SANITY; heroes of olympus

05.5

[act five; chapter five     -     time crawled to a close]

Andy stood on the quarterdeck next to Leo, and it took them all of one second to notice the secret entrance. She couldn't help but gasp at the sight, because holy hells, it was stunning.

Leo seemed to agree. He gasped, "It's beautiful."

After all of the information they had scoured for, they finally hovered over the ancient temple complex of the healing god Asclepius, where they could hopefully find the physician's cure and maybe also some ambrosia and nectar.

Next to her on the quarterdeck, Percy peered over the railing.

"Looks like more rubble," he noted.

His face was still green from his underwater poisoning, but he wasn't running to the bathroom to throw up quite as much as he had before. Between him and Hazel's seasickness, it had been impossible to find an unoccupied toilet onboard for the past few days.

Luckily, Andy's own nausea—thanks to Michael Varus and his handy sword—had faded, which left her with the occasional twinge of deep-rooted pain that only ever lingered for about fifteen minutes at a time, and her wounds from Tartarus had healed nearly completely—though the scars that remained would never fade. Aside from those two facts, she was doing better, but the impending doom regarding a certain queen of dirt and earth still weighed her down. That and the constant lingering voice in her ears and the flicker of gold in her eyes.

Annabeth pointed to the disc-shaped structure about fifty yards off their port side. "There."

Leo smiled. "Exactly. See, the architect knows her stuff."