SANITY; heroes of olympus

04.8

[act four; chapter eight     -     the poisons of night]

Dom couldn't help but feel homesick for the swamp.

She never thought she'd miss sleeping in a giant's leather bed in a drakon-bone hut in a festering cesspool, but right now that sounded like Elysium compared to...wherever she was.

She and Bob stumbled along in the darkness, the air thick and cold, the ground alternating patches of pointy rocks and pools of muck. The terrain seemed to be designed so that she could never let her guard down. Even walking ten feet was exhausting.

But it was a good thing she had been trained to always be alert, and she could feel her ADHD flaring up.

When they had first left the hut, she was feeling empathy for Damasen and how stuck he felt regarding his Fate—a feeling she knew all too well—but she was more rested and her belly felt satisfied, no longer clawing at itself out of hunger. Now her legs were sore. Every muscle ached. She was cold, but had no other clothes to wear, and she (more like Andy) refused to wear a drakon-skin shawl to shelter herself from the cold.

Whenever she or Andy felt like giving up, plopping herself down, and dying (which was, like, every ten minutes, or at least that was how Andy felt), she looked down at Mania, focusing on the familiar thrum of Percy's heart, then at the beads on the necklace around her neck, the ones that reminded her of why she was here and who she was fighting for.

She couldn't help but to wonder what had happened after they left Damasen's hut. She hadn't heard their pursuers in hours, but she could sense their hatred...especially Polybotes and one others that she couldn't quite identify. The giants were back there somewhere, following, pushing them deeper into Tartarus.