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FOURTEEN, palace of death
❀ ✿ ❀ ✿
AS ASTER LOOKED AT the Fields of Asphodel, she figured that this was what the Midwest was like. Just endless farmland sprawling on and on, never ending—sounds like it would be a dream for her mother. Aster thought that would be a pretty boring existence, which was probably what the Fields of Asphodel were like.
But then with all the people added, it seemed like the midwest after a local concert—trampled grass as a result of eons of dead feet. A warm, moist wind blew like the breath of a swamp. Black trees, poplars, grew in clumps here and there.
The cavern ceiling was so high above it might've been a bank of storm clouds, except for the stalactites, which glowed faint gray and looked wickedly pointed. Aster tried not to think about the fact that they could fall at any moment and kill them instantly, but it was hard to ignore the ones that had fallen and impaled themselves in the black grass.
Aster, Percy, Annabeth and Grover tried to blend into the crowd—as best as they could for not being dead—keeping an eye out for security ghouls. Aster looked around the spirits of Asphodel, searching for familiar faces, demigods that she had lost over the years. Aster suspected that they had gone to Elysium, being heroes and all. She couldn't help but look for her father's figure—maybe the reason he hadn't written back was that he'd died somehow. The thought made her stomach churn and her eyes sting.
Fortunately or unfortunately, it was hard to identify much of anything from looking among the spirits of the dead. Their faces shimmered. They all looked slightly angry or confused. They'll come up to you and speak, but their voices sound like chatter, like bats twittering. Once they realize you can't understand them, they frown and move away.
The dead aren't scary, Aster realized. They're just sad.
The four friends crept along, trying to act as dead as possible, following the line of new arrivals that snaked from the main gates toward a black-tented pavilion with a banner that read:
JUDGMENTS FOR ELYSIUM AND ETERNAL DAMNATION
Welcome, Newly Deceased!
Out the back of the tent came two much smaller lines.
To the left, spirits flanked by security ghouls were marched down a rocky path toward the Fields of Punishment, which glowed and smoked in the distance, a vast, cracked wasteland with rivers of lava and minefields and miles of barbed wire separating the different torture areas. Even from far away, they could see people being chased by hellhounds, burned at the stake, forced to run naked through cactus patches or listen to opera music. Aster could just barely make out a tiny hill, with the ant-size figure of Sisyphus struggling to move his boulder to the top. There were worse tortures of course, but a lot of which none of them wanted to repeat.
