

Next came the light. It was indirect, warm and filtered through canvas or linen. A ceiling fan turned lazily above her. The smell was antiseptic with a note of something older. Dried herbs, maybe?

She lay there a moment staring at the ceiling, letting her pulse drum against the linen. I’m alive. That was the most she could say with certainty and the realisation made her pulse kick hard once beneath her sternum.

Cautiously, she tested motion. A slow inhale, one cautious roll of the shoulders. No sparks of pain, only the thick echo of having slept too long. Relief flickered. She didn't seem to be injured.

Time to try sitting up. There was no dizziness either. Good.

She took in her surroundings. Where was she? The room was plain, wooden and sun‑washed. There were three beds other than hers, all of them empty. Across the room from her there was a cabinet of medical supplies. Okay, I'm in some sort of medical facility, she thought to herself. That would explain the filtered air and the sterile sheets.

Next to her was a small table with a pitcher of water and a bowl of... something. Yellowish-gold gelatinous squares. Were they edible? She felt a faint tug of curiosity to find out if they were sweet but an even stronger reluctance to be surprised again.

She lay back down and closed her eyes. My name. That should have been easy. The thought skimmed across the blank inside her skull and came back empty, leaving a chemical taste of dread. Panic started to well up inside of her. What is my name? Finally, a single word surfaced with the relief of air after diving:

Narina.

The syllables landed with strange certainty. Not discovered... remembered. As if they'd been waiting, tucked just behind her ribs.

Narina tried to recall something else, anything else: last name, childhood, any face that carried meaning. But there was nothing. Her chest tightened, a small, involuntary flinch. Something’s missing. The thought wasn’t clinical; it was personal.

Who am I?

Footsteps paused beyond the door, rubber soles scuffing wood, then retreated. The quiet that followed felt deliberate and it prickled her skin. Narina took a deep breath. Calm down. Think. She didn't know who she was but her mind was not blank. There was a shape to her thinking that felt practised.

Start with what you look like.

Narina swung her legs over the bed and walked over to the cabinet. She figured that was the most likely place to find a mirror. By the time her fingers found the cabinet's small metal hatch, her heart was beating loudly with anticipation. She wasn't sure why she was so nervous. She took one more breath and then pulled the door open.

She stared at the mirror. The feeling was uncanny. Nothing about the face in the glass felt familiar, yet it was clearly her own. She catalogued the features with a strange sense of detachment. It felt more like she was studying a specimen than her own face.

Oval face. High cheekbones. Straight black hair, parted off-centre, falling past her shoulders with a hint of wave at the ends. Her skin was smooth, light-toned, with the luminous clarity of someone who had never sunburned or scarred. East Asian. Chinese, she thought, though the recognition had no source. What stood out the most, however, had to be her eyes. Almond-shaped, upturned just slightly at the corners... and blue. Electric. The kind of blue that didn’t occur unless it was trying to mean something.

Narina leaned in slightly, just to confirm that they were real. Everything else about her was precise and balanced. From the narrow nose, to the defined brows, to the steady line of her shoulders reflected faintly in the cabinet glass. But the eyes... They didn’t just belong. They defined.

She sighed. Disappointment settled, quiet but definite. She'd hoped seeing what she looked like would trigger her memory. But again, there was nothing.

My clothes. Maybe they would hold a clue.

She stepped back and looked down, taking in her attire with the same systematic precision. A cream knit sweater: soft, loose-fitting, clean. Functional. Beneath it, dark trousers in a matte fabric. Straight-legged. Wool or a cotton blend, maybe. Neither casual nor rugged, just neutral. The outfit was understated... and unfortunately, not very informative.

She tried her best to reverse-engineer the girl who would wear these things. Minimalist. Professional. No jewellery. No bold colours. Not hiding, but not inviting anything either.

Narina looked around. A long charcoal-grey coat lay folded on the back of a chair. Single-breasted, three buttons. Tailored, but not stylish. Built for order over attention. The kind of thing chosen by someone who valued form and control over trend.

That was all she could piece together. Nothing about it pointed to a story.

A tremor of loneliness surfaced. Narina rubbed her temple. Still no answers. Just clean fabric, quiet lines, and a silence that didn’t fill.

A breath passed. Then a knock.

Knuckles rapped on wood; loud enough to command attention, soft enough to be polite.

The sound jolted her heart into her throat. She straightened, palms suddenly slick. Whoever waited outside might know who she was and why she'd woken up in a strange room with no memories.

Or... they might be one more question you aren't ready for. She tried not to think about that.

"Come in," she managed, voice trying to stay steady.

Narina didn’t move at first. She stayed by the mirror, watching.

The door creaked open behind her and a woman stepped through: tall, lean, mid-twenties, Narina guessed. Golden hair fell in soft, deliberate waves past her shoulders, parted to the side. Her face was angular and symmetrical, the kind of beauty that came from posture and poise rather than ornament. Grey eyes, clear and analytical, met Narina’s in the glass.

She didn't feel like a nurse or a passerby. This woman carried authority. Even in reflection, Narina sensed the quiet strength and something tenser beneath it. It felt like something... held, like a mind mid-calculation.

Narina turned.

The woman’s clothing spoke before she did: dark long-sleeved top, cargo pants, scuffed boots and a worn leather bracer circling one wrist. Tactical, she thought to herself. Narina took her in: this wasn’t who she’d expected in a room that smelled faintly of antiseptic.

“Hey, I’m Annabeth Chase,” the woman said steadily. “How are you feeling?”

An introduction. Narina felt her hope crumble. She doesn't know me either.

She pushed the thought aside. “I’m Narina.” A pause. “I don’t know my last name.”

Annabeth blinked once, then crossed to the foot of the bed and checked the file hanging there. She flipped a page. “Vitals are normal,” she murmured. “No visible injuries. No trauma to the head.”

Her expression shifted, making the faintest furrow. Then her eyes lifted, sharper now. “Do you remember anything else? Sounds? Scents? Names?”

“Just my first name,” Narina said. “Everything else is… blank. I know what a window is. What a coat is. But not why I’d own one. Or what city I live in. Or if I have family. It’s like..." she tried to find the words, "I’ve been cut out of my own context.”

The words felt too clean for the truth of them, but she couldn’t say more without unraveling.

Annabeth listened through it all, saying nothing. When Narina finished, the silence that followed stretched longer. Narina watched her. There was a stillness in the way Annabeth thought, the restraint of someone who didn’t guess unless she had to.

Annabeth closed the file and held it loosely by her side. “That's... unusual,” she said at last. “Especially with no cognitive impairment. You’re lucid and there’s no confusion in your speech or your motor function.” She glanced away, as if deep in thought. A flicker crossed her face, gone before it settled. “Unusual... but maybe not unprecedented."

"I’ve seen something like this before,” she added, voice quieter now. “Once or twice.”

Her steady gaze returned to Narina. She put the file aside and stepped forward. "May I sit with you?" she asked.

Narina gave a small nod and Annabeth took a seat on the bed. “You don’t have to remember everything. Just breathe." She tentatively put her hand on Narina's shoulder. It was a small gesture but a comforting one. Narina hadn't realised how tense she was. "You’re safe. That’s the most important thing right now. Everything else? We’ll figure it out together."

For a brief moment Narina felt her nerves calm. But then the questions rushed back to the surface. "If you know what's going on with me, please tell me."

Annabeth tried to deflect, "That can wait. You should focus on resting up for now."

Narina wished she could, but her mind was too active. She could feel it trying and failing to piece together the puzzle of who she was. She forced her voice to come out steadier, "Please, just tell me."

"Alright," Annabeth agreed. "Just... try to keep an open mind."

Narina nodded. She doubted Annabeth could say anything stranger than what she was already going through.

Annabeth focused her gaze on Narina. “When there’s no physical cause, and the mind is still sharp... sometimes it isn’t about injury. Or medicine.” A beat. “Sometimes it has to do with the gods.”

Gods? The word rang wrong, like an off-key note.

Narina froze.

Had she misheard? No. Some kind of joke, then? She searched Annabeth’s tone for irony, metaphor, exaggeration. Nothing, just calm certainty. She hadn’t said "like gods." She meant it literally.

A shiver passed through her sternum. It wasn’t just the word but how she’d said it. Offhand and certain.

Narina’s eyes widened, in disbelief. “...Did you just say gods?” Her voice stayed level, but the sharpness edged through.

Annabeth didn’t flinch. “Yes.” No pause or softening, just confirmation.

Narina’s mind scrambled to rationalise. Is Annabeth delusional? Part of a cult?

She looked up. Annabeth was watching her: sharp, alert, unblinking. A tactical kind of stillness that was considered without being cold. Narina could feel herself being read, her reactions catalogued like variables in a system. Annabeth didn’t just see, she assessed.

“I know how this sounds. But please, just hear me out,” Annabeth began. She spoke like someone who’d said this too many times. “You’re at a place called Camp Half-Blood. It’s a sanctuary for demigods, children of the gods from Greek mythology.” A pause. “I’ve found it’s better to be direct.”

Narina didn’t respond. Her brain was already testing the statement for cracks. Camp Half-Blood. Demigods. Mythology as logistics. She meant it as orientation, not allegory. And somehow, because of how Annabeth said it, it sounded credible. She was too measured, too precise to be spiraling. This wasn’t theory, it was established.

Narina tilted her head slightly. “So… you are a demigod?” she said, barely believing it was a question she'd actually uttered.

“Yes. My mother is Athena. Goddess of wisdom and strategy.” Annabeth looked her in the eye, “And you are one too, Narina.”

Narina stared at her, searching for a punchline that never landed. “You’re telling me I’m the daughter of a myth.” She didn't even sound incredulous, she was far beyond that.

“I know. It’s a lot to take in,” Annabeth said. “I had a hard time believing it myself. Back then.” Her tone was warm and held no mockery.

“That’s an understatement,” Narina muttered.

Annabeth’s lips curved, just barely. Like she’d mapped this pattern before. “I see the doubt in your eyes. The questions you’re holding back. That’s normal.” She let the silence stretch, calculating how much push Narina could take. “But if you let me show you, I can prove it.”

The questions. Not just plural... specific. Like she already knew the list from the way Narina’s hand had tensed at “Athena” and the way her voice had caught at “demigod.” She’s reading me. And she isn’t wrong.

“Okay,” Narina said qietly. “How much weirder could my day get anyway?”

Annabeth rose smoothly with a half-smile on her face. “Come on. Let’s step outside.”

The door groaned open. Warm air rushed in, smelling of pine sap and woodsmoke. Narina followed Annabeth onto the porch, blinking hard. Her eyes stung. The light felt too alive after the still ward room, yet a thin thread of hope tugged at her: maybe something out here will jog the missing pieces.

Her first sight was a deep‑blue house with a wrap‑around porch. The Big House, Annabeth called it. It looked homey, almost sleepy. Not mythical, not divine. For half a heartbeat she relaxed. If the world outside looked ordinary, maybe the talk of gods would crack under daylight. Beyond it, Camp Half-Blood stretched into a sweep of golden fields and clustered cabins. Pine trees bordered the hills in the distance. The air smelled faintly of wildflowers and warm wood. There was movement: figures darting in and out of sight... but nothing overtly strange. It looked like summer camp, Narina thought. Again, not mythical.

But as they stepped off the last stair, details pricked at her nerves. Children — teenagers? — moved between buildings, some laughing, some hauling gear. Two girls passed by them carrying swords the way others carried backpacks. A boy in an orange t-shirt jogged by, bow slung over one shoulder, a quiver bouncing at his hip. Narina didn’t speak yet. She just took it in. This wasn’t normal. But it wasn’t impossible. Not yet.

Annabeth walked a half-step ahead, her pace unhurried. “The Greek gods are real,” she said. “Not just stories. Actual, living beings.” She said it like she was used to the line shocking people. “They still walk the world. Hidden, mostly. But very real, moving with Western civilisation.”

Narina’s pulse thudded. She kept her gaze on an archery line where a girl loosed an arrow. The shaft hit dead centre with no wobble. Another followed, same perfect strike. The ease of it stirred a slow chill behind Narina’s ribs. Form like that didn’t come from theatre.

“The Mist is what keeps mortals from seeing it,” Annabeth continued. “A kind of magical veil. It filters out what shouldn’t be possible. Makes monsters look like wild dogs, gods look like celebrities, that sort of thing.” She glanced back briefly. “You’re only seeing this clearly because… you’re part divine.”

Part divine. Heat crawled up Narina’s neck. The words still refused to sound real.

“Day-to-day, camp’s run by Chiron,” Annabeth added, slipping back into explanation as they walked. “He’s the activities director. He schedules, training, all of that. But technically, he reports to the camp director, Mr. D.”

“Mr. D?” Narina asked. “Does that stand for something?”

Annabeth’s mouth quirked, like she wasn’t sure whether to laugh. “Dionysus. The god of wine. And madness.”

Narina stumbled on a step, her mind blanking for a beat. A god is here. Right now.

Annabeth shot her a look, sensing the pause in her thoughts. “I’ll introduce you eventually, after you’re more settled. Mr. D isn’t exactly… a people person. Let’s just say patience isn’t his strong suit.”

Narina's brain refused to believe it. A god running a summer camp? It was absurd. And yet, Annabeth said it like she was talking about an irritating boss, not something that shattered reality.

Narina pressed her lips together. Don't rush to conclusions. Focus first on what you see. What you observe, she reminded herself.

They reached the training ring. Wooden blades cracked against each other, the sound jolting her pulse faster. Narina tried her best to slow it down. It's intense, yes. But still nothing that can't be explained away by the right circumstances, she reassured herself.

And then she saw him. From behind, the figure looked human: broad shoulders, curly dark hair, t-shirt, cargo shorts. But when he turned, Narina stopped cold.

His legs were wrong. Coarse brown fur covered his legs. Joints bent the wrong way. Hooves met stone with a hard click. Her stomach surged. No costume moves that cleanly.

“Hey Annabeth,” he called cheerfully. He grinned around small, even teeth. A reed pipe hung from his belt like an afterthought. “Chiron wanted— oh. New arrival?”

Annabeth’s answer sounded far away. “Narina, this is Klynos. He’s a satyr.”

Satyr. The word triggered a picture-book memory, and the reality in front of her tore it apart. Narina’s breath snagged high in her chest. Her fingers tingled; she realised she’d balled them into fists.

Klynos lifted a hand in a casual wave. “Welcome to the weird side of the woods.” His smile was lopsided, disarming.

“It’s okay,” he said, seeing Narina’s expression. “I get that look a lot.”

No anger rose, only a heavy hush, like the second before glass splinters. Her brain flipped through explanations: prosthetics, genetic disorder, elaborate prank, and threw each out.

Narina forced one breath, then another, grounding on the gravel beneath her boots. The world was not reverting to normal.

“Okay,” she said at last, voice thin but steady. “That… isn’t theatre.”

Her heart kept pounding, but the words helped. Naming it pinned the fear to the board.

Klynos looked between them and chuckled softly. “You want me to show her the lyre trick or is it too soon?”

They kept walking.

Narina was quieter now, restless despite the silence. Her mind was crowded: thought after thought pressing in, looping too fast to finish. The same air still clung to her skin: pine, sun-warmed dust, woodsmoke, but it no longer felt the same. Something in her had shifted, like she’d tilted just slightly inside and now gravity pulled at the wrong angle.

Annabeth must’ve noticed. She gave Narina a sidelong glance then spoke gently, like she knew better than to come in too loud. “You probably knew most of this already,” she said. “If not for the amnesia… I’d bet Camp would feel familiar to you.”

Narina’s eyebrows drew together. “What makes you say that?”

Annabeth considered her. “Around the time demigods turn twelve, monsters start showing up. The only way we survive is if someone finds us and brings us somewhere safe. Camp Half-Blood. Camp Jupiter. A few smaller places.”

She looked over, direct but not accusing. “You’re what— mid-twenties? That means you’ve probably been training for years. Living somewhere like this.”

The logic made sense, but it still sat wrong in Narina’s chest. She didn’t know why, only that it snagged on something. Her expression didn’t change, but her eyes stayed fixed on Annabeth even after she finished speaking.

As they turned the corner, gravel gave way to scorched earth and the air began to thicken. Narina heard it before she felt it: metal on metal, rhythmic and sharp. They were approaching a forge.

The structure ahead was open-walled, more like a workshop pavilion. Smoke curled from chimneys. Inside, campers worked in pairs, tending bellows, adjusting clamps, muttering over half-formed mechanisms.

Narina felt her body react involuntarily. Her shoulders shifted, like she was listening without knowing what she was listening for. Something about the place was causing her heart to ache.

Her eyes swept the space, trying to identify what caused the feeling. She took inventory of what she saw: the layout, the safety patterns, the alloys. A wall of schematics inked in dense, efficient strokes caught her attention. She didn’t understand them, but something about it felt vaguely familiar. Her hands twitched.

Annabeth noticed, but stayed silent beside her. Maybe she understood. Or maybe she was still deciding how much to say.

From one of the central stations, a figure stood out: lean frame, curly dark hair, sleeves shoved to the elbows, welding mask tilted back. There was grease streaked across his arms. Mid-twenties at most, Narina thought. His movement was fast but focused. It had a kind of confidence that was less about posture and more about momentum. Like he was always mid-project. The air around him crackled. Not just from the forge, but from some inner combustion he hadn’t bothered to tame.

"Meet Leo Valdez," Annabeth said. "He builds things, blows them up, then somehow fixes them again. He's a friend.”

He didn’t immediately look up. Just reached for a metal rod, adjusted a clamp and started a grinding tool. Sparks bloomed where steel met stone. Then, without warning: “Most people flinch.”

Narina blinked, then turned to look at him

Leo glanced over his shoulder, eyes sharp but kind. “You didn’t.”

He wiped his hands on a rag then strolled toward them, a slight bounce in his step. He gave Annabeth a quick nod, more habit than greeting, then turned his full attention to Narina. “First time here?”

Annabeth answered. “She just arrived. Still acclimating.”

Leo studied Narina like a blueprint. “You got the look,” he said finally.

“What look?”

“The one Hephaestus kids get. When they see something that makes their fingers itch. Like they want to take it apart, see how it ticks.”

Narina spoke slowly. “I... don’t think I’m a child of Hephaestus.”

He shrugged, still watching her with curiosity. “Could’ve fooled me. You walked past celestial bronze like it was nothing. And you’ve been staring at that schematic like it insulted your engineering degree.”

Annabeth interjected, gently. “We don’t know her parentage yet. There’s some... amnesia.”

Something changed in Leo’s eyes, a soft recalibration. The way he reexamined Narina changed, less diagnostic now.

"Ah... Like Jason," he said, his voice unexpectedly wistful.

Narina wanted to ask more about this Jason, but Annabeth shot her a look, as if telling her not to press.

“Well, that explains it,” Leo said after a brief pause. Then, almost to himself: “Still. Instinct’s not nothing.”

A few paces away, a camper struck metal. The note it made was pure and resonant. Narina didn’t know why, but her chest tightened like she’d missed it.

Annabeth turned to her. “You okay?”

Narina nodded, but the weight in her chest didn’t shift. The forge didn’t feel like home... but it didn’t feel like a stranger either.

Leo seemed to pick up on the dissonance. He didn’t push. Just stepped back, motioned toward a curved wrench on the nearest bench. “If you ever get the itch,” he said, “the tools here don’t bite. Well, except the plasma cutters. They bite real hard.” A ghost of a smile flickered on his lips. Then he was gone: back to his workstation, back into the rhythm.

Annabeth touched Narina’s arm lightly. “We can keep moving.”

Narina hesitated. Not from doubt, but from some quieter signal in her bones.

She gave the forge one last look, then followed.

The sun had begun its slow descent by the time Annabeth and Narina crossed the final stretch of the camp’s winding paths. Shadows stretched long across the grass. The sound of distant laughter mixed with the occasional clash of sparring swords and the rhythmic thump of arrows finding their mark.

They reached a low wooden cabin tucked into the outer ring of buildings. Its paint was peeling slightly at the edges and the front step creaked as Annabeth led the way up. Above the door, carved into the weather-worn lintel, was a set of wings and a caduceus.

Annabeth paused with one hand on the doorknob. “This is where you'll stay for now,” she said. “Until we figure out where you belong, Hermes' cabin is kind of the catch-all. Kids who haven’t been claimed yet or whose parentage is complicated.”

Narina eyed the building. It was a little crowded-looking, with several bunks visible through the windows and clotheslines stretched from the porch to a nearby tree. Still, there was something about it that felt lived-in. She didn’t move to enter. Instead, she folded her arms and turned slightly toward Annabeth. Though they'd only met a few short hours ago, Narina felt comfortable with her. She didn’t trust the world yet, but she trusted the woman in front of her.

She tried to keep her tone as even as possible but there was a subtle tension running through it. “I still don’t know if I believe any of this. Gods, monsters, prophecies.”

Annabeth didn’t look offended. She nodded, like she’d heard it all before. “That’s fair.”

Narina's eyes flicked briefly toward the training fields, where someone shouted in triumph. Then to the forge, still glowing faintly in the distance. Then back to Annabeth. “But I’ve seen things today I can’t explain. And you—” She hesitated. “I believe you.”

Annabeth smiled, her gaze softening slightly. Narina met her eyes. “So if you don’t mind... can you tell me everything? From the beginning.”

There was a pause. A quiet moment between them filled only by wind and the creak of the trees. Then Annabeth opened the door.

“Come inside.” She stepped back, holding it open. “This may take a while.”

Chapter Text

ACT I: The Mystery

Chapter 2: Off Key

PoV: Narina

"...so monsters, gods, the Mist. All of it operates under its own kind of logic. Hidden, but structured." Annabeth's voice was assured, a steady presentation of facts she no longer questioned.

Silence followed. Long enough that the breeze outside the Hermes cabin made its way in, brushing the wooden floor with a whisper. Narina sat on the edge of the bunk, elbows on knees, gaze focused on a spot somewhere past the floorboards. For a moment, she said nothing and Annabeth didn’t press. Finally, Narina blinked. Just once.

"Okay."

She didn’t say it with belief or disbelief. It was a placeholder – like pinning a variable for later analysis. Her mind was still catching up. This entire narrative: gods, monsters, magical borders; it should’ve set off every alarm bell. It did. But beneath the rational protests, she trusted Annabeth.

Annabeth was studying her reaction. Narina could tell without looking up: The pause, the presence, the way Annabeth didn’t fill the silence. All of it registered. Narina realised she was studying Annabeth back. She was learning the shape of this woman’s mind: neither pushy nor patronising, just still. The kind of person who didn’t need to speak to hold space. In the time they’d spoken, she'd come to respect the way Annabeth moved through the world: calm, self-assured, articulate without needing to dominate a room. Like she had nothing to prove, but everything to teach. That counted for something.

Narina exhaled softly through her nose. Then, trying to lighten the mood: "Great. So I’m the protagonist of a YA novel."

The joke came out awkward and she immediately regretted it. Where did that come from?

But then Annabeth huffed a quiet breath and chuckled softly. "Let’s hope not. Those girls never get enough sleep."

Narina smiled for the first time since waking up. It was small but it was something.

"Well, I'll let you settle in," Annabeth said as she stood, smoothing out her pants. "If you need anything, I’ll be at Cabin Six for the rest of the weekend."

Narina looked up. "Athena."

"Exactly."

They held each other’s gaze for a moment longer. "Thank you," Narina said.

Annabeth gave a small nod then walked to the door. She paused and turned back before closing it, "I know it's tough, but you're not alone, Narina." And with that, the door shut behind her with a soft click.

Narina sat still for several breaths then leaned back slightly, gaze drifting up to the ceiling. For the first time since waking up, Narina was alone with nothing but her own thoughts. She thought of the satyr. Not the idea of a satyr, the actual satyr. Klynos. With the legs, the hooves and the lopsided grin. Her brain had tried, in real time, to explain him away: prosthetics, performance art, a camp with a very committed LARP budget. But none of those theories survived more than a few seconds under scrutiny. And the lyre trick? Well, that was something else entirely. In any case, if she was willing to accept that Klynos and his hooves were real, then the rest: gods, monsters, magical wards... it wasn’t that much of a leap. It was either that, or assume she was hallucinating with perfect sensory integration, and she didn’t feel particularly psychotic.

Besides, the hallucination theory didn't account for Annabeth. Or the forge. Or the way everyone moved like they knew.

Fine. She would believe it. Not forever, not blindly, but for now. Until she had a better hypothesis.

Her fingers tightened around her knees. Now that the myths were settled and filed away under provisional reality, the only thing left to reckon with was herself.

Who was she?

Annabeth had said most demigods were claimed by their godly parent around age twelve, when they arrived at a camp like this. But try as she might, she just could not remember who had claimed her. Who was her godly parent? Leo had guessed Hephaestus back at the forge and it wasn’t a bad guess. She hadn’t flinched at the sparks, hadn’t looked away from the schematics. The forge had felt... if not familiar, then at least intelligible. But Athena was a possibility too. The way Narina thought before she moved, the way she studied people like puzzles to be solved. That kind of calibration didn’t come from nowhere.

She wished she knew, just for some orientation. If someone could point and say: That one. That’s where your instincts came from. That’s the divine blueprint, it would at least be a start.

But the memories were gone.

She clenched her jaw. It was one thing not to remember a birthday, a favourite book, a face. But this was a whole self, erased. A history stripped clean. She didn’t even have fragments: no flickers of laughter or panic or names whispered in the dark. Only the present, pristine and contextless. She was a sealed file with corrupted metadata. And the worst part? She still worked. Her brain fired on all cylinders. Her instincts were clean. She functioned. So who had she been? And who had made her forget?

How had she gotten here, exactly?

Maybe that was the first step, the entry point to everything else. If she could trace the path that brought her to this camp, maybe she could begin to unravel the silence inside her. Annabeth had mentioned someone. A name... Clarisse? From the Ares cabin. Apparently, she’d been the one to bring Narina in.

Time to pay Cabin Five a visit.

Cabin Five looked like it had been designed by someone with strong opinions about pain. It sat at the edge of the cabin circle like a clenched fist. The outer walls were scorched in patches, reinforced with metal braces and lined with weapon racks. A pair of battered shields flanked the doorway, both visibly used. The roof bristled with spears. Literal spears. As in: someone had embedded them there intentionally and left them in place like a warning or a dare. Narina took it in with the same detached curiosity she’d used on celestial bronze.

A woman stood off to the side, wiping down the blade of a short, broad-ended spear with what looked like an old Camp Half-Blood t-shirt. She was tall, broad-shouldered, and visibly muscular. Not in a sculpted, training-app kind of way, but like someone who’d earned it over years of carrying heavy things through enemy territory. Her hair was tied back in a rough ponytail, streaked with sun-bleached gold and old battle grime. Her face was angular, slightly weathered, and totally unbothered by it. There was a scar across one eyebrow that did not, in any cinematic sense, detract from her expression. If anything, it made her look more annoyed.

The woman didn’t look up immediately. She moved with the practised economy of someone who cleaned weapons more often than she spoke. Her clothes were standard camp fare: orange shirt, cut-off fatigues, but there was a weight to the way she stood, a readiness. Like she could end a fight before it started and would be mildly disappointed if she had to.

Narina watched her for a few moments longer. There was something oddly reassuring about how grounded the woman seemed. Brutal, yes, but also... present. Like the kind of person who wouldn’t forget who she was, even if the rest of the world did.

Well, she matches the description Annabeth gave. She stepped closer. "You must be Clarisse."

Clarisse looked up. Her gaze swept over Narina once, flat and unimpressed. "And you’re the amnesiac demigod whose ass I saved."

Narina inclined her head. "Seems likely."

Clarisse grunted. She slung the now-clean spear across her back. "Right. Well. Don’t get used to people going easy on you. Camp doesn’t run on pity."

Narina didn’t flinch. "Wasn’t expecting a fruit basket."

Not again… She wondered if there was a god of bad jokes.

"Huh. You’re not soft. Good. I hate soft." Clarisse eyed her again, this time with something bordering on respect.

There was a pause. Clarisse scratched the back of her neck like she was weighing whether or not to bother continuing. She looked, for a moment, like someone forced to read aloud from a feelings journal at gunpoint. "Look," she muttered, eyes flicking away, "memory stuff... it fucks with your head. Even if you act fine. You’re not. I’ve seen it."

It was gruff and awkward, but it landed. Narina nodded once. "Thanks."

Clarisse cleared her throat hard enough to reset the air. "So. You here to ask about what happened?"

"Yes. How did I get here, exactly?"

Clarisse leaned against one of the shield posts. "I was on a quest. Rescue op. Didn’t know who I was looking for, just that someone was in danger and the timing was tight. The signs pointed to Manhattan."

Clarisse continued, "Got there just in time to see you running from three monsters. Manticore, empousa, and a laistrygonian giant. Real teeth-and-claws variety pack."

Narina blinked. "Thanks for saving me."

Clarisse grunted, like thanks were mildly offensive. "One of my fastest rescues ever," she added. "Monsters actually made my job easier by herding you straight toward me. Nice of them, really. Felt like they gift-wrapped you." The corner of her mouth twitched, not quite a smile but close.

Clarisse gave a short, almost nostalgic laugh. "Made my job simple. Skewered the empousa, the other two scattered. Was kinda hoping for more of a brawl, honestly. Been itching for one." She shrugged. "You fainted. I hauled you back here. You’d better be worth the bruises."

Narina said nothing, just listened. But her eyes lingered on Clarisse for a moment longer. This woman was neither kind nor warm. Not someone who would ever soften her voice for your comfort. But she was dependable in the way steel was: blunt, cold, and hard to break. Narina wasn’t sure she liked her, but she understood her.

Clarisse didn’t say anything else. She just turned back to her gear and continued cleaning her spear, like the conversation had ended five minutes ago. Narina waited a beat, half-expecting another comment. None came. She got the hint. Without a word, she turned and started back toward Cabin Eleven.

Narina walked with her hands in her pockets and her thoughts trailing behind her like smoke. Clarisse’s voice still rang faintly in her head: blunt, scarred, unmistakably real. The woman had left a mark. She was the kind of person who operated with a built-in perimeter. You were either inside it or not. Narina wasn’t sure where she stood yet. The gravel crunched underfoot in a steady rhythm. The air smelled faintly of pine and forge smoke, with the sun warm against her neck. She wasn’t sure what she expected to feel after that conversation. Insight? Clarity? A sense of narrative progression? Instead, she just felt... unfinished.

"Narina?"

She stopped. The voice came from off to her left: low, male, almost cautious, pitched like it didn’t want to startle her. She turned.

The man standing a few feet away was tall, with sea-green eyes that caught the light like shallow surf, and messy black hair that refused to obey gravity. He didn’t move immediately. Just stood there, grounded and utterly unbothered by it, like stillness was an old friend.

Narina's mind processed the data. Observations came easy to her. He wore a weathered brown leather jacket over an orange Camp Half-Blood t-shirt, sleeves pushed up to the forearms, as if ready for action or maybe just a little too warm. The jacket suggested mileage; the shirt, allegiance.

A small blade rested in a sheath at his hip and a leather bracelet circled one wrist: similar to the one Annabeth wore, Narina noted. His pants were dark and functional, cuffed at the ankles... and he was barefoot, with the ease of someone who didn’t need the protection. Narina’s eyes narrowed slightly. That was... stranger. It felt sort of elemental, almost like he was part of the ground.

She refocused on his face. His expression was open but layered: a faint crease at the brow, a softness around the eyes. Neither cheerful nor worried, just... present. The kind of presence people tried to fake with posture and failed. She didn’t know him, but she understood that others probably did.

He took a step forward. "I’m Percy. Annabeth’s fiancé." He offered a small, lopsided smile. "She filled me in on your... memory situation. How are you holding up?"

Percy Jackson. Of course. Narina smiled, reflecting on the way Annabeth had spoken about Percy during their talk. There was a slight shift in her tone whenever his name came up. A certainty in her phrasing, like there was no version of the story that didn’t include him.

"Nice to meet you." Narina studied him for a bit longer. "I haven't bitten anyone, if that's what you're asking."

This time it was intentional. Turns out bad jokes were good stress tests to see how seriously people took themselves.

Percy chuckled, low and unforced. "Good start."

He shifted his weight, just a little. His stance was loose but deliberate, like he knew how to stay balanced on uncertain terrain. "Not sure if Annabeth mentioned it," he said, "but I’ve actually been through the same thing. Divine amnesia. No memories, just my name and a weird feeling that I was supposed to matter. It’s disorienting as hell. If you ever want to talk to someone who’s been there, I’m around."

"She did mention it. Something about a Greek-Roman alliance?"

He grimaced, like the phrase left a bad taste. "Yeah. Camp Jupiter. Roman demigods. I woke up there with no idea who I was, got shoved into their world and told to keep up. Didn’t know my own name until it slipped out by accident halfway through a monster fight."

He glanced toward the woods as if expecting the past to materialize. "Hera did it. Wiped my memories. Dropped me there like some mythological peace offering. Said it would build trust between the camps." His voice stayed even, but the undercurrent was sharp, like the edge of a blade just visible under calm water. "Apparently, suffering builds character."

He paused, then added with a sigh, "And... fine I guess it worked in the end. We did get the alliance... and some perspective, I guess."

Narina absorbed it without comment. A chill crawled up the inside of her. There was something quietly awful in the idea of being offered up like a diplomatic test case. But it also made her pause. Percy talked like it had been impersonal. Maybe even justified.

She drew a slow breath. "Can I ask… how do you feel about it? I mean—emotionally." She wasn’t sure why the question mattered, only that it suddenly did.

Percy fixed his gaze on a spot in the grass. For a brief moment he seemed younger, shoulders rounding inward. "Most days?" he exhaled through his nose, "I tell myself it served a greater good. And that’s mostly true. But whenever I let myself sit with it— Yeah, I’m still bitter. Angry, sometimes. At the idea that a god can just... hit reset because the narrative needed it."

Narina nodded slowly. She could recognise that anger as valid. Necessary, even. But inside her, all she found was static. Anger required a shape: something lost, something loved. She didn’t yet remember enough of what she'd lost to grieve, let alone rage. Mostly she felt displaced, like a variable waiting to be defined. The closest feeling she could name was longing. To understand who she was and what it was all for.

Narina's voice was quiet. "And what greater good was my memory taken for?"

Percy looked at her then, really looked, the lines around his eyes deepening. "I don’t know," he said honestly. "But you’re not alone here. The camp has your back. I’ve got your back. We’ll figure it out together."

"Thanks for answering," she said quietly. Percy offered a half‑shrug, accepting the unfinishedness of it.

Percy let the silence linger, then tried again, lighter this time. "Anyway. Bet you still get the urge to punch a Minotaur, right?"

She raised an eyebrow. "Not really? Should I?"

He laughed, a little sheepishly. "Maybe that was just me."

Then he added, more seriously, "What threw me the most wasn’t losing my memories. It was how familiar everything felt. Gods, monsters: it all clicked somewhere deep. Like my body remembered what my mind didn’t."

Narina tilted her head. "That’s... not how it feels for me. Not at all."

Percy hesitated, just for a fraction. "Huh. That’s... weird. I mean— Jason and I, we were both freaked at first. But there was always this gut-level yes. Like I’d walked into a dream I’d had before."

Narina shook her head. "It’s not just unfamiliar. It feels fake. Like a high-budget illusion everyone else is in on. I’m trying to stay open-minded, but nothing about this world feels like mine."

Percy tilted his head, half-smiling. But she saw it then: the quiet recalibration in his posture, like he was searching for something that should’ve been there and coming up short. He didn’t say anything, but Narina didn’t need him to. Whatever connection he’d hoped to build, it wasn’t forming.

He frowned slightly. "Hey, uh. Can I try something?"

Narina raised an eyebrow. "That depends. Do I need a helmet?"

"No, just... come with me."

They walked a short distance to a nearby training ground: an open space with dummies, weapons racks, and circular rings of trampled dirt. Percy grabbed two blades from a rack, flipping one hilt-first toward Narina.

She caught it clumsily, the weight surprising her. She stared at the blade, and awkwardly rotated it in her grip.

"Which end is the user manual?"

Percy gave a crooked smile. "This is a xiphos. Just trust your instincts. Muscle memory’s a hell of a thing."

He stepped forward, lifting his own blade slowly and non-threateningly. "I’m going to swing. Not hard. Just block it."

Narina’s brows drew together. "You're going to—"

Too late. The blade came toward her in a smooth arc. She raised her weapon with both hands... but the grip was wrong, the angle sloppy. The swords met with a sharp clang, and hers went spinning from her hands, landing with a thud in the dirt.

She stumbled back, breathing hard.

Percy’s eyes widened. "Whoa! Are you okay?"

"Fine," she said, though her pride winced harder than her wrists.

He stepped closer, lowering his blade. "Sorry. I thought—" He hesitated. "I thought you'd have it. When Jason and I got our memories wiped by Hera, we still remembered how to fight. Like, our bodies just knew.

Annabeth had filled Narina in about Jason too. She knew better than to ask more about him even without Annabeth here to glare at her this time.

“It was freaky, but kind of useful. I figured you'd have something like that too,” Percy continued.

Narina didn’t answer. She was still staring at the blade in the dirt and wondering, not for the first time, what exactly she was missing. "I don’t think I ever knew how to fight. But... intellectually? It’s like... there’s a scaffolding in place. I can make observations and test hypotheses like it’s second nature. I still think like someone trained in a discipline. I just don’t know what discipline."

Percy paused, thrown by the phrasing. "Huh. So, more like muscle memory of the brain."

Narina nodded, dryly amused. "Something like that."

Percy chuckled, but it didn’t fully land. "You’re a different breed of amnesiac, I’ll give you that."

She caught it then: the smile still on his face, but his eyes had shifted. He was trying to keep it light, but there was an undercurrent now. The faintest hint of unease.

They didn’t talk much on the walk back. Percy kept the silence comfortable: no forced chatter, just the occasional glance to make sure she was keeping pace. But Narina could tell that something in him had shifted, a crack in the certainty he’d carried when they first met. A quiet question he hadn’t expected to be asking. He stopped a few feet from Cabin Eleven and offered a gentle nod. "I’ll go find Annabeth. She’ll want to know how it went."

Narina nodded back. "Tell her I didn’t stab anyone."

"Gold star," Percy said, and this time the smile reached his eyes, if only faintly. Then he turned and walked off, back toward the heart of camp, leaving damp footprints in the dust.

Narina stepped inside. The cabin was still empty, still humming faintly with ambient magic and the faint scent of aged wood and laundry detergent. She thought about Percy Jackson. He had been easy to talk to. He seemed like someone who made decisions fast and dealt with the consequences later: not reckless but instinctive. He and Annabeth were almost opposites in how they handled things. Yet somehow they made sense, complemented each other. Narina hadn’t seen them together but she could imagine it. She wondered what it would be like to have that. Someone who fit next to you like it was natural. Did I ever have someone like that?

She climbed up to her bunk, where someone, probably Annabeth, had left a neatly folded map of Camp Half-Blood on the pillow. She unfolded it slowly, scanning the layout. She traced paths with her finger: cabins to dining hall, forge to arena, strawberry fields to woods; as if memorising the shape of the place would make it feel like hers. It didn’t. The structures were neat and the categories made sense, but something was missing. Not from the map, but from her. There was no layer, no tether.

Her name still sat strangely in her mouth. Narina. It felt real but incomplete. She had no flashbacks, nightmares or headaches. Just... absence. As if someone had scrubbed her past with clinical precision and left her behind to guess at the outline.

Her eyes drifted to the window where a breeze stirred the curtains. Somewhere far off, she could hear the sound of waves. She lay there listening to the waves and closed her eyes. Her purpose and identity remained a riddle, but it felt like something had begun. And Narina, despite everything, was still here.

Still asking.

Chapter Text

ACT I: The Mystery

Chapter 3: Marked by Fire and Choice

PoV: Annabeth

The forge's annex was quiet at this hour. The fires in the main forge had long since died down and the metal tables still held the warmth of their earlier work. Annabeth sat on the edge of one, boots resting on the lower rung of a stool, hands folded loosely in her lap. The air smelled faintly of solder and iron filings; a kind of clarity she appreciated. Clean, not in the sterile sense, but in the way good design was clean. Everything here had a purpose.

This wasn’t a place most campers came after hours. It wasn’t off-limits, just tucked out of the way. She came here sometimes when her thoughts were too structured to sit still. Behind her, the door creaked open.

"Thought I'd find you here," a voice said.

She didn’t turn immediately. Just let the familiarity of his voice settle into the room before answering. A smile appeared on her face. "Of course you did. You know how forge air helps me think."

Percy stepped inside, quiet-footed despite the boots. A glance told her he'd changed out of his camp shirt and into a dark thermal, sleeves pushed to his elbows. He looked comfortable, but something in his eyes carried the weight of a thought still forming.

"You talked to her," she said. Not a question.

Percy nodded. "Yeah. Just now."

Annabeth shifted slightly, boots scraping softly against metal. "And?"

He didn’t answer right away. Instead, he picked up a stray tool from the workbench (a narrow spanner), turned it once in his hands, then set it down again. "Something’s off," he said. "Like... not wrong. Just not familiar."

Annabeth raised an eyebrow. She knew her fiancé wasn’t one to be vague without reason.

He leaned against the opposite table, facing her now. "You remember how I was, after Hera—"

"I remember."

"I still had the instincts and the muscle memory. The world felt... I don’t know. Like a song I couldn’t name, but still recognised."

Annabeth nodded once. That had been one of the markers. Divine amnesia didn’t wipe everything. Personality, values, instincts; those tended to remain.

Percy rubbed the back of his neck. "Narina doesn’t have that. Not even a trace."

That made her still: not enough for most to notice, but Percy did. He always did. "No combat instinct?"

"None. I tossed her a xiphos. She nearly dropped it on her own foot."

Annabeth frowned. "But she walked into the forge like she belonged there."

There was a long silence. Not awkward, but densely packed. She trusted Percy’s read on people. He was better than anyone she knew at listening when someone talked and catching what they didn’t say. If he felt something was off, she believed him.

Annabeth let her thoughts unfurl, quiet and precise. Narina had arrived with no memories, but her physicality was composed, her thinking intact. She lacked combat response, but her spatial awareness was refined. She hadn’t flinched at celestial bronze and had studied the forge like a schematic.

Annabeth folded her arms. "Alright, let's examine the facts."

"First," she said, her voice sharpening slightly as she stepped away from the table, "Narina looks to be in her mid-twenties. Which means she’s too old to have survived on her own this whole time. No demigod makes it that far without training or protection. She must have had shelter and combat instruction somewhere."

Percy leaned back, brow furrowed in thought. "Then yeah, most likely? She grew up at a camp. Obviously not Half-Blood, or we’d remember her. But maybe Jupiter or one of the smaller ones that have been cropping up lately... gods, it’s hard to keep track."

Annabeth made a quiet sound in agreement. "I’ll check with Frank, see if she’s from Jupiter. But my bet is on one of the smaller ones. We should send out a message to the camps we know about and see if anyone recognises her."

Percy gave a quiet nod. Then, softer: "Wherever she’s from... someone’s probably worried sick."

Annabeth felt the weight of that. She remembered the ache when he'd vanished. The days where logic failed and fear took over, when every hour stretched impossibly long because she didn’t know where he was. It had been one of the worst periods of her life.

She blinked it away. Stay focused, Annabeth.

"Okay. Second." Her tone leveled out again, brisk and clinical. "No head trauma, language deficit or confusion about daily life. This is episodic and targeted, which means it's very unlikely to be normal amnesia from physical causes."

She paused. "So our best theory is mythical interference. Some kind of memory curse or divine suppression."

Percy's eyes narrowed. "But it's not quite the same as what Jason and I went through."

Annabeth looked over at him, "Exactly. Not a hint of deja vu. Not a trace of combat reflexes."

She began to pace, one hand brushing her chin. "So... either this isn’t Hera, or Hera changed the playbook. Could this be another god? Someone who wanted a full reset instead of just a shuffle?"

Percy crossed his arms loosely. "Maybe it isn't a god at all? They’re not the only ones who can tamper with memories."

She glanced at him. "You're thinking monsters? Mnemosyne’s children, Lethe naiads?"

"That’s what I meant, yeah."

Annabeth went still for a moment, weighing it. It was a good question. A small smile tugged at her mouth. Percy had a way of doing this: cutting straight to something important without even realising it. He was a lot smarter than he ever gave himself credit for, and she made a point to remind him whenever she could.

“Nice catch,” she said, her voice softer now, a trace of a smile lingering as she met his eyes. “You’re right to bring it up. It's possible..."

She thought a moment longer before sighing, "...but unlikely. Most monsters that mess with minds do it violently: dreams, illusions, madness. Narina isn’t broken. She’s calm, cogent and eerily intact." She looked up, her voice quieting. "This feels like someone removed what they didn’t want her to know... and left everything else perfectly intact. That feels more like divine strategy than brute force."

She paused again, then added, more to herself: "Or maybe artefacts. Lethe water, Lotus Casino enchantments, Hecate’s illusions. Even cursed locations or enchanted weapons. But..." She ticked through the list with sharp efficiency, one finger tapping lightly against her arm. "Lethe water would leave her dull or vacant; Narina is sharp and observant. Lotus Casino-type spells cause dreamlike detachment; Narina is lucid and grounded. Hecate illusions might mask myth memories, but not erase her name, role, or identity. Cursed items usually leave magical residue or trauma. This is a clean, total wipe."

She trailed off and the silence settled again. When she looked up, Percy was watching her. His expression wasn’t amused, or even impressed exactly. It was something steadier. Like he was remembering, all over again, exactly why he’d fallen in love with her.

Annabeth blinked. "What?" she said, trying (and failing) to sound annoyed.

He smiled, the slow, lopsided kind that always threw her off balance. "You’re just... incredible when you do that."

She flushed and turned slightly, brushing nonexistent dust from the table. "I do logic every day, Seaweed Brain."

"Yeah," he said softly. "Still gets me."

She didn’t answer that. Not aloud.

"Oh— one more thing she said," Percy added, "Not about fighting. About her mind."

Annabeth looked over, attentive.

"She said it felt trained. Like she’d studied something. She just can’t remember what."

Annabeth replayed their earlier conversation: the way Narina had absorbed information, asked questions, drawn clean mental lines.

"Yeah... I clocked that too," she said. "When I told her that monsters regenerated in Tartarus, she asked me if they did it through cellular repair... Just before she asked me if gods are 'independent entities, or psychological archetypes that gained external form through belief saturation.'"

"She used those words?"

"Verbatim."

Annabeth rubbed her chin. "And the way she logically studied the room and even me. It was like she was running a diagnostic. Definitely not just instinct... it felt learned."

Percy grinned. "From you, that basically counts as a marriage proposal."

Annabeth shot him a look, but the corner of her mouth betrayed her. "Careful, Jackson. I already proposed once."

“Still the best tactical decision you’ve ever made,” came Percy’s reply.

It was.

She turned back to the table, thoughts clicking forward as she refocused. "So maybe she was a planner or a tactician. Someone who operated behind the front lines: magical research, battlefield analysis, maybe even prophecy."

"Could be a daughter of Athena," she added. "Though I’d expect more edge."

Percy tilted his head, eyes still on her. "She had presence. Just not... armour."

Silence stretched between them again, but it wasn’t empty. It was the kind they knew how to share: quiet, reflective, shaped by the rhythm of old partnership. The forge annex was still, save for the creak of settling wood and the soft hum of distant wind. It could’ve been minutes or hours. Neither of them filled it with false urgency. Finally, Annabeth stood. "We’ve hit the limit of what we can guess from scraps."

Percy straightened. "Where are you going?"

She was already moving toward the door. "To get better scraps."

She glanced back at him with a raised brow. "You in?"

Percy pushed off the table without hesitation. "Always."

They found Chiron in the library of the Big House, hunched over a cracked leather-bound text that looked older than the floorboards beneath him. The scent of old ash clung faintly to the pages, like memory preserved in smoke. He closed the book as they entered, his expression unreadable. Annabeth crossed the threshold first, Percy just behind. She gave a brief, respectful nod. “We need to talk.”

Chiron’s eyes moved from her to Percy and back again. “I gathered as much.”

They filled him in quickly, alternating points. Percy relayed the details of Narina’s reactions (or lack thereof) while Annabeth clarified her deductions. When they finished, Chiron was quiet. He leaned back in his chair, the old wood creaking beneath him.

“You’ve seen this kind of amnesia before,” Annabeth said.

Chiron folded his hands. “I’ve seen many kinds. This one... resembles certain divine interventions, yes.”

“Like Hera?” Percy asked.

“There are... echoes,” Chiron said, his voice careful. “Patterns the gods leave behind when they interfere. You start to recognise the residue, even if you can’t see the hand.”

“But the residue’s different this time,” Annabeth pressed.

He nodded once, gravely. “Different enough to trouble me.”

The old clock on the wall ticked three more times before Chiron answered.

“I think Narina is significant. And I think someone does not want us asking why.”

Annabeth watched his hands, how still they were. Chiron only kept that kind of stillness when something unsettled him. He stood, joints stiff with age and weight both real and symbolic. He moved to the wide window overlooking the Camp.

“What makes you say that?” Annabeth asked.

“It is as much about what I have not heard as it is about what I have,” Chiron replied. "Officially, I haven't received any information about Narina. No word from Olympus." He paused. "But unofficially? I've heard whispers about her. Fragments. Nothing clear... but one phrase stands out."

He turned slightly, looking somewhere just past them. “Marked by fire, and by choice.”

Percy gave a dry huff. “Well, that doesn't sound ominous at all.”

“It isn’t a threat,” Chiron said, turning back to them. “But it is deliberate. Someone, or something, chose her path. And until we understand why, we protect her.”

His gaze shifted briefly toward the window again. “I have spoken to Dionysus about it, to see if he knew anything. But...” his mouth tightened slightly, “he has not been helpful. Or interested, truthfully. You know how Mr. D is.”

Annabeth caught Percy rolling his eyes before he even spoke.

“Yeah,” Percy said. “If it’s not about cards or soda, good luck getting him to care.”

Chiron’s expression softened, almost indulgent despite the gravity of the conversation.

“I’ve already sent word to the smaller camps,” Annabeth said, getting the conversation back on track. “The ones that don’t answer to us or to Camp Jupiter. Maybe she came through one of them."

Chiron inclined his head. “That's wise. Until we hear back... I think it best Narina stays here. Without her memory or training she’s vulnerable. Letting her roam while gods or monsters may be watching... it would be abandonment.”

“So we keep her grounded,” Percy said.

Chiron's voice was low but sure. "We give her time, shelter and safety. That’s what this place was built for."

Something in Annabeth stilled. She remembered what it was like to be young and hunted, to cling to logic while the world turned mythic around her. She remembered the relief of not having to know everything. Of someone older saying: "You don’t have to run anymore."

She exhaled. It wasn’t the clarity she wanted, but she could tell Chiron didn't know anything more. It would have to do... for now.

The sun had dipped below the tree line by the time they stepped out of the Big House. Camp Half-Blood stretched around them in quiet hues, the lake reflecting streaks of copper, cabins flickering to life with lamplight. The forge fires had dimmed, and the air smelled faintly of pine and smoke.

Annabeth waited at the top step, jaw tight. Percy stood beside her, watching the wind play with the torchlight down the hill. She let out a slow breath. “Marked by fire and choice. That could mean a dozen things.”

“None of them good.”

They walked together in silence. There were few things Annabeth hated more than uncertainty.

“We’ll keep an eye on her,” she said finally. “No interference. Not unless we have to.”

Percy nodded. “Just... stay close. See what surfaces. You think that’s going to be enough?”

“No,” she admitted. “But it’s a start.”

Annabeth glanced sideways at Percy. There was something in his voice, caution edged with instinct. “You think she’s dangerous.”

He shrugged. “I think she’s important. And that’s usually accompanied by some danger.”

They reached the fork in the path. Ahead, the Athena cabin stood quiet and still. Inside, a young camper was sketching blueprints under a warm desk lamp.

Annabeth slowed, then stopped. The cabin looked the same as ever: austere, orderly, a little too bright. She and Percy had their own apartment in Manhattan now, full of clutter and noise and overlapping toothbrushes. But whenever they came back to camp, they still returned to their old cabins.

“Let’s keep this between us for now.”

Percy replied immediately. “Agreed.”

“And if something changes...”

He gave a small smile. “You’ll be the first to know.”

She exhaled with something softer than a sigh. Then she touched his wrist, briefly.

“Good,” she said.

She leaned in and gave him a quick peck. “See you tomorrow, Seaweed Brain.”

And with that, they parted: quietly, easily, with the kind of understanding that only comes from time.

Across the camp, the lights of Cabin Eleven glowed faintly through the trees. And inside that quiet room, the girl with no memories turned fitfully in her sleep, unaware that the people she was beginning to trust had already started bracing for the storm she might bring.

Chapter Text

ACT I: The Mystery

Chapter 4: The Waiting Path

PoV: Narina

The summer had turned to autumn. The leaves in Camp Half-Blood were beginning to rust at the edges and the wind that curled down from Half-Blood Hill carried a chill that hadn’t been there before.

Narina wrapped her arms around herself as she watched a younger camper loose a crooked arrow into the dirt at the archery range.

“That one’s got nerve,” Rachel said beside her, squinting. “No aim, but a good spine.”

Narina offered a faint smile. “Spines are easier to grow than memory.”

Rachel Elizabeth Dare didn’t answer. She rarely offered pity, one of the reasons Narina liked her. She was the first real friend Narina had made at camp. She was comfortable with Annabeth and Percy, yes, but they weren't around camp most of the time.

Rachel didn’t look like an Oracle. Not the kind from myths, anyway. She looked like someone who’d wandered out of a mural half-finished: freckled arms smudged with paint, red-orange hair tied back just enough to pretend she’d tried. Her overalls were faded, the front pocket ink-stained and she always seemed to have charcoal under her nails. Even barefoot on the pavilion floor, she never looked unfinished, just unbothered by polish.

Her face was all contrast, a softy-pointed chin and wide green eyes that saw more than they chased. Not beautiful in the curated way some of the Aphrodite girls managed, but striking and real. She always sat cross-legged, like she was bracing for something that might arrive slowly. And when she turned to listen, properly listen, there was a steadiness in it that made you want to meet her there. That, too, was part of why Narina liked her.

Their conversations had started as coincidence, shared mealtimes and overlapping routes across camp. But over the months, something steadier had taken shape. Where other people had tried to fill the gaps, in her memory or personality, Rachel had just sat next to her and sketched. She never asked Narina to explain herself or tried to fix the silence. She just moved alongside it, like someone who knew better than to interrupt calibration. That had mattered more than Narina expected.

“She’s overcompensating with her left foot,” Narina murmured. “Throws off her center of gravity.”

Rachel blinked. “You say that like someone who’s taught combat.”

Narina didn’t answer. She wasn’t sure she had; she wasn't sure she hadn't either.

They walked together toward the dining pavilion, Rachel with a sketchpad tucked under her arm, Narina still nursing the last few sips of something vaguely orange from a camp-issued bottle.

The routine was solid now: meals, chores, exercises, the occasional monster drill. Campers nodded to her, sometimes smiled. No one called her “new” anymore; they'd stopped treating her like a question mark. That didn’t mean they understood her, just that they’d stopped expecting her to explain herself.

Some of the younger campers had started calling her "Brainwave," or sometimes "Specs," even though she didn’t wear glasses. The names weren’t mean-spirited, just their way of making curiosity manageable. She didn’t mind. Nicknames meant she’d been filed somewhere. Better than being invisible.

It had been months since she’d woken up without memories and still, she didn’t know who she was. She'd visited the Hypnos cabin, but Clovis hadn't been able to retrieve any memories or provide any new information. She'd spoken to Mr. D, who had been completely unhelpful, kept calling her "Marina," and seemed like he hated her. Percy had reassured her that was normal. Reaching out to the other camps had been a dead end too, the ones that replied said they didn’t know her.

But while her previous identity was still a mystery, she was slowly beginning to build a new one. She'd developed a reputation in camp. Sometimes they asked her to predict sparring match outcomes, or whether the next monster drill would be a false alarm. She answered when she could; the patterns seemed obvious and it felt strange to hold them back. Once, she offhandedly mentioned a pattern in the way lesser monsters skirted the tree line after sundown and someone from the Apollo cabin started keeping a chart. They still found her strange, but strange wasn’t the same as alone.

Rachel adjusted the strap of her sketchpad as they walked. “Any dreams lately?”

Narina tilted her head slightly, not answering at first. Rachel, being Rachel, didn’t push.

“There’s one that keeps looping,” Narina said finally. “Always the same.” She glanced down at the bottle in her hand. “A man's voice. I never see his face. It feels like he’s waiting just off-frame. He says my name like it hurts to remember it... like it means something.”

Rachel’s brow furrowed gently, “Do you know who he is?”

“No,” Narina said. “But he always feels familiar.”

Rachel nodded, slow and quiet, with that careful, grounded attention Narina had come to trust. Like she was sketching something invisible, waiting to see what shape it took before she called it anything at all.

“I’ve been spending time near the forge,” Narina added after a pause. “It calms me. Makes things... surface, almost.”

Rachel raised an eyebrow curiously. “What kind of things?”

“Not memories.” Narina’s voice was even, but something in her grip on the bottle tightened. “More like impressions. Emotions that don’t have a clear source. The kind that... leave a shape without a label.”

Rachel was quiet a moment. “And the forge brings them out?”

“Sometimes it makes my chest ache. Not in a bad way. Just... like I’m standing next to something I miss, but can’t name.”

Rachel studied her for a long beat, then offered a soft reply. “Sounds like memory’s knocking. Just not through the front door.”

A pause.

Then Rachel casually added, “So... forge affinity, emotional imprinting, pattern-seeking brain. You sure you’re not a Hephaestus kid in disguise?”

Narina huffed a breath. “Maybe. But I’m not sure. There isn't any instinct for building. Just... alignment. Like the forge knows how to be a forge, and I know how to be near it.”

Rachel shrugged one shoulder. “Fair enough. Not all resonance is inheritance.”

At the pavilion, she and Rachel sat off to one side. The usual groupings held: Athena kids clustering with their scrolls, the Hermes cabin arguing over slices of peach pie. Overhead, the enchanted sky flickered with the golden-pink tones of a nearing sunset. The camp was still half-full, even this late in the year, though many had returned to mortal school terms.

"So, how does prophecy work really?" Narina asked.

Rachel was halfway through sketching something abstract, a swirl of lines that looked like a seashell and a hurricane had gotten into an argument. She answered without looking up.

“Well, the Moirai are the ultimate authors of destiny,” she said. “They weave fate. Even the gods are subject to what they weave. Prophecies are... glimpses of that threadwork. Usually incomplete. Often confusing and inconvenient.”

Narina raised an eyebrow, her characteristic curiosity stirring. "And how do we get these glimpses?"

Rachel paused, turning her pencil idly between two fingers. “Good question. They didn’t exactly give me an instruction manual when I became the Oracle,” she said dryly. “But I’ve been able to piece together a few things over the years.”

She flipped to a new page absently, sketching a loose spiral. “There are two main ways. First, some beings are just born with it. Primordials like Gaia, or gods like Apollo. Prophecy is like an innate ability.”

“And the other way?”

"Certain places have strong prophetic resonance," Rachel said. "Dodona, for example, or Delphi. Under the right conditions, even beings without innate prophetic abilities can receive something... if the site, or whoever controls it, allows it."

Narina studied her friend for a moment. “And which is it for you?”

That finally made Rachel look up. Her smile curved slow and smug.

“Both, actually,” she said. “I’m special that way.”

Narina's eyebrow somehow arched even further. Leave it to Rachel to announce that with zero humility and somehow make it sound factual.

“I’m the current host of The Spirit of Delphi,” Rachel went on, waving her pencil like a wand. “Which means the prophecies I speak aloud: green smoke, deep voice, all that dramatic stuff; those come from Delphi the place. The spirit connects me to it. I’m a vessel for what it sees.”

Narina frowned. “But?”

“But,” Rachel said, tapping the page in front of her, “even before I became the host, I already had something. Visions, fragments. I’d paint things that hadn’t happened yet. Or remember things I shouldn’t know.”

She gestured to the swirling mess of lines she’d been drawing. “That comes from me. Not Delphi."

Narina looked at the sketch, then back at Rachel. “So your art is prophecy.”

Rachel shrugged. “Sometimes. Other times it's just art. I still don't really understand that part, honestly.”

Narina opened her mouth to ask a follow-up question, but was cut off by a sudden shout from one of the long tables.

A new camper, no older than twelve, was staring up in shock as a blazing lyre symbol hovered briefly above his head, radiant with golden light. No question about it: claimed by Apollo.

Excitement buzzed across the pavilion. Campers leaned over benches, clapped the boy on the back, started placing loud bets on how soon he’d start writing poetry or shooting bullseyes.

Narina watched it all in silence, her expression unreadable.

“I wish I remembered mine,” she said softly.

Rachel glanced over.

“I know the gods ghost their kids half the time,” Narina went on, “but you’d think they’d at least make exceptions for the ones with amnesia. Just talk to us once. So we know that we’re theirs. So we get a piece of our identity back. That would be enough.”

Rachel’s mouth twitched. “That would require consistency or compassion. Neither of which are in the Olympian top ten.”

Narina didn’t speak again. She just sat with the silence, letting it stretch long and low between them. Somewhere between the clatter of cutlery and the fading notes of the flute, the day folded inward. Scene by scene, Camp Half-Blood settled into evening.

After dinner, Narina made her way to the Big House's strategy room. Clarisse was waiting by the war table when Narina arrived, watching a pair of campers argue over the correct way to set a tripline. The setting sun glinted off her armour, which looked like it had seen three wars and punched its way through all of them.

“You’re late,” she said, not looking up.

Narina checked her watch. “I’m early.”

Clarisse grunted. “Then your early needs work.”

There was no winning with her, which Narina had come to realise was the point. Clarisse wasn’t interested in comfort, she was interested in steel: who bent, who didn’t and how much pressure it took to find out.

They weren’t close, but Clarisse had taken to calling her over now and then to help with patrol routes, monster intel and sometimes strategy drills. She never said why, just barked instructions and expected Narina to keep up.

Today, the table was covered in monster maps: sightings logged by various cabins, marked in increasingly frantic ink. Harpies, telkhines, even a rogue hellhound on the border. All further out than usual, but moving inward.

“Something’s off,” Clarisse said, jabbing a thumb at a cluster of pins marking the northern ridge. “Cyclops sightings shouldn’t be this frequent. They’re not migratory and they usually steer clear unless something’s drawing them.”

Narina scanned the pins. The pattern emerged almost immediately.

“Not a draw,” she said, reaching for a red thread from the supply tin. “A funnel.”

Clarisse watched as Narina laced the thread between clusters in arcs and converging angles. It wasn’t about distance: it was about terrain, visibility, choke points. Tactical contours, not topographical ones.

“They’re being directed,” Narina murmured. “Or instinctively pushed. Ridge bottlenecks, water access here, broken wards here and here... it’s shaping them.”

Clarisse grunted, clearly impressed. “You’ve done this before.”

Narina shook her head. “No. I just see it.”

Clarisse stared. She almost looked impressed, albeit under several layers of skepticism. She scratched her cheek, then muttered: “That’s Athena work if I’ve ever seen it.”

The words hit like a bell in Narina’s chest. Athena. Logic, form, strategy. It made too much sense. Her heart twisted toward it with longing. If the goddess had claimed her once it would explain everything. Not just what she could do, but who she was supposed to be.

“That would fit,” Narina said, a little too quickly.

Clarisse raised an eyebrow. “You want that to be true.”

“I want something to be true.”

Clarisse didn’t reply right away. She just looked back at the board. “Well. If you are a brainspawn, you’re a weird one. But useful.”

“I’ll take that as high praise.”

“Good,” Clarisse said. “’Cause it was.”

She didn’t smile, but the air shifted anyway. For a moment, Narina let herself believe it. Let the identity settle on her like a cloak that might already have been hers, just misplaced. She didn’t notice how tight her grip had become on the marker until the tip snapped.

They worked side-by-side in silence after that, surrounded by pins, maps, and the steady undertone of something forging itself into place.

Chapter Text

ACT I: The Mystery

Chapter 5: Hydrophilic

PoV: Narina

The infirmary at Camp Half-Blood had the clean hum of order about it. Gauze rolls stacked in even towers. Herb bundles hanging from the rafters. A low breeze drifted in from the open window, carrying the scent of pine.

Narina stood off to the side, observing. Not as a patient this time, but as someone curious about systems. She liked the rhythm of the place. The low murmur of care that didn’t demand attention.

She watched as Will Solace worked. In his mid-twenties, he looked every bit the veteran healer: lean and sun-warmed, with tousled blond hair tied back in a short, functional knot and a permanent faint tan that made him seem lit from within. His scrubs were rolled at the sleeves, revealing forearms dusted with old burn marks and ink-smudged notes. He moved like someone used to triage: efficient yet unhurried. He had a quiet focus as he switched between cots, checking pulses and bandages, murmuring instructions to a younger medic who was clearly trying not to drop an armful of poultices.

Will stepped toward the last cot, where a boy from the Demeter cabin was groaning softly, his forearm wrapped in bandages that pulsed faintly with dark magic.

“Cursed wound,” Will muttered. “Some kind of barrow-ghoul claw. I’ve tried every neutralising agent I’ve got. Nothing’s touching it.”

The younger medic offered a suggestion. “Maybe something from the Underworld herbs set?”

Will shook his head. “Tried. They just... slide off it.”

Narina frowned, stepping closer. She hesitated, startled by the shape of the thought as it arrived.

“What if you blended in a hydrophilic reagent?”

Will blinked. “Sorry?”

“To destabilise the curse’s adhesion,” Narina said, her brow furrowed like she was working it out aloud. “If the magical compound’s bound to lipid structures in the tissue, a water-soluble dispersal could break the interface without triggering necrosis. You’d need to monitor for osmotic backlash, but the flux would be manageable if buffered.”

The room stilled. The younger medic froze, mid-step.

Will stared. “You just…” He exhaled. “Did you just invent water-soluble curse dispersal?”

Narina’s mouth was slightly open now, her own expression unreadable.

“I… I don’t know,” she said. “It just made chemical sense.”

Will narrowed his eyes, curious now more than surprised. “What’s your background?”

She didn’t answer, because she didn’t know. And yet... the terminology had come too easily. The framework, the logic, the molecular structure: it had flowed like a second language. She wasn't speculating, she knew.

“I shouldn’t know that,” she said quietly, a chill blooming low in her chest. Her heart pounded once, sharp and dissonant, like her body had recognised something her mind couldn’t place.

Will softened. “Doesn’t mean it’s bad that you do.”

But Narina barely heard him.

That night, long after the camp had quieted and the sky turned silver with stars, Narina sat by the tree line with a notebook Rachel had given her months ago. She rarely used it but now it sat open in her lap, blank and expectant.

She stared at the page for a long time, her pen hovering over it.

The infirmary scene played over in her mind. Not Will’s surprise, not even her own words, but the way they had felt.

Not like deduction or reflexive problem-solving. It had felt like memory. She had been waiting for something like that. For weeks. Months.

Maybe this was it. The first leak. Not just instinct, but knowledge. Actual knowledge.

Her chest felt tight with anticipation as her fingers tightened slightly around the pen. Slowly, she drew a line.

She didn’t know what, if anything, she was trying to prove. Maybe it was just the need to feel it again, whatever had happened in the infirmary.

She took a breath and began to add more lines. A second, then third. Soon, shapes started to form.

She began to sketch chemical structures on the page. ATP chains. Catalytic loops. Glycoprotein receptor sites. The lines were cautious at first, but then something gave way. Her hand moved faster, finding a rhythem, a confidence.

Then she moved to more complex things. Flowcharts. Systems logic. The genetic markers of drought resistance in cereal crops. The principles behind a CRISPR edit. The degradation rate of RNA in suboptimal storage conditions.

Each answer came faster than the question. She wasn’t thinking. She was remembering.

She sat back and placed the pen down.

Her eyes traced the page, now densely covered in things she shouldn’t know but did know. Her gaze settled on a messy but precise diagram of neurotransmitter uptake and trace mineral diffusion. The symbols blurred slightly as her eyes stung. It felt like a part of her had reattached.

Well this isn’t certainly battle instinct. Doesn't feel like Athena.

She stared down at the page, conflicted.

Maybe I was a scientist, or something like it. A researcher? A biochemist?

The terms felt both foreign and familiar.

Whatever it was… I think I loved it. I remember loving it.

And yet, that realisation didn’t bring clarity. If anything, they raised more questions. Her thumb brushed the edge of the page. Her throat was dry and her heart unsteady. What does that make me now?

The sun was just beginning to rise over Camp Half-Blood when Annabeth found her.

Narina was seated on the porch of Cabin Eleven, legs tucked loosely beneath her, a half-drunk cup of tea cooling beside her elbow. The air still held the soft hush of early morning: birdsong low, forges dormant, the lake glassy with reflection.

Annabeth approached without ceremony or greeting. Just the solid rhythm of boots on wooden steps.

"You're up early," she said.

"I don’t sleep much."

Annabeth sat beside her, near enough that the porch didn’t feel like hers alone. They sat in silence for a few beats. A squirrel skittered somewhere behind the cabin.

Narina traced the rim of her cup with one finger. "How're things in Manhattan?" she asked. Annabeth and Percy didn’t live at Camp full time. They had an apartment somewhere in the east side of the city and commuted in and out depending on what the camp needed. Pegasi, Mistways, Iris-messages. The commute options weren’t exactly standard, but it meant they could drop in relatively easily.

Annabeth glanced over. "Pretty good, actually. My firm really liked the last design I pitched. They're letting me run point on the next phase." Her tone was easy, almost pleased. "It’s a waterfront project. Mixed-use space. I got to sneak in some old Greek columns. Just enough to make the classicists twitch!"

"Elegant sabotage," Narina said, "I approve." She gave Annabeth a small smile, she was glad her life was going well.

She didn’t say more than that, but her gaze lingered on Annabeth a moment longer in quiet acknowledgment. The kind you gave someone whose mind you’d come to trust.

"You’ve been dropping by camp more often lately," Narina said, tone neutral.

Annabeth didn’t answer right away. She reached for a pine needle that had landed on the step beside her, rolling it between her fingers.

"We come when we can," she said eventually. "Camp’s been a little more active. Minor tremors. Some scouting runs turning up strange reports."

The reply was calm and casual... almost too casual. Narina nearly let it pass, but something in the timing, in the angle of Annabeth’s voice, caught on her skin like a grain of sand. It wasn’t quite evasive, but it was close. She didn’t press, just tucked the observation away with the rest. She suspected they were really here because of her.

Annabeth shifted slightly. “So how’ve you been?”

Narina tried to figure out where to begin.

"Something happened in the infirmary yesterday," she said.

Annabeth turned slightly and looked at her attentively.

"With Will. He was treating a cursed wound. Said nothing was working. And I... I said something. A chemical approach. Hydrophilic reagent. Osmotic flux buffering. I didn’t think... it just came out."

Annabeth didn’t interrupt.

"It didn’t feel like a guess," Narina continued. "It felt… familiar. The terms, the logic. I remember I studied it for years." She paused. Her fingers curled lightly around the cooling cup.

Annabeth’s face lit with a quick smile. “That’s good,” she said. “That’s really good.”

Her voice was warm and had a quiet brightness to it. "It means something’s stirring. Some part of you is still intact. That’s not nothing." She tilted her head. "Did anything else come back? Memories, flashes, anything tied to it?"

Narina paused for a moment before continuing. "Later that night, I started drawing. Diagrams, formulas, reaction chains. It just… poured out. I didn’t have to think. It was like remembering, not discovering."

She looked up finally, her voice quieter now. "I don’t know what it means yet. But it felt real."

Annabeth’s gaze was steady and thoughtful. She didn’t speak, but her thumb tapped once against her knee. A small, anchoring gesture.

Narina didn’t mind the quiet. She was just looking for the space to name it out loud. "I think… I used to be a scientist. A researcher. Biochemistry, maybe."

Annabeth gave a short, warm breath of a laugh. "Fits the way your mind works." There was no rush in her tone, just steady encouragement, made softer by how much she clearly meant it. "You talk like someone who built systems for a living. You see patterns fast and clean. It’s trained precision."

Her smile softened, just slightly. "You don’t have to name all of it yet. But what you’ve got? That’s something, Narina. And it’s yours."

Annabeth leaned back slightly, resting her hands on the step behind her. "So, how does it feel?"

Narina stared out at the trees. The mist hung low over the hills, pale and quiet. "Like I found a door that had always been there," she said slowly. "I didn’t remember opening it. But I knew what the room looked like."

Annabeth nodded. "And now that you do?"

"I don’t know," Narina admitted. "It just gave me more questions. To be honest... I was hoping to remember something more personal."

The same squirrel darted across the railing and into the beams overhead. Narina followed it with her eyes, then let them drift back to the treeline.

"I don’t think I can wait for the rest to return," she said. "If memory won’t come to me... maybe I have to go to it."

Annabeth looked at her, brow tilting slightly. "Go to it how?"

Narina turned slightly, catching her gaze. "You all keep telling me my fighting reflexes will come back eventually. But what if they don’t?"

Annabeth studied her, one brow raising. "Then what?"

Narina exhaled, brushing her hair back. "Then I want to stop waiting. If I can’t remember how to fight, I want to learn. From scratch."

Annabeth looked over weighing the shift. "You’re serious."

Narina nodded once. "And maybe if I rebuild from the ground up, not just fighting, but anything... maybe more pieces will fall into place."

A breeze moved through the trees. In the distance, the clang of training swords echoed faintly.

Annabeth thought for a moment then stood up and extended a steady hand. "Let’s start simple."

She waited, just for a moment. "One step at a time."

Chapter Text

ACT I: The Mystery

Chapter 6: Surge

PoV: Narina

It was summer again. Nearly a year since Narina had woken up without her memories; nearly half a year since she started learning how to fight. The sun hung high and hot over Camp Half-Blood, turning the dirt paths dry and thickening the air. Shirts clung to backs, cabins creaked, and somewhere in the distance, a hammer rang out from the forge in slow, lazy intervals.

Inside the infirmary, it was marginally cooler, but the smell of antiseptic clung stubbornly to everything. Narina stood near the supply cabinet, hands gloved, eyes narrowed in focus. A young camper lay on the cot beside her, pale and clammy, sweat beading at his temples. Not a combat wound this time: something fungal, picked up on a quest down south, now spreading up his side in branching red tendrils.

Will passed her a sealed vial. “Standard burn salve’s not cutting it. This stuff might.”

Narina held it up to the light. “It won’t if the cell membranes are still porous. We’ll need something to bind the outer layer first.”

Will didn’t question it. “Your call.”

A few minutes later, the worst of the infection had been arrested. The boy’s breathing steadied and the flush in his cheeks began to fade.

Will peeled off his gloves. “Nice catch.”

“Just pattern recognition,” Narina replied, wiping down the counter. “The cultures didn’t lie.”

He gave her a crooked smile. “You say that like it’s normal to spot enzyme trail shifts from twenty feet away.”

Narina shrugged, but there was a flicker of pride in her posture. This had become her routine: mornings in the infirmary, sometimes afternoons too, depending on how many campers came back with injuries, sickness, or weirder ailments that didn't seem to make sense, even by demigod standards. Will treated her like an equal: a colleague not a curiosity. She wouldn't call them friends yet, but they had a friendly working relationship.

She stripped off her gloves and tossed them into the bin. “I’ve got training in ten,” she said, already reaching for her water bottle. “Percy said he’s switching things up today.”

Will winced theatrically. “Try not to get skewered.”

“No promises.”

She slung her bag over one shoulder and stepped out into the sun. She could navigate the winding trails between cabins without thinking now, could name most campers by voice before even seeing their faces. Her bunk was always made, her gear hung at the proper angle, and her name was scratched into the sparring board near the top. Not for victories, but for showing up. Every day.

She headed toward the lake, already bracing herself for the heat... and whatever absurd drill Percy had dreamed up this time.

Narina pivoted on one foot, brought her staff low in a sweeping arc... and missed the target’s center by a finger’s width. Again.

“Breathe,” came Percy’s voice from across the training ring.

She let out a slow exhale, jaw tight. The heat of the morning air made everything feel slower. Her fingers adjusted on the staff automatically. They’d been doing these sessions for months now. Quiet, almost ritualistic. Before breakfast, sometimes after the younger campers' curfew. Annabeth had taught her the fundamentals: grip, stance, spatial memory, but Percy had taken over when things moved into full-contact drills. He was more instinctive, less academic. Sharper, too, in a way Narina hadn’t expected.

She and Percy had gotten closer over the course of the training. Not in the way people might expect. There were no heart-to-hearts or long personal exchanges, just… an ease. Training with him felt natural. She almost wanted to call it familiar, but it wasn’t memory. It was more like a gut-level alignment, something built into her without explanation. Sometimes she caught herself mirroring his stance. Sometimes he said things she’d been thinking. He didn’t comment much on her form, angle, or grip anymore. He didn’t need to. He just gave the occasional reminders: "Breathe." "Ground yourself." "Let go."

She moved again. Swing. Parry. Elbow pivot. Downward block. Her grip slipped on the dismount.

Percy caught the staff before it hit the dirt. “You don’t fight like you’re trying to win,” he said, handing it back. “You fight like you’re trying not to break anything.”

Narina flexed her fingers around the shaft. “I don’t like breaking things,” she replied factually. She turned the staff once in her grip, feeling its balance. Something in her still pulled inward. Percy had noticed it early on: the restraint, the subtle recoil behind her strikes like she was afraid of finishing them. He hadn’t called her out directly, at least not at first, but she knew. Percy was trying to figure her out. Trying to get her to stop protecting… something. But the truth was, she didn’t know how. It felt like she’d spent her whole life holding something back, but she didn’t remember what or why. It just... felt safer to keep the lid on.

“Sometimes that’s what the fight is,” came a familiar voice from the side. "Breaking things."

Narina turned. Annabeth had wandered in from the path, arms crossed, half-eaten granola bar in hand. She looked more amused than serious, her expression light as she scanned the scene.

“She still holding back?” Annabeth asked, sitting on the edge of a bench, posture neat but relaxed.

“I’ve learned the forms,” Narina said. “Footwork, grip spacing, recoil angles. I could recite them in my sleep. But it still feels…”

“Off?” Percy offered.

She nodded.

Annabeth leaned forward slightly, voice thoughtful now. “Whatever it is you’re holding back, it’s not just in your muscles. It’s deeper than that. Doesn’t mean it’s dangerous. Doesn’t mean it’s safe either. It just means it matters.”

Narina looked down at her hands. They were callused and far stronger than they used to be. She could spar for hours now, run drills until sweat soaked through her clothes. But even in motion, some part of her never fully committed. She was always calculating, always containing.

“I don’t even know what I’m afraid of,” she said softly. “It’s like there’s something under the surface, right there, and I just… I don’t want to let it out.”

Percy met her eyes. “Instinct isn’t always safe... But it’s honest.”

He didn’t say more, nor did he have to.

The three of them stayed there for a moment. Narina standing in the ring, staff resting across her palms; Percy a steady presence beside her; Annabeth still, watchful, perched with quiet grace on the bench. And somewhere just below Narina’s skin, that pulse of something still coiled.

Annabeth broke the silence first, glancing over at Percy. “So,” she said casually, brushing the last of the granola crumbs from her fingers, “if you’re done beating each other up for the morning… are you still down for that swim you promised?”

Percy raised an eyebrow. “You mean the swim you demanded.”

Annabeth smirked. “Tomato, tomahto.” She looked toward Narina, her tone easy. “You should come too. Water’s probably the only place cooler than this oven of a training ring.”

Narina's pause was slight, a half-second at most, but she felt it in the way her spine stiffened: confusing, automatic. Something inside her recoiled instinctively. A quiet, visceral no that surprised even her.

“Maybe another time,” she said, too quickly.

Her voice sounded casual, but her thoughts were already scrambling. She needed something to make it sound plausible. “Didn’t bring swim stuff,” she added. “And I’ve got notes to run for Will.”

She saw it: the way Percy’s head tilted. His expression changed slighty, a soft question forming behind the eyes.

“You okay?” he asked, voice gentle. “We’re just floating near the shore.”

Narina’s heart thudded harder. He isn’t buying it. Not entirely. Quick think of something else to say.

She tried to give a light, offhand laugh. “Yeah. I’m fine. Just… not really a water person.”

She cringed internally. Well, that was a stupid excuse. Why wasn’t she a water person? It sounded ridiculous even in her head. Was she scared? No, that was absurd. And yet, here she was, heart racing, throat dry, crafting excuses like she was dodging a fight.

Percy blinked. “Huh. Not a water person?”

The way he said it wasn’t mean, just surprised. Like it genuinely didn’t compute. And maybe it didn’t.

“I’m not even sure I know how to swim,” she offered weakly with a shrug, still trying to sound breezy. “No memories, remember?”

Percy smiled, warm and a little crooked. “Then you’ve got a built-in excuse to doggy paddle. We won’t judge.”

Annabeth added, voice light but sincere, “You won’t drown, I promise. Percy’s basically the god of lifeguarding.”

Narina's attempt at smiling didn't quite land. Her hands were cold despite the heat. “It’s irrational, I know,” she said, quieter now. “Water just makes me feel... off.”

Percy’s brow furrowed. “Off how?”

“Like my chest tightens. Like something’s wrong and I just can’t name it. Like... I’m about to remember something I don’t want to. Or... like," she paused, trying to find the words. "Like the water is watching me back."

The silence after that was heavier. Narina felt Annabeth watching her. Then she saw the small, subtle look Annabeth gave Percy. Pointed, but gentle. A quiet signal: drop it.

Thank you, Annabeth. For being ever perceptive.

The feeling was irrational and shapeless... and all Narina knew was that she wasn’t ready to unravel it here, in front of them.

Percy’s expression immediately softened. The half-smile returned, this time even warmer. “Well, if the lake’s giving you the side-eye, we’ll file a formal complaint.”

The tension cracked, just enough to breathe. Annabeth touched Percy’s arm. “Come on Seaweed Brain, let’s go.” Then she turned back to Narina. “Hey, if you ever want to talk about anything, anything at all, you know where to find me.”

Narina nodded but said nothing.

Percy and Annabeth moved on, their conversation drifting to lighter things as they walked away. But the unease stayed with Narina: silent, waiting. Like the memory, whatever it was that made her recoil from swimming, was still curled somewhere deep beneath the surface.

Narina headed toward the dining pavilion, trying to shake off the strange feeling. The sun was higher now and camp was beginning to stir with its usual clatter and movements. As if nothing odd had happened at all.

The dining pavilion was loud in the way only demigod mornings could be: bickering siblings, someone loudly cursing over a syrup spill and a dozen satyrs trying to pretend they didn’t notice. Narina slid into her usual seat at the far end of the Hephaestus table, just as Leo slammed down a platter stacked with very blue pancakes.

“Ladies and geniuses,” he declared with a bow. “Breakfast, brought to you by my crippling need for attention.”

“Crippling,” Narina said, tone dry as she reached for a fork.

“Painful,” Leo confirmed, jabbing a pancake. “But at least it’s structurally sound.”

Across from them, Hazel Levesque laughed with that quiet kind of amusement that made people lean in to catch it. Her dark curls were pulled back in a loose braid, gold-brown eyes steady beneath long lashes. Her skin held a rich, earthen glow, like she’d been sculpted from volcanic soil and dusk light. Even seated, she held a grounded poise, like her presence carried more weight than her frame should allow. She wore her usual deep purple jacket, already dusted with chalk from the obstacle course.

“You’ve got grease on your cheek,” she said to Narina, her voice gentle and warm.

Hazel was another person Narina had formed a strong connection with since arriving at camp. They’d met a few weeks in: Hazel visiting from Camp Jupiter, where she held a senior leadership role. She still dropped by Half-Blood often, usually just to check in on old friends, but never made a big deal of it. Narina had liked that.

There was something about Hazel’s presence, composed but unintrusive, that made her easy to trust. She offered a kind of wise, younger-sister energy, if such a paradox made sense. Someone who understood what it was to live between opposites: life and death, past and future, power and restraint, without needing to explain any of it out loud.

Narina wiped off the grease with the corner of a napkin. “Training,” she said. “Percy made me redo a sequence five times.”

“Only five?” Leo asked. “Clearly slacking.”

“I think he’s trying to be subtle.”

Leo snorted. “Percy Jackson? Subtle? Please. That boy fights like a wave and teaches like a ghost.”

Hazel smiled faintly, then leaned a little closer, her voice softer but steady. “He’s been good to her.”

“I know,” Leo muttered. “That’s why I haven’t pranked him yet.” He paused. “In the last few weeks.”

Narina tried to focus on the food, the chatter, the easy rhythm of familiarity around her. It was supposed to help anchor her, but the conversation around her blurred at the edges. Her mind kept dragging back to the way her throat had gone dry. To Percy’s voice: neither angry nor pushing, just confused.

“Not really a water person?” It hadn’t been an accusation, but it landed like one anyway.

A breeze swept through the pavilion then, too strong to be natural. It rustled napkins, lifted Hazel’s hair, and carried the faint scent of salt from a sea that was too far to smell that clearly. Narina didn’t flinch or shiver, but her hand tightened around her fork.

Hazel’s eyes flicked toward the horizon,registering it quietly. Leo didn’t seem to notice. The moment passed and the table went on laughing. But Narina didn’t.

The warmth of the dining pavilion lingered long after the plates were cleared, but something in her chest hadn’t settled. Expectation.

It was building steadily now. She didn’t know what she was holding back, or why it twisted so hard when it tried to rise. She only knew she was tired of feeling cornered by things she didn’t understand.

So when Chiron casually mentioned the upcoming combat assessments, her hand went up before she’d thought it through. “I want in,” she said.

Chiron’s brows lifted slightly in surprise. “You’ll be placed in the next cycle.”

“No,” she said. “Today.”

He studied her for a moment. Then, with a small nod: “Very well.”

The arena hadn’t changed in decades. Dust rose from packed earth. Chalk lines faded under boot scuffs. A few training dummies leaned crookedly near the edge, stabbed into silence long ago. But the air felt different today. Campers clustered along the ring’s edge, some curious, others skeptical. Narina stepped forward and felt their eyes skim across her like measuring tape. Waiting.

Clarisse was already there, shoulders squared, arms folded, gladius slung across her back. She didn’t smile or speak, she just watched Narina like someone checking a fuse length.

From the sidelines, Chiron cleared his throat. “This is voluntary,” he said. “A practice assessment.”

No one replied. Narina adjusted the bracers at her wrists. They were borrowed from the Athena cabin and were a little too loose, worn slick from use. They shifted slightly when she flexed her grip, but she didn’t mind. It kept her honest.

Clarisse grunted. “You sure about this, clipboard?”

Narina met her eyes. “Yeah. I am.”

Clarisse gave the faintest shrug that felt almost respectful.

Chiron nodded, more to himself than anyone. “One-minute rounds. First to three resets or disarmament. No divine weapons.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Clarisse muttered, unslinging her blade.

Hazel appeared at Narina’s side with a training shield.

“I’ll stay near the edge,” she said. “Backup, just in case.”

Narina accepted the shield silently, fingers brushing Hazel’s for half a second too long. She hadn’t asked for backup, but didn’t refuse it either.

Across the field, Percy and Annabeth stood together. Rachel was behind them, charcoal staining her fingers. Leo lounged on the wall, chewing something nuclear-coloured and definitely not regulation.

The horn sounded, low and even. Narina stepped forward and so did Clarisse. Dust curled around their boots.

The sky above the arena had dulled to a matte gold, the kind of light that softened everything but didn’t quite warm it. Campers ringed the edges of the training field now: some on the stone bleachers, others perched on weapon racks or leaning casually against dummies, pretending not to look interested.

Clarisse rolled her shoulders, and her armour creaked faintly. Not because it was stiff, but because she wasn’t. She looked like someone who expected to win but hoped she wouldn’t do it too fast.

Somewhere behind her, she heard Leo murmur, “Ten bucks says Clarisse takes her down in under thirty seconds.”

“Leo,” Hazel hissed.

“What? She’s the one who signed up.”

“Yeah. And Clarisse is the one cracking her knuckles like it’s the Fourth of July.”

“Exactly.”

Narina exhaled through her nose and let the noise blur. She had no delusions. Clarisse was stronger, faster, more experienced. But Narina hadn’t come to win, she had come to find the edge.

“On my mark,” Chiron called. “Begin.”

Every instinct told her to analyse the weight, the pivot range, the torque. Instead, she watched Clarisse’s stance. Foot placement. Blade angle. Breathing rate.

Clarisse broke the stillness first. Her first move was fast and un-flashy. A forward lunge, angled high, meant to push Narina off her balance without fully committing. Narina stepped into it, lifted the shield. The bronze crack rang up her arm like a tuning fork: sharp, vibrating, but she didn’t flinch. She pivoted away from the follow-up, her boots skidding just slightly in the dust. She hadn’t fallen. That's something, she thought to herself.

Clarisse backed off, blade swinging in a lazy arc. “Still standing. Huh.”

Narina didn’t respond. Her silence wasn’t defiance. It was focus. Her brain was already filtering motion into data. She logged the angles of approach, the feints, the rhythms. Not just what Clarisse did, but why.

The second pass came harder. Clarisse’s footwork was tight, relentless: each strike designed to pressure, not kill, but she wasn’t holding back either. Narina parried the first two blows, ducked under a third, and nearly missed the fourth. Her shield arm was beginning to go numb. She retreated two steps, breathing shallow.

“You’re quicker than you look,” Clarisse admitted. Then added, “Still gonna lose.”

Narina said nothing. She shifted her grip, lowered her stance.

Another blow followed, and another. Clarisse moving like someone who didn’t believe in soft landings. Narina blocked each one, but just barely. Her form held, but the rhythm wasn’t hers.

Clarisse grinned. “Not bad. For a medic.”

Narina still didn’t answer. She pivoted, let Clarisse overextend slightly, then struck low with the edge of her shield. It caught Clarisse’s thigh. Not enough to hurt, but enough to surprise.

A ripple of surprise passed through the crowd, someone let out a soft whistle. They broke apart, a reset.

Clarisse barked a short laugh. “Sneaky. Could use that.”

Round two.

This time, Clarisse didn’t wait. No feint, just mass and intent. She charged, shield first, and slammed into Narina with the full weight of her body. Narina braced. Too slow. The impact hit square. Her lungs emptied. Dirt scratched her palms. No time to gasp. No time to think. She rolled and came up half-kneeling. Her breath was ragged now and her stance loose.

Clarisse was already on her again. Stalking closer. Not gloating, testing. “You think training fills the gaps? That muscle makes up for memory?”

Narina blocked the next blow. Sparks flew as bronze scraped bronze. “I think it’s a start,” she said, breathless. “I think muscle can learn what memory won’t give back.”

Clarisse shoved her back. Just enough to say: Then prove it.

The next exchanges were messy. Clarisse drove forward. Their weapons clashed again and again. Narina blocked, always a second behind. Her arms ached. But it wasn’t pain that was slowing her. It was the knot. That tight, coiled thing inside her chest. Not fear of Clarisse. Not fear of losing. Fear of what else might come out if she stopped resisting.

Clarisse narrowed her eyes. She sensed it too. “You’re holding back.”

Narina didn’t deny it. She couldn’t. Sweat was starting to trace lines down her spine. The tightness was building: calves, shoulders, jaw. She was holding back... and she didn’t know why.

They broke apart again. A breath passed. Clarisse feinted left, then spun and slammed her shield forward. Narina blocked too high and stumbled. Clarisse didn’t press. “Whatever you’re afraid of? That’s what’s killing you.”

Clarisse advanced again. More frustration than aggression now. “Come on,” she said. “You wanna learn how to fight? Then fight.”

Narina panted. Her fingers ached from gripping the shield too tight. She knew Clarisse wasn’t bullying her. She was testing her. And for some reason, Narina didn’t want to fail her. Because it mattered that someone like Clarisse thought she could be more.

Hazel didn't understand though. She didn't know the relationship she and Clarisse had. Her voice called out sharply from the sidelines, “Clarisse, back off—”

Clarisse’s head snapped toward her, annoyed. “Stay out of it, princess.”

But the moment’s distraction threw her balance. Her next swing was angled out, wild, meant to signal Hazel away. Hazel, to her credit, didn’t flinch. But she was too close. The blade was arcing toward her shoulder: too fast to block, too wide to miss.

It happened before Narina understood what she was doing.

Her hand lifted, in something older than fear or calculation. Reflex, maybe. Or memory. Or the sudden absence of restraint. She felt it then. The knot: the one she’d been carrying inside for the past few months. The one Percy had tried, and failed, to get her to loosen time and time again.

It unraveled.

She closed her eyes. Time slowed and her breath evened out. The tension in her shield arm drained away. Clarisse’s shout blurred into silence.

For the first time she could remember, she wasn’t fighting herself or holding back. She just stood there, hand outstretched. She felt power surging through her body and toward her fingertips. Not in a rush or a blaze. It flowed.

A barrel at the ring’s edge split open without a sound. Just an elegant rupture, like a seal breaking.

Narina's eyes snapped open. A column of water surged upward, impossibly clean, unnaturally smooth. It coiled midair like a whip, then fanned outward in a crescent arc. It struck Clarisse’s blade mid-swing. Metal jolted sideways with a screech, deflected cleanly.

The water hung in the air for a moment longer, suspended and precise. Then it collapsed, rushing to earth with a wet thud.

Hazel staggered back, eyes wide.

Silence.

Everyone was still, even Clarisse. And then, behind Narina, just over her shoulder, it appeared. A trident. Pale blue and glowing. No lightning crack or music swell. Just presence. A pulse of power so deep it didn’t echo in the air, it echoed in the bone.

One beat.

Then it vanished. Clarisse stared, blade lowered. Hazel looked like she hadn’t breathed yet. Percy had moved halfway to the ring without realising, something unreadable flickering behind his sea-glass eyes.

And Narina? She stood perfectly still. Her arm was still raised, her hand still open. But for the first time... they didn’t feel empty.

Chapter Text

ACT I: The Mystery

Chapter 7: A Name

PoV: Narina

The arena was still.

Water streaked across the dust, pooling in shallow rivulets under Narina's boots. The scent of bronze and earth clung to everything: metal, skin, the inside of her mouth. Her chest was rising too fast. She noticed it distantly, as if her body belonged to someone else.

Around her, a loose, uneven ring of campers stood frozen at the edge of the sparring field. Leo had stopped chewing. Hazel’s braid clung to her shoulder, dark with water. Rachel's charcoal had smudged across her wrist, fingers arrested mid-sketch.

The trident was long gone, but the image of it hadn’t left. It pulsed behind Narina's eyes like an aftershock. Her hands stopped shaking, but she could feel the potential in them still. As if they remembered.

She stood straight, held together by compression. Her pulse was still too fast. She felt her skin cooling unevenly where sweat clung to it.

Clarisse backed away first. Narina heard her mutter something, low and tight, and then the soft thump of a gladius dropped into dust. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Hazel wring out the hem of her shirt. Their eyes met. Hazel looked unsettled in a way Narina couldn’t parse.

From somewhere to her left, Chiron cleared his throat. The sound was gravelly and small in the space left behind by silence. No commentary followed, just that one sound.

Narina sensed movement from behind her. She turned her head and saw Percy walking toward her from the bleachers. His stride was loose, but careful, like he hadn’t decided yet whether he was approaching as a leader or as something more personal.

He stopped a pace away, holding out a towel that looked impossibly ordinary. She blinked once, then took it. It was rough, sun-warmed and smelled of cedar.

Percy didn’t smile. "I think I’m your brother," he said.

Her lips parted, but not in shock. It felt less like a revelation and more like a landing.

Her gaze dropped to the towel, the dirt, the boots in front of her. Then up again slowly. "I– I think I already knew," she said. Her voice was soft, but unfaltering.

The words surprised her as they left her mouth. She didn’t know how she knew. Just that the moment felt... right.

A gust of wind cut across the arena, lifting the edge of her damp shirt. Far off, from the direction of Long Island Sound, gulls cried. She could feel eyes on her. Questions forming and reshaping. Some campers were glancing between her and Percy, as if recalibrating everything they thought they understood. Others didn’t look away from Narina. They just stared with the quiet tension of waiting.

Percy didn’t try to explain. He just stood there, steady and present. Like someone who remembered what it meant to be claimed without warning.

Finally, he spoke. "Let's take a walk."

The sea was quieter than usual that evening. The waves breathed in and out, and Narina could almost feel the water thinking.

She walked the shallows barefoot beside Percy, just where the surf met the sand. The water lapped over her ankles in cool pulses, each step sinking slightly into the wet grit. She expected cold, but what she felt was something closer to recognition. Like the sea had been waiting to touch her again. A current ran up through the soles of her feet, subtle and alive, as if her body was remembering how to listen. Her skin prickled; not with fear this time but with something else. Presence… and power She felt awake in a way she hadn’t in months.

Her boots were slung over one shoulder, still damp from the arena. The breeze had softened, brushing loose curls against her cheek. Percy had rolled up his jeans and was twirling his camp necklace absently in one hand. The beads clicked against his fingers in a slow, uneven rhythm.

"So," he said eventually, voice low and almost wry. "I have a demigod sister."

Narina let out a soft huff. It wasn’t quite amusement. More like the breath that escapes when you’re still catching up to yourself. "Apparently."

Percy nodded to himself. "That makes three of us now. Children of Poseidon. You, me, and Tyson. Well, not counting the immortal ones anyway."

Her eyes narrowed slightly. "The Cyclops?"

"Yeah. He’s great. Hugs like a hydraulic press."

That pulled a quiet laugh from her. It rose from her chest without asking permission. She wasn’t sure when she’d last heard herself laugh like that.

They walked a little farther. A gull shrieked overhead, the sound knifing briefly through the calm. Narina bent to pick up a flat stone, rubbed her thumb across its surface, then tossed it into the water. "You’re handling this really well," she said after a beat. "The claiming. Me."

Percy shrugged, his eyes on the horizon. "Well, I figure… the sea’s got room. I’m not gonna start drawing borders."

She smiled, more in her eyes than her mouth. There was something disarmingly easy about the way he said things like that. "That sounds like something a son of Poseidon would say."

His lips twitched. "It also sounds like something Grover would put on a mug."

The joke hung in the air for a second. Then the breeze shifted, cooler now.

"So... you’re not worried?" she asked softly.

"About you?"

"About what I mean."

They stopped walking. The sea curled around their ankles and receded again. When he spoke, it was quieter than before. "I think it means I’m not the only one anymore," he said. "That’s not something to be afraid of."

Percy's words resonated more than she expected. She’d regained part of her identity with the claiming: the name, the symbol, the bloodline. That had all been important, but this was something else. Family. She didn’t remember the family she’d come from, or if she’d ever had one... but she had one now. And that? that lifted something, a pressure she hadn’t known was there until it eased. She wasn’t alone anymore.

The truth of that caused her throat to tighten. "Thank you."

He answered with a warm smile. Then, softly: "You feel different now?"

"A little," she said. "Like the floor stopped shifting. I didn’t know I needed a name for that until it settled."

She saw him nod slowly out of the corner of her eye. "Yeah," he said. "I get that."

The breeze traced over her skin. She turned a little more toward him, the sand shifting beneath her heels. "It feels like... a piece of me clicked back into place. Something I didn’t even know was missing until it was there again."

Percy didn’t interrupt. He just kept walking beside her, slow and unhurried.

"I still don’t remember anything," she said. "But things feel closer now. Still out of reach but... but I can almost feel the outline."

Percy nodded again, more serious this time. "That sounds about right. It doesn’t come all at once. But it does come."

After a moment, he shifted slightly. "Can I ask you something?" he said, almost hesitant. "You don’t have to answer. I just... I’ve been thinking about it since this morning. And even more since you were claimed."

Narina glanced at him, wary but open. "Okay."

He scratched at the back of his neck. "This morning after training, when Annabeth and I talked about swimming, you said you weren’t a water person. And... you meant it. That wasn’t just modesty. It felt real."

She looked out at the sea. The calm didn’t match the tension coiled beneath her ribs. She knew what Percy was asking, "How can a child of Poseidon be afraid of water?"

"Yeah," she said. "I know. It doesn’t make sense."

Percy didn’t push. He just waited.

Narina let her arms fall to her sides, then crossed them loosely. Her eyes flicked back to the water. Her thoughts came like fragments, brushing against each other like driftwood in current. The waves lapped at her ankles again. "I’ve been... wondering about that too," she said slowly. "Why I’d be afraid of something that’s supposed to be... mine."

She swallowed, her brow furrowing. "At first I thought it was just dissonance. But the more I sit with it..." Another pause. "Maybe I was repressing it. Not just forgetting... burying. Like I knew what it was... and chose not to let it out." Her voice had gone quieter. "And I don’t know why," she admitted. "I don’t remember what I was scared of, or what I thought would’ve happened if I didn’t hide it."

Percy’s face was unreadable, but his stillness felt heavier now.

"Whatever it was," she added, "it must have mattered, to make me shut it down that hard."

The wind lifted again, brushing cold salt across her skin. The waves rolled a little farther up the shore, then pulled back like they were listening. She looked over at Percy, who was still staring out at the sea. She studied his face, the ease and steadiness. Her brother. For the first time since losing her memories, she felt like she was truly a part of something. "But I'm not afraid of it anymore."

Percy looked over, then reached out and touched her wrist, just briefly. A steadying contact. Then he let go and stepped aside, letting the moment belong to her.

She didn’t say more. They stood there, shoulder to shoulder, letting the surf do what it always did: come close, retreat, return. It had been a long time since Narina felt this still, not braced for something to go wrong. She just breathed.

Then she bumped her shoulder gently against his. "So," she said, voice dry but softer than before, "how about that swim?"

The camp had gone quiet. Dinner was long over. Somewhere in the trees, a dryad hummed a lullaby to no one in particular. The stars were thick tonight, like salt spilled across dark slate.

Narina sat cross-legged on her bunk. A thin sheet was pulled over her knees, though the night wasn’t cold. Cabin Three was quieter at night than Narina expected. Its salt-stone walls held the ocean’s breath: cool, constant, and still. The room wasn’t grand, but it felt ancient.

She stared at the ceiling. Her fingers traced the grain of the wooden bedpost. Her mind wouldn’t rest: thoughts circled, surfaced, slipped away again. She looked across the room. Percy’s side was dark, save for the low blue glow of a nightlight shaped like a hippocampus. She’d said it was hideous. He’d said thank you, and that Tyson made it. She wasn’t sure if that had been a joke or not, but it made her smile now.

It was nice to have company. She had been by herself in Cabin Eleven. Annabeth had told her that ever since the Second Titan War, Hermes had refrained from having anymore demigod children. Out of guilt maybe, or shame. In any case, the cabin had been left empty ever since its previous occupants had grown up and moved out.

Her thoughts drifted back to the lake. The feeling of water all around her, welcoming her. The way her body had known, somehow, to inhale even underwater. The first breath had shocked her. The second had steadied her. By the third, she’d stopped thinking about it. Percy had shown her how to cut through the water like a fish: shoulders angled just so, arms tight, legs trailing. They’d raced once, and he’d let her win. Or maybe she hadn’t needed him to. Either way, he just grinned, pleased. It had felt good. Right. The water had lapped over her skin like a second heartbeat. Every movement had felt effortless and natural. She had felt powerful: connected and awake.

She thought about her eyes. She'd once described them as electric blue. But now she thought of them as being the colour of the ocean. Not sea green like Percy's, but a striking blue: like the shallows of the Indian Ocean.

Without really thinking, Narina extended one hand toward the small fountain tucked into the far corner of the cabin: a saltwater feature Percy had said was hooked up to the bay. A small sphere of water lifted from the surface. It hovered in the air, wobbling faintly, catching starlight from window.

Slowly and gently, Narina lowered the sphere with her mind. Her hand lifted to meet it halfway, palm cupped, fingers relaxed. The cool water settled into her grasp and her breathing immediately slowed in response.

She closed her eyes and sank inward, letting the quiet surround her. The weight that had pressed behind her ribs began to ease and her mind felt clearer than it had in months. And then, like a current she hadn’t felt until it surged, something surfaced.

A name.

Her eyes fluttered open, lips moving before she could stop them. “Adrian,” she whispered.

The sphere of water trembled, then broke. It splashed across her blanket, cool and startling, causing her to flinch.

Narina stared at the wet fabric, heart thudding. She hadn’t just recognised a name. She knew it. The man from her dreams had a name. Adrian.

She said it again, like a prayer... or a lockpick. She wasn’t sure if she’d meant to say it aloud, but now it settled into the cabin like it belonged there.

Sheets rustled. Percy sat up slowly, listening.

She turned toward him. “I remembered a name,” she said.

Percy’s eyes widened. He blinked a few times, pushing off the last of the sleep, then leaned forward expectantly. “What was it?”

She hesitated, then said it again, softer, like she was still getting used to it. “Adrian.”

Percy’s expression shifted: first surprise, then something steadier. He let out a quiet breath. “That’s huge,” he said. “Really, really huge.”

Narina looked down at her blanket, fingers brushing the damp spot. “Is it?” she asked. “I mean… it feels significant, yeah. But it’s still just a name. I don’t remember anything about him. Just that… I think he was important to me.”

“He is,” Percy said. “Trust me.”

He was quiet for a moment, then added: “I didn’t tell you this before, but… when I lost my memories, back in the Roman camp, there was one name I held on to. Just one. I kept saying it, over and over. I didn’t know why or even know who she was, but it kept me anchored.”

Narina met his eyes. “Annabeth,” she said.

Percy smiled, in a way quieter than the usual camp grin. “Yeah. So… you know how important a name can be.” Percy’s voice was gentle. “Hold on to it. The rest will come. I’m sure of it.”

Narina let out a slow breath. “I hope so.”

They didn’t speak after that, but they didn’t need to. The hippocampus nightlight still glowed faintly between them. They sat there until the stars began to fade. Two half-siblings, tethered by scars neither could see, and one name neither could explain.

And somewhere far above, the gods were silent. But not absent.

Chapter Text

ACT I: The Mystery

Chapter 8: Choreography

Multi PoV: Percy/Annabeth

The morning smelled like brine and heat. Percy took the path behind the armoury, where the dew still clung to the grass and the sunlight hadn’t quite dried the earth. It was early enough that most of camp was still asleep, or pretending to be. The only real sound came from the waves just beyond the hill, rolling in and out like a heartbeat. He walked slowly, head still full with thoughts.

Narina.

He said her name in his mind the way you might test a word you’d only just learned to pronounce. It felt strange in the best way: like finding a photo of your family and realizing there was someone in the background you'd never noticed, standing right there.

His sister.

Yes, there was Estelle: his baby sister, who was now eight and thought he hung the moon. He loved her like crazy. But this was different. Narina was another child of Poseidon. A demigod child, like him.

He hadn’t thought that was possible. He hadn’t even hoped for it. For so long, Cabin Three had been a room with too much silence and not enough footprints. Percy had made peace with that, eventually. With being the only child of the sea god. The only link in a line that Poseidon wasn't supposed to repeat. And now? Now she was real. Not a vision, not a prophecy, not a maybe.

She even moved like their father, in that quietly tidal way: all stillness until the moment it mattered. He felt it again, the strange, low warmth in his chest.

And then, of course, there was the name. Adrian. It had caught him off guard when she whispered it last night. He’d heard a lot of names over the years: gods, monsters, campers, enemies, allies. But that one had weight. Like it had been carried a long time just to reach her lips.

And she had remembered it. Which meant she hadn’t lost everything. Percy slowed his steps even more, following the thought to its end. It should have been hopeful, but instead, it made his chest ache. He remembered what it had felt like when Hera wiped his memories and all he had left was a single name: Annabeth. It had nearly broken him.

And now Narina had a name like that. He swallowed. It isn’t fair. She deservs one full day of being whole, without strings.

He reached the meeting spot behind the stables just as Annabeth stepped out from the shadow of the archery range. She looked like she’d been up for hours already. Hair braided back, tablet under one arm, that particular Athena-tightness-in-her-jaw that meant she’d already had three theories and an argument with herself before breakfast. He took one look at her and felt that familiar twist. Yeah, that was his girl.

"Hey," Percy said, offering a grin. "You look like you slept great."

Annabeth studied him for a moment without smiling, then said, "You're still floating."

He blinked. "What?"

"You're walking like you forgot the ground's real."

Percy scratched the back of his neck. "Okay, maybe I'm a little... floaty. It's not every day you find out you've got a sister."

Annabeth exhaled slowly, but not unkindly. "I know. And I’m happy for you, really! But we need to talk about what that means."

That was the tone that meant: sit down, Seaweed Brain, and think.

So he did. Or at least leaned against the fence while she opened her tablet.

"Narina’s claimed. That’s confirmed, publicly and undeniably. Which means she's not just a kid of Poseidon, Percy... she's a child of The Big Three."

"Right."

"And she's around our age. Maybe a little older."

"Sure."

Annabeth looked at him sharply. "Then why wasn’t she part of the Great Prophecy? You remember, it wasn’t just about any demigod. It was about a child of the Big Three. That was the whole hinge."

Percy opened his mouth. Closed it again. She was right, as usual.

Annabeth pressed on. "Where was she during the Titan War? During the Battle of Manhattan? Or the Second Gigantomachy? She never even came up in conversation. How does a half-blood child of Poseidon just... not register?"

Percy felt the wind shift slightly, cooler now. "I don’t know," he admitted.

"Exactly. And neither do I." Annabeth flipped to a page of notes, lines already marked and circled. "I've started pulling some threads. But if she really has been around this whole time, even off-grid, there should be some trace."

He scratched his head. "Maybe she was somewhere else? Hidden."

"Then someone went to a lot of trouble to hide her. From prophecy. From us."

That landed harder than he wanted it to.

He looked down at his hands, then out toward the hill. The sea was just visible past the treetops, silver in the morning light. "She didn’t feel hidden," he said quietly. "She felt like someone who’d been waiting a long time to come home."

Annabeth softened, just a little. "I know. And I believe her. But believing her and understanding her aren’t the same thing."

They stood in silence for a moment. Percy glanced down again, the grass damp beneath his shoes. He thought of the Titan War, the Battle of Manhattan, the years when everything had been chaos and prophecy and survival. Could she have been out there then? Somewhere in the world while they were fighting to hold it together? It didn’t quite add up. She felt new, like her story was just starting now.

Finally, he said, "So what do we do?"

Annabeth looked up, eyes steady. "We find out where she’s been. Why she's suddenly appeared. And why now."

"Divide and conquer?"

"Obviously," she said with a smile. "I’ll handle records, timelines, camp chatter. You look into how exactly she arrived at camp."

"Rachel?"

Annabeth nodded. "If anyone knows how she ended up in camp, or if there was any divine push behind it, it’s her. Just don’t let her go full prophecy unless you absolutely have to."

"You mean ease into it."

"Exactly. Just listen. You’re good at that."

He shrugged, but a small smile tugged at his mouth. "Guess we’re still a dream team."

"When you’re not floating," she said, but her voice was warm.

Percy gave her a parting hug, the weight of the situation finally beginning to sink in. This wasn’t just about welcoming someone home. It was about what had kept her away. And who had decided she shouldn’t be found.

Annabeth took the back steps up to the Big House. She’d been here late last night, talking to Chiron, who’d been just as confused and concerned by Narina’s claiming as she was. She’d wanted to talk to Mr. D too, but he was away from camp. A week or so ago, Olympus had tasked him to check out the smaller demigod camps that were cropping up lately: a task he’d very grudgingly gone along with. Not that he’d be much help even if he were here... but still.

The morning sun hadn’t yet warmed the porch and Annabeth's fingers were cold on the brass door handle. She didn’t mind. The cold helped her think. The records room was tucked behind the old war maps in the spine of the house like a secret. Annabeth knew it well. She’d reorganised it herself during a particularly quiet winter. No one else seemed to enjoy cross-referencing divine bloodlines with monster attack logs. Their loss.

She pulled the door shut behind her, the familiar scent of parchment and cedar settling around her like armour. She opened the first drawer, the one designated for children of the Big Three. The cabinet was old, iron-handled, and mostly empty. Even after all these years, the drawer barely needed more than a few inches of rail.

She let out a yawn. Percy had been right, she hadn't slept last night. She hadn't had a moment's rest since Narina pulled water out of that barrel and the arena. Annabeth shook her head, she could rest when she'd solved this mystery.

She wasn’t looking for Narina’s name. She’d already done that a year ago, when Narina first arrived. At the time, it had made a cruel kind of sense that there was nothing. Narina had no memories, no claim, no past. But now? Now she was Poseidon’s daughter. A child of prophecy blood, by definition if not participation. And that meant there should be something, even if not by name.

Annabeth pulled the folders out one by one: Percy. Thalia. Nico. Bianca.

That was it? She shut the drawer more forcefully than needed and moved to the one beneath it: a slimmer iron case with a different set of lock wards. Roman records. Normally, Camp Half-Blood didn’t maintain these, but children of the Big Three were a shared exception.

Jason. Hazel.

Annabeth paused on that one. Hazel Levesque. She had died and come back, displaced through time.

Wait, the thought struck her. Not just Hazel. Her eyes snapped back to the Greek drawer she had just closed. Nico and Bianca. They hadn't been resurrected like Hazel, but they too had been pulled through time. Hades had hidden them in the Lotus Casino. One month for them had been seventy years in the outside world.

It was easy to forget Nico was from the '30s. His memory of his life before the Casino was wip– Annabeth froze. Just like Narina. Gods, how had she not thought of this sooner? Could Narina have slipped through time somehow? Been born in another century? Memory wiped and hidden in an attempt to avoid the Great Prophecy like the di Angelos?

She crossed to the far wall, the deeper archives, where the scent of dust sharpened and the files turned to thicker, older paper. If Narina had been displaced, there might be something older: a girl with no name, strange behaviour, a watery omen scribbled in the margin of some patrol report. It was far-fetched. But not impossible. She pulled the index and went backward. 1990s, 1980s, 1970s. Still nothing.

Further. 1940s, 1920s, 1900s, even earlier. Her fingers moved faster now, less precise. She scanned each heading, each index tab, each brittle paper fold for anything. Anything at all. But there was nothing, not even a blip.

Annabeth exhaled sharply. She wasn’t prone to panic, but she could feel the pressure building behind her eyes. And then there was the other problem: Narina's knowledge, the vocabulary she used, the detail in her diagrams. Annabeth had watched her draw molecular pathways with a fluency that matched university researchers. This wasn’t someone who grew up in the 1900s. If she'd fallen through time, she'd somehow landed here carrying advanced twenty-first century science in her head. Annabeth didn't think that was likely.

Annabeth sat back, frustration building, the folder still open in her lap. No name, no anomaly, no misfiled hint. She wasn’t overlooked, she was missing.

And not by accident.

She exhaled slowly. One breath, then another. The quiet of the records room pressed in around her. Annabeth didn't like this one bit, but she wasn’t about to give up.

She reached for the drachma in her coat pocket and stepped toward the basin by the window. She removed the small torchlight clipped to her belt (for moments just like this) and adjusted its beam until a faint rainbow shimmered over the surface of the water.

“Oh Iris, accept my offering,” she whispered, tossing the coin into the rainbowed water. “Frank Zhang. Camp Jupiter.”

The mist shimmered, and a moment later, an image of a man in praetor armour resolved in the smoke; his broad shoulders squared, his short black hair now trimmed closer than Annabeth remembered, with a faint line of silver at the temples. A hint of shame tugged at Annabeth: It had been far too long since she'd spoken to to her old friend.

"Annabeth," Frank said, straightening. "Everything okay?"

Even through the haze, the weight of leadership clung to Frank. Praetor of New Rome, and every inch of him looked it. He looked more solid than before, more sure of himself. Worn around the edges, but steady. Very steady.

"Mostly," Annabeth said, brushing a strand of hair behind her ear. Her fingers felt colder than they should have. "I just need to ask something... strange. Do you have a moment?"

Frank gave a nod, his expression turning serious. "Shoot."

Annabeth hesitated. She hated the feeling in her gut, the sense that she was pulling at a thread that might unravel something much bigger. But she asked anyway.

"I assume Hazel already told you what happened yesterday?"

Frank's brow furrowed. "Yes, she did. It's... disturbing news. If there was another kid of Neptune, modern era, I’d like to think we’d have noticed. Especially with the Pact."

Annabeth offered a wan smile. "My thoughts exactly. I just checked the records at Camp Half-Blood: Not a trace, even a hint of a rumour, about another child of the Big Three."

"I did the same," Frank replied. 

"But then I thought about Hazel and the di Angelos," Annabeth continued without missing a beat, "one way or another, they all slipped through time. So I wondered if maybe…"

Frank gave a slow, thoughtful nod. Annabeth caught a flicker in his eyes. She knew what Hazel meant to him. "Hazel’s case was... unique. But yeah... I remember what it felt like when we first found out. This doesn’t sound the same. Still..." He rubbed the back of his neck. "I’ll check my records again, but I’m pretty sure Percy’s the only one we’ve had in the last hundred years. This is new."

Annabeth let out a quiet breath. She hadn’t realized how much she’d been hoping Frank would say something else, anything to make the pieces fall into place. She looked at him more closely: the calm in his voice, the strength behind his eyes.

"Thanks, Frank. Really."

Frank’s expression softened a little. "I’ll get back to you soon. And Annabeth. Keep your guard up, yeah?" His voice held a quiet note of concern. "And tell Narina... I hope she finds what she’s looking for."

Annabeth gave a small nod, "I will."

The image shimmered, then faded, leaving only smoke and flickering light. Annabeth stared at the empty basin for a moment, her fingers curling slightly around the next drachma. She wasn’t done yet.

"Thalia Grace," she said quietly, and cast the next coin into the water.

Percy followed the winding path up the ridge behind the amphitheater, boots crunching dry needles underfoot. The air still smelled like summer, but the peace he’d felt yesterday was gone. Annabeth had been right. Where has Narina been all this time?

He rubbed a hand across the back of his neck as he walked. Nothing at camp ever stayed simple for long. Monsters, wars, missing siblings: all par for the course. But this one felt different, how could a child of the Big Three go unnoticed for over twenty years? Even the Mist had limits.

He reached the mouth of the Oracle’s cave. The entrance looked almost like a natural fault in the rock: narrow, overgrown with hanging moss and fig roots, half-shadowed by a leaning cypress. A trickle of water ran nearby, thin and silver across the stones. There was no door, just the cave, quiet and waiting. Percy crouched, picked up a small pebble, and tapped it gently against the stone three times.

A beat passed, then another, and then Rachel Elizabeth Dare stepped into view. She looked the same, but not quite. Her red hair was longer now, braided loosely down one shoulder, and she wore a paint-streaked tunic over her jeans. There was color on her fingertips: green, maybe cerulean, and she had that familiar, unblinking steadiness in her gaze.

"Percy," she said, a little surprised, but smiling. "It’s been a while."

He smiled back. "Hey, Rachel."

They hesitated. Then yeah, they hugged. Briefly, lightly. The kind of hug old friends gave when neither of them was great at goodbyes, and both were bad at checking in. He was hit with a faint memory of a night years ago: sitting with her on the Big House porch after a battle, sharing silence and a paintbrush.

"You’re not here for a prophecy," she said, pulling back, brow raised.

Percy shook his head. "Not unless I absolutely have to. Just questions."

"Thought so." She stepped aside and motioned him in. "Come on. You’d better tell me everything."

The cave swallowed the light in slow degrees. Percy followed Rachel in, ducking slightly as the ceiling dipped. The walls were rough limestone, damp in patches where moss clung and wept. Bits of paint dotted the stone here and there: charcoal sketches, faded symbols, an outline of a dragonfly. It smelled like old earth, candlewax, and something faintly metallic, like ink. Further in, the passage widened into a low, round chamber lit by flickering lamps in carved alcoves.

Rachel walked a few steps ahead of him, her braid swaying with the rhythm of her stride. She moved like someone who knew exactly where every shadow fell.

Percy cleared his throat. “I came to ask about Narina.”

Rachel stopped. It wasn’t dramatic. No gasp or stiff shoulders. She turned, her face unreadable for a second. Then she tilted her head and gave him a crooked little smile. “Took you long enough to ask.”

Percy stared at her. “What does that mean? You’ve known something?”

Rachel's smile faded. Her fingers curled slightly at her sides. “I’ve… felt something. Ever since the prophecy that led Clarisse to her.”

He frowned, "I'm listening."

“The prophecy I received,” she said after a moment, “it didn't feel like the usual. Not like a vision pressing through. It was more like… like being handed a script and told to read it.”

Percy’s expression darkened, a sharp feeling of protectiveness over Narina suddenly rising. “Like... with Python? Why didn't you say anything?”

Rachel’s gaze dropped for a moment, then lifted. “Because I wasn’t sure... until now. This wasn't like with Python. I spent a lot of time reflecting on the time I channeled him.”

Rachel rushed on, sounding uncharacteristically flustered. “I wasn't aware of the words I was saying, but in retrospect, I remember it feeling wrong. Kind of how like how it felt different that time Hera spoke to Piper through me. But with Python it was so much worse: like… pressure behind the eyes, like I was forcing the words through mud. If it happened again I would’ve noticed that instantly. Plus, there are the obvious signs, y’know? Rancid yellow smoke?”

Rachel paused briefly to collect herself, as if she’d realised she was starting to ramble. “Anyway, my point is: this was different. No physical signs and it just felt like... a smudge on glass. Barely there."

Percy watched his friend closely. There was a tension in her shoulders, a searching flicker in her eyes. He forced his expression to ease. “Hey,” he said, quieter now. “It’s okay. Just… start from the top. Whatever you’ve got, we’ll figure it out.”

“It’s hard to explain. There was this... unease. Subtle. Like something out of tune, just enough to make you stop and listen again. I couldn’t tell if it was real or if I was projecting." She continued, her voice had the texture of a brush dragged gently across canvas. "But you showing up now; that’s the confirmation I didn’t know I was waiting for. Like the smudge on the glass finally lining up with the crack beneath it.”

Percy glanced around the cave: the flickering shadows, the strange comfort of Rachel’s half-painted world. She always seemed to know when to speak and when to wait, when something was about to shift. If even she was unsure now, it meant this went deeper than she’d let on.

“It didn’t feel like the Oracle. But it didn't feel like the Oracle was being abused either. It felt like… something was wearing the Oracle.”

That chilled him more than he expected.

They sat for a while in silence. Then Rachel said softly, “Well, only one person actually heard the prophecy. You know who you need to talk to next, right?”

Percy let out a low groan and dropped his head back against the stone wall. “She’s not going to like this.”

Rachel smiled faintly. “Don’t worry,” she said, dry and a little amused. “I’ll come with you. For moral support. And to witness the carnage.”

Percy and Rachel stepped out of Cabin Five into the sharp afternoon light. The door creaked shut behind them, muffling the last echoes of its occupant's not-so-quiet opinion on surprise visits and people who didn’t know when to mind their own business.

Percy blinked, squinting at the sun. His hair was slightly mussed. He looked like someone who’d just walked out of a mild hurricane.

"Well," he muttered, dragging a hand through his hair. "That pretty much went as well as I expected."

Rachel snorted. She smoothed out her tunic, then puffed up her chest slightly and deepened her voice in a passable Clarisse impression: "'Are you interrogating me, Jackson? You think you know how to do my job better than me? Gods, give me strength before I punch a wall—'"

Percy gave her a side-eye. "Okay, that’s terrifyingly accurate."

Rachel shrugged, amused. "She’s got a cadence."

He let out a breath that was halfway between a sigh and a laugh. Leave it to Rachel to make him laugh in the middle of a minor crisis.

Then Rachel’s tone shifted. She glanced at him, more serious now. "Okay, but you heard what I did in there, didn’t you? That bit she said: 'Did you think I just stumbled into a prophecy?'"

Percy nodded slowly, the words replaying in his mind. "And 'You're not the only one who dreams, red!'," he continued.

"Clarisse is always volunteering for quests, so I didn’t think much of it at the time when she showed up outside the cave last year, asking for a prophecy," Rachel continued, voice low. "But from what she said today... well, yelled, it wasn’t just any quest she was after. She had a vision of her own that led her to this quest in particular. To Narina."

Percy rubbed his temple. That made things even murkier. "So either she got a real vision. Or..." he trailed off.

Rachel looked up sharply. "You think it was planted too."

He didn’t answer.

"If that's the case, this just got a whole lot more serious."

A heaviness settled between them, like the world had tilted a little.

Finally, Percy sat up. "Thanks."

"For what?"

"For still being the one who sees sideways."

Rachel smiled faintly. "You’re not going to like what’s coming."

"I never do," he said, and walked back toward camp, shoulders tight, heart pulling in a direction he couldn’t name. Because Clarisse had already been moving when the prophecy had come. Like someone had primed her before it even started. Rachel had been used. And Narina... She’d been found by accident... or maybe not by accident at all.

The forge hissed behind them, golden light flickering as Leo worked late, goggles down, music thrumming from his speakers. Annabeth barely registered it. She stood at the edge of the workbench zone, arms crossed, jacket half-zipped against the wind. Percy was already there, pacing a groove into the dirt.

They both spoke at once. "I need to talk to you."

If not for the weight of her discoveries this afternoon, Annabeth would have laughed. When she and Percy had first met they had almost nothing in common. Now they spoke in unison more often than she cared to admit.

Focus, Annabeth. There was a tightness in her chest that hadn’t left since she pulled the last file from the archive. "You first."

Percy shook his head. "No, you go. I’ve got a feeling it’s the same thing."

She didn’t argue. "I checked the records," she said. Her voice was steady, but inside, her thoughts were turning like gears. "Greek, Roman. Physical, magical, digital. Narina isn’t in any of them. Not even a partial file or a single vague mention."

She looked at him, really looked. "She’s not just unknown, Percy. She was hidden, or worse, removed."

Percy nodded once.

"I even spoke to Thalia. Wanted to know if the Hunters had heard anything. Plus, they tend to have a better ear on the smaller camps than we do. Took an hour and about six missed calls, but she finally picked up."

Percy raised an eyebrow. "And?"

"Nothing." Her arms tightened across her chest. "Never heard of Narina or a mysterious daughter of Poseidon."

A slight smile forming as she remembered her old friend. "She said, and I quote, 'if the gods are hiding another one, I’m going to kick someone off Olympus myself.'"

Percy exhaled slowly. "Yeah. That tracks."

He hesitated for a breath, then looked up at her. "I talked to Rachel."

Annabeth's spine straightened a fraction. Rachel didn’t speak lightly, and from Percy's tone, whatever she had told him definitely mattered.

"She’s been feeling it too," Percy said. "That something’s off. That prophecy that led to Narina? Clarisse had a vision that specifically made her seek it out from Rachel."

The implications leapt forward faster than Annabeth could speak them.

"And what's worse," Percy continued, "Rachel said even the prophecy itself felt odd. Unnatural... planted."

Annabeth’s breath hitched. "Planted?"

"Like the image wasn’t hers. Like it was shown to her. And no," Percy added, "it wasn't like how it was with Python. It was subtler."

Silence for a beat. Annabeth felt a sharp spike of worry followed by a heavier uncertainty. She hated both.

"I used to think interference looked like lightning bolts, warped omens, divine signs. But now… this feels worse."

"Calculated," Percy said. His mouth was a grim line. "The night Narina showed up... the monsters didn’t fight like they were hunting. They fought like they were herding, pushing her into Clarisse’s path."

Annabeth felt her stomach drop, a sinking clarity that tasted metallic at the back of her tongue. "So it wasn’t a coincidence. It was choreography."

Silence settled between them again, this time electric. Like something vital had just clicked into place.

Annabeth’s gaze dropped to the dirt. Her thoughts weren’t just spinning now, they were threading. She could feel it in her fingertips, that quiet throb of a theory locking into place, a dozen background assumptions collapsing.

She looked up, her voice quieter but more certain. "The gods must have orchestrated this," she said. "They're the only ones powerful enough to have done all of it. They hid her for years... and then they dropped her off at our doorstep, over two decades later. No memories and no trail."

Percy's shoulders rose and fell. "But why now?" he asked.

Annabeth’s brows drew together. She could feel it, that itch when something didn’t line up. Her voice sharpened. "And why all the smoke and mirrors just to get her here? This is more than secrecy. It’s precision. It’s strategy."

She shook her head once, slow and grim. "It’s convoluted, even for them."

The firelight crackled behind them. Sparks flared and died. Percy shifted beside her, his weight moving from one foot to the other like he was searching for something to break the tension. Then, lightly, he said, "On a more positive note… I think Narina’s memories have been starting to come back faster ever since she was reclaimed. Last night she remembered a name—"

Annabeth's head snapped up before she could even think. "Wait," she said, sharper than intended. "Say that again."

Her breath caught and her heartbeat stumbled like it had missed a stair. There was something off in that sentence. No not just off, wrong.

Percy cocked his head. "Um… Narina’s memories have started to come back?"

"No," She took a half-step closer, "after that. You said ‘reclaimed.’"

The word echoed in her skull like a dropped coin in a silent hall.

Reclaimed.

The pieces had finally started to fit together: a hidden daughter, manipulated paths, divine silence. The theory had felt close, tantalizingly close. And then Percy said that one word and the whole structure fell apart.

"Percy…" she said, voice low, the syllables careful. "The gods don’t reclaim their children." Cold air scraped against her arms, but she barely felt it.

His expression shifted as realisation started to set in. She saw it land in his eyes.

"But that means…"

She nodded, her pulse thudding in her neck. The forge hissed behind them, rhythmically. "Yesterday," she said quietly, "that was the first and only time Narina was claimed."

She didn’t need to explain further. The silence that followed was dense. They both stood in the weight of it, the implication pulsing between them like static.

The gods didn’t know about Narina either.

Somewhere behind them, Leo’s music crackled. Sparks hissed against metal. And above them both, a storm was beginning to gather.

Chapter Text

ACT I: The Mystery

Chapter 9: Breach

Multi PoV: Percy/Annabeth/Narina

The sky hadn’t made up its mind yet. Still that dull, morning grey, the sun stalled somewhere behind a bank of clouds. For a moment, it looked like the kind of day where nothing could go wrong.

Percy and Annabeth headed toward the Big House first thing the next morning. They hadn’t said much about their realisation since the forge. The words still felt too sharp, like if they started talking now, something might split open. So they just walked, side by side, boots scuffing dry pine needles, the air thick with all the unsaid things.

Percy kept replaying it in his head: Poseidon, the gods, hand't known about Narina either. It still sat wrong in his chest. Chiron would want to hear all of it it. The prophecy, the silence, the monster patterns... the delayed claiming. He’d know what it meant, or what it could mean. And if he didn’t... well, Percy didn't want to think about that yet.

They were just passing the stables when the alarm went off. Three short blasts of a horn.

Percy's whole body flinched. The sound sliced through the morning like it had teeth. Sharp, metallic, unmistakable... and definitely not a drill.

He felt it in his spine first, that old, electric jolt. Then the cold hit his gut.

They froze, just for a second.

Then they ran.

Campers were already spilling out of cabins, in every state between sleep and panic. Percy caught flashes: someone dragging on armour backward, another still in pajama pants, sword in hand. A kid from Hermes cabin was hopping on one foot, trying to pull on a greave. Percy remembered when he used to be like that. It felt like a lifetime ago.

The dining pavilion was already filling. Percy and Annabeth pushed through the crowd, breath still catching from the run. And then the shimmer hit the air, a pulse of gold mist, high above the tables. An Iris feed, projected into the sky like a flare. That's new... when did we install that? Percy thought to himself. Then again, it had been a while since the alarm at camp had last gone off.

Most of the pavilion went still as the image crackled into focus: a grainy stretch of woods just outside the camp's magical barrier. Trees swaying a little in the wind. No monsters, no campers, just forest. Then a figure stepped into view.

Gasps broke the hush like glass. He was tall, armoured in a black suit of armour etched with gold circuitry, lines glowing faintly under the grain. The way he moved made the hair on Percy’s arms lift. It was deliberate, like he knew exactly where the boundaries were.

Someone whispered, "What is that?"

Hazel stood, slow and steady. Her eyes didn’t leave the image. "Not a monster."

Will, beside her, spoke quieter. "Not anything I’ve seen."

Percy turned to look at Annabeth, but she was already moving.

She was at the edge of the pavilion, elbowing through a knot of stunned campers. Her hands found the hidden panel beneath the pavilion beam like she’d built it herself. Come to think of it, she probably had. She scrubbed the feed back five seconds and slowed it down. "That armour..." she murmured. "Those glowing lines. What are those?"

Percy stepped in beside her, finally squeezing through the crowd. He folded his arms, his jaw felt tight. "Could be enchanted."

She shook her head, slower this time. He heard the uncertainty in her voice. "I don’t know... it doesn’t feel enchanted. It almost looks like—" She hesitated. "Circuitry, maybe... tech."

Tech.

The word felt heavier than it should. Camp didn’t do tech, not like that.

Annabeth zoomed in, focusing on the figure's helmet. It was shaped like a Greek helm, Percy noted: same ridge and contour. But where the open visor should've been... that's where things started to get weird. In place of exposed eyes, there was only a sealed plate of glowing light. In place of a nose and mouth, shadows.

Murmurs started to rise, voices rippling across the pavilion like a nervous wind. The projection zoomed out slightly as the figure approached the magical boarder, invisible, but everyone knew exactly where it was. The boundary of camp, the threshold.

The figure paused just short of it. The feed glitched. A flicker of static rolled across the image.

Then, he stepped forward.

Percy felt it before he saw it. That low hum, like the wards holding their breath.

The figure reached out, one gloved hand extending toward nothing... and touched it.

The Iris feed stuttered. The figure stood at the edge of the woods, one hand braced against the air. No, not air. The barrier.

Annabeth felt her breath catch in her throat. She knew exactly where the boarder ran, its geometry was fixed in her memory like floorplans. He was testing the perimeter. Her fingers closed tighter around the controls beneath the pavilion beam and she leaned forward without meaning to.

Then he pushed. The mist rippled. Not just in the feed, but all around her. A shimmer passed through the real air, subtle but definite. Annabeth's heartbeat surged in her ears. Her mind catalogued it automatically: perimeter tension elevated, threshold held, outer barrier destabilised but intact.

He drew back a fist... and punched.

Nothing. Annabeth exhaled in relief. The barriers are holding. Good.

Around her, a few campers sighed. One of them let out a nervous high-pitched laugh.

But Annabeth didn’t fully relax just yet. Her eyes were on his movements. They were slow, purposeful and unafraid. Whoever he was, he’d expected that. With growing dread, Annabeth realised that he hadn’t been testing defences, he’d merely been confirming them.

He reached behind his back and her stomach tensed. Her hand hovered just above the magnification rune.

He drew something long and heavy. It looked like a broadsword but not like any she'd seen before. The blade pulsed with bright light.

Annabeth's squinted. Not celestial bronze or imperial gold. Not even mundane steel. Its glow didn’t flicker like fire. It strobed cleanly like a circuit. The feed pixelated and distorted under the bright golden light.

He stepped forward once more, raised the sword, and stabbed the barrier.

The world twitched. The spot where the blade pierced the barrier shimmered, like heat off pavement. A ripple burst outward: concentric, fast, almost beautiful. For the briefest instant, the barrier revealed itself. A grid of gold and blue lines, thin and intricate, like divine circuitry lit from within.

Gasps scattered through the pavilion. Behind her, someone whispered, "That’s not possible."

Will Solace. Annabeth didn’t answer. She was already calculating. Angle of contact. Radius of spread. Frequency of pulse. Her mind moved fast, faster than her breath. She couldn’t afford to blink. She didn't have time for fear or disbelief either.

The sword withdrew and the figure adjusted his stance. He slashed once, downward diagonal, then again opposite: An X.

The knot in her stomach tightened further as she read his body language. He was preparing for a final blow. Her fingers tensed around the beam edge.

Then he drew back his armoured fist, the pistons on his arm (hydraulic, she presumed) sliding into place... and he punched. Right through the center of the X.

The screen flared white.

When the flare cleared, a perfect gash was suspended in empty air, like someone had sliced into glass that wasn’t there. The barrier itself remained invisible, but the wound glowed: sharp-edged, precise, wrong. Hairline fractures spidered outward from the breach, forming a web of light with no surface to cling to. They shimmered and pulsed, trembling with unstable magic. And from the edges, light bled; as if the world had been holding something in, and now it was starting to leak.

And the figure stepped through.

Annabeth didn’t speak. Her mind was full of thoughts, but she didn’t know what language would still make sense.

The moment the feed cut out, Camp Half-Blood ignited.

Even though she had only been at camp for a year, Narina could tell that there were no real protocols for something like this. Monster attacks, sure. Intruders, yes. But not someone cutting through the barrier.

"Form up!" Clarisse’s voice cracked across the pavilion. Campers jolted like startled horses. "Eastern woods! Now!"

Narina didn’t move at first. She wasn’t quite sure why. Her body just… held still. What did she feel first? Cold? Pressure? Dread? The space where the Iris feed had vanished still buzzed in her vision.

The image of that suit lingered behind her eyes like an imprint. The silhouette, the very... human way it moved; all of that rattled her. But that wasn't all. There was something about the helmet. Narina immediately recognised it as Corinthian in design. There was something... familiar about it that she couldn't quite put her finger on it. And strangely enough, it was her heart that responded most strongly to it. A stronger version of the ache she felt near the forge.

"Hey!" Percy’s clipped voice interrupted her thoughts. He was already halfway down the hill, Riptide switched into sword form. "Let’s go!"

She blinked, nodded once, then fell into step beside him.

When they reached the stables, Chiron waiting for them, bow in hand. A loose line of armoured campers stood behind him. Will, Hazel, even Nico. Annabeth jogged up last, tugging on her gauntlets.

"He’s inside the first ring," she said. "We meet him before he hits the cabins."

"And if he’s hostile?" Clarisse growled.

"Then we slow him down," said Percy. "We don’t kill what we don’t understand."

For some reason that caused a sense of relief to surge through Narina. Clarisse didn’t look thrilled, but she didn’t argue. Narina had come to learn that while she and Percy didn't always get along, they had the highest respect for each other when it came to combat and leadership.

The campers moved fast, fanning out across the wooded slope in practiced rhythm. Narina stayed centre; her steps were sure, but her pulse was quick and something under her skin felt too light.

The air felt charged and... rewritten, somehow. Like something was breaking the rules and bringing its own. The trees thickened as they neared the outer markers.

Annabeth’s voice came, low: "Contact in thirty seconds."

No one spoke.

Then Narina saw him; a brief glimpse through the trees. Her fingers curled at her sides. A feeling she couldn't quite place surged through her.

She didn’t know who he was. But some part of her, a part deeper than sense and older than memory... it wanted to.

Chapter Text

ACT I: The Mystery

Chapter 10: Clash

Multi PoV: Annabeth/Percy

The wind shifted, kicking up dust that swirled in slow arcs around the figure in black. Annabeth watched him: He hadn't moved yet. He just stood inside the breach he had carved; helmet angled, unreadable. The sword was still in his hand but it was no longer glowing as brightly. In fact, Annabeth thought it now looked a lot like regular celestial bronze.

No one crossed the line. Chiron stood at the front now, flanked by Will and Hazel, with cabin leaders forming a loose semicircle behind them. The Ares kids had already begun spreading out into a wedge formation in preparation.

Annabeth held her ground. Her heart beat steadier than she expected, a solid rhythm in her ribs, but her fingers never left the hilt of her dagger. She could feel the faint imprint of the leather grip against her palm, grounding her.

She scanned the scene again, counting positions and cataloguing posture. Everything about the figure was wrong: his stillness, the precise way he stood just inside the breach.

Out of the corner of her eye, Annabeth spotted Narina standing at the edge of the formation, half-shadowed by a tree. The girl hadn’t moved since they’d arrived. Her arms were folded and her shoulders tense. Annabeth caught her gaze flicker once, just once, to the stranger’s helmet, before locking back ahead, silent and focused.

Annabeth had spent her life practicing how to interpret body language but she wasn't sure what to make of Narina's. She made a mental note: follow up later. Not now.

Percy stepped forward. She felt it more than saw it: the shift of his weight, the breath he took. He didn’t draw Riptide yet and kept his posture open, palms loose at his sides. The light caught faintly in his hair as he spoke, his voice carrying clean across the clearing. “You’ve made your entrance. Now how about your name?”

The figure tilted his head. The motion was slight, mechanical and soundless. Percy took another step.

Annabeth tensed slightly. She agreed with Percy's approach and trusted that he could handle whatever happened next, but a part of her always worried whenever he stepped headfirst towards danger. If anything, she somehow felt it even more strongly, now that they were engaged. She couldn't stand the thought of losing him.

“You’re standing on protected ground,” Percy continued, steady as tide. “That cut you made? Not subtle. Which means you want us to see you. So let’s skip the part where we pretend you’re lost and talk straight.”

Still nothing; only the low, pulsing hum of the suit. It had a weight to it, like the beat of distant war drums you only felt in your bones.

Chiron’s hand drifted toward his bow. Not yet, give Percy some time. Annabeth raised her hand, just enough to give a signal: wait.

“We’re not your enemy,” Percy said slowly, each word precise. “But we don’t let strangers punch through our borders without an explanation.”

A beat. Then the figure took a single step. It was neither fast nor agressive... but it caused half the line to flinch. Annabeth didn’t, her eyes were busy tracking every micro-movement. She was trying and failing to read the figure's intent. Searching for anything she could use to give Percy a strategic advantage.

The figure isn't giving anything away, but maybe...

Annabeth glanced back towards Narina. Her whole body had gone still as if she were listening closely. Her eyes were narrowed, measuring. Something in her posture said: I know that shape.

But before Annabeth could process what that meant, the figure was moving again, sword lowered and helmet still down. She tried once more to get a read: it didn't feel like a threat... but it wasn't a surrender either.

Percy moved forward to meet him, Riptide now uncapped, low and steady at his side. “You’ve got five seconds to explain why you tore through our boundary like a monster.”

The helmet tilted again with that same eerie precision. The visor caught the light and returned nothing.

Then a voice, male, slightly metallic through the helmet. “Monsters destroy,” the figure said. “I'm here to correct.”

Percy’s grip shifted. A heartbeat of tension. “Try again.”

Silence, then: “You took someone from me.”

Annabeth felt her breath catch at the way he said it: without anger or desperation, just absolute certainty.

Percy frowned. “We don’t abduct people.”

“No,” the figure said. “But you follow gods who do.”

That was it.

Percy moved, fast. A blur of motion, a rush of wind. Riptide came down in a clean arc... and the figure raised his own blade to meet it.

Sparks screamed off the clash and the clearing exploded into sound and motion.

Percy struck first, Riptide flashing as it came down. The figure turned with unnerving precision and brought his sword up to catch the blow without flinching. Metal screamed as sparks scattered across the clearing like startled birds.

Percy’s bare feet hit the ground hard. Keep up the pressure, don't give the guy space, he thought. Strike, pivot, rebound, another clash.

The figure blocked and countered precisely and mechanically. He moved like he'd studied this rather than lived it. Efficiency without flourish. Percy ground his teeth. He’d fought monsters who roared and gods who preened. This one didn’t do either. Just met him blade for blade, silent and unyielding.

And that armour. Up close, it was bulkier than it had any right to be: all squared joints and plated shoulders, like someone had designed it to punch through a warhead and survive. Matte black, with veins of gold circuitry etched onto the surface, flickering with a constant, steady pulse. The helmet was sealed, like a Greek hoplite helm but modernised.

And the sword: that first flare of raw energy that had torn through the barrier was gone. The weapon in the figure’s hand now looked... normal, Percy thought. Still celestial bronze, maybe. Still dangerous, but it didn’t hum anymore.

Percy narrowed his eyes. This wasn’t Olympian. This wasn’t monster. This looked like Hephaestus and Athena had a war baby and left it in a bunker to grow teeth.

Percy lunged. A tight diagonal slash, aimed to test but not kill. Once more, the figure met it, blade up. The impact clanged loud and sharp, metal scraping as he angled the sword to deflect.

Percy didn’t pause. He stepped in with a shoulder feint, then pivoted low, sweeping his leg to catch the other off balance. The figure jumped; just far enough.

He landed heavily, boots cracking a divot in the dirt. Okay, Percy thought. He’s not just wearing metal. He knows how to use it.

Another strike, this time a flurry. Percy moved his blade like water: three quick jabs and a final overhead sweep meant to break almost any stance. But the figure adapted and responded. Tightly and precisely, defensive patterns over instinct. He blocked high, twisted low, shifted weight with each strike like he was calculating angles in real time. He didn’t parry everything cleanly (his form was too mechanical for that) but he absorbed each blow, shifting with the force instead of fighting it.

“Huh,” Percy muttered. “Not bad.”

He pressed harder. Faster footwork. A jab to the ribs, then a fakeout heel-spin toward the shoulder. The figure angled his shoulder just so, letting Percy’s blade scrape harmlessly across a reinforced plate. Then—

WHAM.

A servo whirred and the figure shoved forward with an augmented palm strike to Percy’s ribs. Percy flew backward a good five feet before landing in a crouch.

He heard a few campers gasp.

“Did he just—”

“He’s keeping up with Percy.”

Percy exhaled slowly. His ribs didn’t hurt, but his pride had questions. He spared a brief glance at Annabeth. He could tell she was deep in thought based on the hand on her chin and the cute way here eyebrows furro– she made eye contact. "Focus, Percy," said her eyes. He could practically hear his fiancée in his head: "That strike wasn't magic. It was torque."

Well, whatever it was, it was controlled, mechanical and brutally exact. Percy straightened, rolling his shoulder. Who is this guy?

Percy stepped back, one foot dragging slightly in the dirt. The figure was strong: not just in brute force, but in design. Whoever this was, they weren’t guessing. Every motion had intent. Every reaction was calibrated.

But there was one thing you couldn’t engineer. Percy turned his head, just enough to catch the shimmer of the nearby stream. The camp border always ran close to a natural water vein, and it was still there, winding like a silver thread through the trees. He opened his palm and the stream answered. A rush of cold clarity surged through his spine as the moisture leapt from the bank and snaked through the air, coiling around his wrist and forearm, sinking into his skin. His muscles relaxed, his balance sharpened and the slight ache in his ribs vanished.

And in response, the figure stilled. It was almost as if he was calculating.

This time, when Percy moved, it was different. It was even faster, cleaner. He lunged in, feinted left. The figure bit. Too slow. Percy pivoted right and came down hard with a vertical strike. The blade caught the figure's shoulder, skidding off armor. Percy followed up with a backhand slash, powered by the rising mist at his feet.

The stranger reeled. Percy noted that he wasn't quite staggered or failing yet... but he was definitely behind.

Percy raised his blade. “Getting tired?”

The figure didn’t answer, but his grip shifted. Percy nodded once. “Good.”

He moved again: quick jabs, a spinning slash, a low kick that met resistance from what felt like a steel pillar. The figure reacted slower now, just a half-beat off. Percy could feel it: the timing was his.

Okay, let's see how you react to this. The mist thickened around Percy’s ankles as he drew deeper, calling from the trees themselves. Moisture clung to bark, pooled under leaves. He called it gently and steadily, and then directed it at the figure. Just enough to see what the figure would do.

To Percy's disappointment, the figure didn't seem to be surprised at all. He simply adjusted, with the smallest backward shift; a half-step of recalibration. His sword angled lower, protective rather than aggressive. The suit, too, seemed prepared. It didn't hiss or spark when touched by the water, it deflected it instead. The surface was sealed, insulated. Whoever built this had planned for what a child of Poseidon could do. Smart design, Percy thought, Annabeth would approve.

But he hadn’t counted on pressure. Percy stepped forward, the water surging now up his legs like armor of its own. He brought the mist with him, drawing it into his core, letting it fuel his momentum. His foot hit the ground, and a spray of mist burst outward forcefully, knocking the figure off balance.

Percy’s eyes locked on the weak point: the exposed seam at the figure’s shoulder joint, just beneath the overlapping black plate. The kind of gap you left only if you had no choice. That was the opening.

Now.

He dashed forward fast, precise and mist-wrapped. Riptide angled low, then reversed at the last second in a sharp, rising arc: a classic misdirect. The figure tried to counter, caught off-guard for the first time. His blade came up too late. The strike landed clean.

But it passed through.

There was no clang. No jolt of resistance. Just the faintest shimmer at the edge of impact, like Riptide had sliced through air. Percy stumbled a step past him, confusion sharp in his chest. He’d aimed true, the gap had been real and Riptide never missed like that, not unless…

He froze for a split second. The blade had passed through. Only mortals did that. Humans.

But there was no time to process, the figure was already pivoting, recalibrating. Percy’s instincts screamed at him: danger wasn’t over. Human or not, this thing was still standing and still armed. Percy reset his grip on Riptide. Whatever he was, he was still a threat.

Percy raised his sword again, when all of a sudden, a voice rang out.

“STOP.”

Percy halted mid-step, blade still raised. The figure did the same, his helmet tilted, as if listening.

Percy’s eyes flicked toward the sound. Narina? She was standing slightly beyond the treeline in her camp jacket, unarmed and unarmoured. Her hair was damp and her breath was caught from something other than just the run. Percy could feel it: the tension, the pull. Like recognition had bloomed in her before she could name it.

Her voice barely broke the silence. “Adrian...?”

A chill prickled down Percy's spine. The name hit like a punch. This was him. Adrian.

Percy’s grip on Riptide loosened as he dropped the blade to his side. Its tip hovered just above the earth, still ready at a moment's notice. The armoured figure, Adrian, matched him. Percy watched as the sword lowered slightly. The figure didn’t fully sheath it either, but his shoulders dropped in something that seemed like relief.

“You’re... safe,” Adrian said. The voice was filtered, but the modulation cracked just enough for Percy to hear it: emotion, barely held. “I didn’t know if you made it. I looked. I searched everywhere. But I couldn’t come until I was ready.”

Percy studied Narina. She stood frozen, eyes shimmering with something other than tears. Longing? Relief? He didn’t know. But he knew what it felt like to want something to be true so badly, you’d believe it even before the proof came.

“You built all this… for me?” she said.

A pause. “No,” he said. “For us.”

She took a shaky step forward. Percy saw the way his sister's fingers curled slightly at her sides, like her body remembered more than her mind did. “I don’t remember everything. Just… flashes. But when I saw you—”

“You remembered what mattered,” Adrian said. “That’s enough.” He extended a hand, “Let’s go home, Narina.”

Narina didn’t move right away. She turned towards Percy, eyes wide with a hint of panic. Percy’s feet stayed planted, but his chest felt tight and his head was spinning.

For once, he was at a loss for words. A part of him recognised what was going on, but the rest of him was still trying to process it. Everything was happening so quickly (he wasn't even sure he had finished processing Narina being his sister, before all this happened).

In any case, whatever this was? It wasn’t a threat, not anymore. He capped Riptide and then proceeded to pocket its ballpoint form.

“I– I didn’t know,” Narina said. “Not until now.”

Annabeth stepped forward, slow and deliberate. Percy didn’t need to look to feel her beside him. Her presence was steady and grounding. She gave a single nod, no judgment, no demand.

Narina looked back at Adrian. Then at the camp. Then, slowly, she walked toward him.

Percy watched as they left the ring of trees together. They weren't running or hiding. They were just… going home.

Clarisse made a noise: half-growl, half-protest. “We’re seriously letting him take her? Letting him just walk out of here?”

Percy still hadn’t moved. But now he spoke, low and firm, “Let them go.”

Clarisse stared at him. “You know who that is.”

Percy’s jaw tightened. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s Adrian.”

And somehow, that was enough.

End of ACT I

Chapter Text

ACT II: Forge

Chapter 11: Flashback

PoV: Adrian

The lab hummed: soft, steady, precise. Not the hum of life, but of machines too well-maintained to complain. The overhead lights were half-dimmed, motion sensors overridden long ago. The others had left hours ago. Adrian preferred it that way.

He adjusted the clamps. A vein of alloy glowed faintly under the electron microscope, waiting for final calibration. He didn’t check the clock. Time passed differently when it was only him and the work. Cleaner.

He toggled the focus. Re-ran the scan. Something was off in the lattice, a microfracture he hadn’t anticipated. He noted it, already redesigning the test housing in his head before the computer could beep. His fingers moved over the interface with muscle memory. Precision without pause. Like always.

He was supposed to be sleeping, or teaching, or whatever postdocs were meant to be doing when not quietly overrunning the departmental resource budget. He hadn’t checked the rules lately.

Adrian didn’t work late to impress anyone. If he had, he would’ve stopped years ago: around the time someone from admin called him a "brilliant hazard." That had bothered him, once. The fact that the insult had landed. So he’d filed it away. He’d earned a reputation; the kind that gets you left off group emails and left alone... in the best sense of the word. He wasn’t cruel, just efficient, and people didn’t like being outpaced by someone who didn’t slow down to soften the edges.

He adjusted the lens again. The crack had propagated. Too linear. A design flaw. Good, he thought: he preferred errors that made sense. It meant they could be fixed.

He stood, back cracking from hours of stillness. One last task before shutting down the night: closure, made visible. He reached for the engraving tool. Etching was for documentation: batch numbers, trial sets, sterile labels scratched into metal so future interns wouldn’t misplace them. This one was just that: a clean, precise mark for tracking tonight’s work. But the act always slowed him down, made him deliberate. There was something therapeutic in dragging a hard point through metal. Something final. Something exact. The lab had digital records, but this was different. He’d been etching things since undergrad, even projects no one would ever see. Especially those. Sometimes it was just a date, other times a shape. And once, a single word.

He paused at the lab door, then turned back toward the other bench and opened the drawer.

It was still there, tucked beneath a sheaf of unused housings: a palm-sized block of alloy, etched with the word "proof." The block was not part of any sanctioned project; he’d logged it as scrap. He’d theorised the structure years ago: a containment matrix designed to store dense electrical charge. Compression without rupture. The idea was sound, but so far the prototypes couldn’t hold. Every time he got close, the energy buckled the lattice. Like the material itself couldn’t accept the burden. Well, at least not yet.

This cube was one of the failures. Still intact, technically. But one side had slumped and warped, metal visibly scorched from the last overload test. The surface was blackened and sagging, like it had tried to breathe and folded in the effort. He looked at it without lifting it out, then closed the drawer again.

He was halfway to the door when she entered. Hair tied with careful precision, not a strand out of place. Lab coat fully buttoned, a rarity in this building. There was a stillness to the way she moved. Composed. Intentional. The kind of presence that shifted the room just by being in it. She crossed to the biosensor hood, logged in without hesitation, and began calibrating the microneedles. Her hands moved like she'd done it a thousand times. Measured, unshowy, practiced.

She clearly wasn't new to this. But he didn’t recognise her from any previous rotation or group. Her equipment confirmed it: not a material scientist.

Then it clicked: the cross-disciplinary initiative. A broad university push pairing engineers with researchers across biology, chemistry, neurotech. Structured overlap without any fixed deliverables.

This wasn’t the first biologist he’d seen in the lab over the past few months. They came and went, none particularly noteworthy. But something about the woman standing across the lab from him was different. What caught him was the way she checked her pipette. A double tap to her wrist, deliberate but absent-minded, like a trained reflex. As if confirming something her body already knew.

He turned to leave, but something held. A tension he couldn’t name, like the circuit hadn’t discharged. He glanced back, without quite knowing why.

That’s when she met his gaze. Her eyes, sharp and striking blue, held his just long enough to register. She neither flinched nor smiled. Instead, she gave a brief, evaluating pause, as if she’d already assessed him and filed it away, then turned back to her work.

Adrian didn’t fall, didn’t spark. He just noted her, like marking a yield point before a system gives way.

She’d noticed him noticing. He was sure of it. But like him, she left it unacknowledged.

Adrian stepped out into the night air, phone already in hand. Curiosity wasn’t his usual impulse, but something about the lab encounter lingered. Without quite meaning to, he was already in the university portal, fingers navigating the cross-disciplinary roster.

He searched with intent. Biologists assigned to the materials wing: seven. He skimmed their faces without pause, until the blue eyes stopped him.

Narina Lin.

Genetics department. Specialist in phenotypic expression and sensory-linked traits. Sparse publication record. Impeccable academic history. References glowing. No public social links. Standard faculty formatting.

The profile was concise, but he read it twice. Then he locked his screen and kept walking.

They officially met three days later. The meeting was scheduled in Lab 4. She arrived one minute early, he was already there.

"Adrian Vale," he said simply, by way of introduction.

"Narina Lin." No handshake, just a quiet, neutral nod.

The day before, Adrian had checked his inbox out of habit. He was mid-simulation, eyes on the containment model, when the subject line slotted itself in: Final Interdisciplinary Assignment Notice.

He almost didn’t click. The email was routine. Predictable. The pairing system had been circulating for weeks, every engineer matched with someone outside their domain. He’d assumed he’d been skipped, or quietly exempted. Either was acceptable, preferred, even.

But he wasn’t.

Dr. Vale, your assigned collaborator is: Dr. Narina Lin.

There were no attached notes or special instructions. Only her name, rendered in default system font.

He stared at the email for a while, unsure of what he was feeling. They hadn't asked this time, just assigned. Ordinarily, that would’ve annoyed him. He disliked being conscripted into collaborations wrapped in the fiction of reciprocity. Especially when what they wanted was his output more than his method. But this didn’t feel like that... Not entirely.

Now, standing across from her in the lab, he was more certain of it. She arrived unperformatively: measured, and already in equilibrium. He wasn't completely reassured, but it settled something.

He reviewed her proposal summaries without small talk. Her writing was clean. Focused. A little sparse on experimental scaffolding, but the spine was there. She was tracking something sensory, something she didn’t name outright.

He paused on the phrase: external non-photonic input channels.

It caught his attention. It was certainly unorthodox. Bold without performance, and maybe more interesting than he’d assumed. He raised an eyebrow in acknowledgment.

She noticed. "It’s not standard," she said. "But it maps a working model. Light-adjacent patterns that don’t behave like light."

Most material scientists would’ve dismissed it as nothing more than inference and instinct dressed up in systems language. It lacked framework or proofs.

But not him. Not after the way she said it, without hedging or defence. Her posture didn’t shift and her gaze stayed steady. It was as if she’d already tested the theory alone, Repeatedly, and this was just the reporting phase.

He spoke without looking up: "If the effect is real—not imagined or retinal—it might be a lattice-phase mismatch," he said. "Something outside standard refraction indices. We’d need to tune a sensor to see what the eye can't."

He saw the subtle, almost imperceptible shift. A softening around her mouth and the faintest drop in her shoulders. It didn't seem like pride or surprise. It felt more like... relief, maybe. Masked, but there.

He looked up, just enough to meet her eyes. "So," he said, dryly, "how many material scientists turned you down before me?"

Her lips curved into something close to a smile. "Just six."

Adrian almost laughed, quiet and unvoiced. She’d said it like six was generous.

"This doesn't seem like it has anything to do with genetics," he said.

"Should it?" came her reply.

"I thought you were a geneticist."

"Sometimes I like to go outside of my field, keeps things from getting boring."

That wasn’t the answer he’d expected. Or the person, really. She was nothing like anyone he’d met... and far more than her file had conveyed. To his surprise, he realised he was enjoying the conversation.

"Fair enough," he said, trying to hide a smile.

He didn’t ask why she was chasing the anomaly. She didn’t ask how he could entertain it so easily.

But that was the first fifteen minutes. And neither walked away.

It was almost midnight when he found Narina again; this time in the quiet annex of the university library.

The research wing stayed open late for fellows, though few ever used it. Adrian had only come to clear his head, but there she was, her coat folded neatly beside her.

She was seated at one of the back tables, head slightly tilted toward a book. It was a dense, hardcover genetics volume with pages slightly curled from use. One hand moved a tinted reading ruler down the text, swiftly and precisely.

He’d meant to walk past without interrupting, but the second his steps crossed the threshold, she looked up as if she’d sensed him.

"I didn’t think anyone else came here this late," she said.

Her voice was quiet. Unstartled.

"I could say the same." Adrian exhaled, just a little. "I come here to think sometimes."

There was a small shift at the corner of her mouth. Acknowledgment, precise and deliberate. "Have some important thinking to do, then?"

"It can wait," Adrian said, the speed of his reply surprising him. Was he... nervous?

That earned the faintest flicker of a smile. She gestured lightly at the seat across from her. He sat without needing more.

They didn’t talk about the project. Instead, they drifted sideways: instinct before data, perception versus response, why certain structures triggered recognition before proof. Adrian found himself speaking more than usual. Not explaining, but exploring.

At some point, he leaned forward, elbows on the table, eyes skimming the edge of her book. "So," he said, "light that isn’t light?"

Narina didn’t flinch. "Yeah." Her gaze remained steady. "The last material scientist looked at me like I was crazy."

Adrian caught the slight tightening around her eyes. Just enough to suggest it still stung, even if she was trying to play it off.

Adrian tilted his head. He pictured a familiar silhouette: rigid tone, squared posture, that scowl of someone who never questioned the frame. “Let me guess. Chen?”

She gave a short nod, the corner of her mouth tilting. "He asked me if I believed in irrational things."

Something in him pulled taut. A quiet, focused irritation at thought of her being dismissed like that.

Narina continued, with something like a smirk on her face. "I asked him if the moss-covered gnome that sometimes rearranges my pipettes counted. He requested a transfer the next day."

He was caught off guard by how much that amused him. A short laugh escaped before he could stop it.

When he'd collected himself, he studied her face, the stillness in it. "And do you? Believe in irrational things, that is."

She paused without looking away. It felt like she was deciding whether or not to trust him. Her hand moved first. In one well-practiced motion, she flipped her reading ruler around while closing the book, bookmarking the page.

"I believe in signals we haven’t named yet."

Adrian’s chest lifted slightly on the inhale; with understanding. He nodded once. That answer, for her, was complete. He didn’t push further.

The silence that followed folded around them without pressure. Light spilled across the table in angular streaks. He let himself watch the shelves, the way their shadows angled and blurred. For the second time that day, Adrian found himself needing to revise what he thought he knew about Narina.

Then, a glance from her through her lashes. Quick, but unshielded.

"You don’t flinch when people sound strange," she said.

He met her eyes. His expression didn’t shift, but his voice become lower, steadier. "I flinch when they sound ungrounded." He paused a moment before continuing softly: "Not when they dare to ask questions."

That time, the smile reached further. Still small, but unmistakably hers.

He didn’t know what that smile had disarmed in him, only that it had. That night, they stayed in the library longer than either of them had planned.

In the weeks that followed, the project deepened. A steady accretion, like crystal growth under pressure. Unspoken alignment. Iterative trust.

They met often; not always scheduled, but never accidental. Syncing interface protocols, reviewing data structures, refining the containment model. And somewhere in that rhythm, something started to shift.

It started with time. He lingered longer after sessions, always finding a reason to stay. At first, it was cleanup; then final checks, then a quick recompile. All true, but not the whole truth. He noticed she never closed her laptop first, never angled her body away. She didn’t encourage the extra minutes... but she didn’t end them either.

Then came the smaller things. Not the data, her. The way she flipped through protocols without subvocalising. The stillness of her hands. The tuned precision in how she moved. He noticed how she paused before speaking, always choosing the most exact form of thought. Never redundant. Never softened. He admired that.

Without meaning to, he began mapping her rhythms: the angle of her jaw when she read, the silence she held when reviewing a flawed model. Once, he caught the sound she made—a single breath through her nose—when the data surprised her. He hadn’t realised he’d memorised it until the day it didn’t come.

He’d memorised other things too: the faint trace of her scent, vanilla with something warmer beneath it. Constant and unchanging. He noticed it most when she leaned close, but sometimes it lingered after she left, like a line of code still running in the background.

He told himself it was alignment. Precision recognising precision. And yet, that didn’t account for the way his attention drifted when she wasn’t speaking, or how fast it recalibrated the moment she did.

The moment that fractured his denial came quietly. He was leaving the lab late, coat half-zipped, backpack strap slung. And instead of heading straight out, he turned. And walked toward the library annex.

He told himself he was going to there to think, that was the usual reason after all, but there weren't any pressing projects on his mind this time. As he passed the window near the genetics shelves, he found himself slowing, just slightly. He didn’t expect to see her, but he was still disappointed when she wasn't.

He left without entering.

Things weren't the same after that. Something in him had changed: quiet, clean, unarguable. He didn’t say it out loud. Didn’t name it, even in his own mind. But he couldn’t pretend not to know anymore.

They were back in Lab 4. The lights had long since dimmed into their after-hours cycle, humming low with the weight of silence. Most of the building had emptied hours ago. Adrian barely noticed.

The test on their latest polymer-lattice sensor had failed, again, but the margin of failure was narrower. The outlier signals were finally collapsing toward a consistent band. Still outside tolerance, but directional.

Adrian marked the result in the log without irritation. He could already see how the next iteration might tighten the edge constraints.

From the corner of his eye, he heard, then felt, a quiet exhale.

He glanced over. Narina was staring at the sample tube, still locked in the stabiliser clamp. Her posture hadn’t shifted in minutes. Elbows balanced on the bench. He could tell she was thinking... calibrating.

He let himself watch her. Fully, this time.

The set of her shoulders. The quiet in her breath. The absence of unnecessary motion, like stillness was her native state, and she only moved when the thought was complete.

He’d known for days, now. Weeks, maybe. But something about this exact moment—the silence, the space, the way her presence filled it without effort—made the decision simple.

He wasn’t sure she’d say yes, or what he’d do if she didn’t, but the question was already rising, and he didn’t want to stop it.

No preamble.

“Do you eat?”

Narina looked up. Her gaze met his without flinching, but something softened there, the barest lift at one corner of her mouth.

“In general?” she asked.

Adrian exhaled a half-laugh. “In the next hour.”

She tilted her head, studying him. Weighing intent. She always did that: the extra second of silence, like some internal axis was turning behind those unblinking, precise blue eyes.

Adrian felt a flicker of doubt. Maybe he’d misread her. Maybe this was a mistake.

“Sometimes,” she said. A dry edge to her voice. “With people I trust.”

She blushed, just slightly, but Adrian caught it. Relief hit him hard and fast. He hadn’t realised how tense he’d been until it let go.

“Then come," he said, without looking away. "One hour. Nothing fancy. Just… not here.”

She reached for the interface and powered down the array. One brow arched as if to say lead the way.

That was it. No questions or ceremony. Just a flicker of mutual understanding: this had started.

It was the first time they left the building side by side. Not in parallel, but together. The night air hit with unexpected softness. Cooler than before.

Adrian adjusted his coat by reflex, then glanced at her beside him. She hadn’t brought one. He was about to offer his to her, but then realised that she didn’t seem to feel the cold. She noticed the intent though, and smiled; more to herself than at him.

He didn’t say anything, but his steps felt lighter. She was here, walking beside him and that felt good in a way he couldn’t ignore.

As they passed under the sodium-glow of the streetlights, she tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and looked up, just briefly, at the stars smeared faintly above the city haze.

"Adrian," she said, with a deliberate glance.

He turned his head.

“If this is a date,” she said, quiet but sure, “don’t try to make it normal.”

There was no irony. The way she said it curved, like she already knew he wouldn’t.

Adrian didn’t smile, but something in him let go.

“I wouldn’t know how,” he said.

Her eyes didn’t waver. But after a beat, a flush rose: high on her cheeks and unmistakable in the cold. She looked away then, like she hadn’t meant for him to see that.

They walked on in silence.

After a few steps, her hand drifted close to his: not quite touching, but clearly not by accident. Just near enough that if either of them shifted, the space between would disappear.

A moment later, it did.

Adrian never did figure out who closed the gap. All he knew was that neither of them let go.