¹On This Spring Day, percy jackson & the olympians

003.

ON THIS SPRING DAY
━━━━━ chapter three

━━━━━ THERE HAD BEEN a certain dream following Violet around as if it was a bad omen. As if it was some warning.

She had seen it first last winter, flying on the cold metal shoulders of Hank. They were flying towards San Francisco, hoping to save Artemis and Annabeth. ( Luckily, they had succeeded. ) But this dream would not stop tormenting Violet.

The first time she saw it, she wasn't sure what to make of it. Now, six months later, Violet still wasn't sure what to make of it. She didn't know what to make of the blonde girl who couldn't be older than eighteen fighting for her life. She didn't know what to make of the sword made out of iron darker than midnight. She didn't know what to make of the clothing that looked like it came straight out of the late 1910s.

And Violet especially didn't know how to take a monster shrouded in a veil of gloom. A monster that spoke exactly like Ms. Aarden.

The blonde gripped her sword tightly, darkness swirling around her. She scowled at the monster, cuts leaking blood and staining her clothing. Her green top with grills stained with red blotches in her abdomen, her dark skirt flowing down to her ankles was ripped and stained with mud, and her black jacket lay torn twenty feet away, blood blotching the pearly white snow.

The girl was coated in blood, cut in several places, and a blow to her head had blood trickling down and staining her hay-blonde hair. Her teeth chattered as she hissed, "I will never!" Just like last time, the accent was impossible for Violet to place; the most she could come up with was that it wasn't a modern accent from the Americas.

The monster shifted, struggling to pick a form. It was shrouded with darkness. Violet never understood why it was. Maybe for the monster to conceal itself from her prying eyes. "You have no choice." It sounded exactly like Ms. Aarden, except for the fact the voice crackling, as if talking through a broken walkie-talkie.

The blonde straightened. "Yes, I do." But her voice wavered, and she looked exhausted. She didn't have much of a fight left to give.

"There is no point in fighting any longer, Elain." Violet shivered at the name; Ms. Aarden had called her that two summers ago. "You don't like the gods as much as me."

"Maybe I don't like the gods," said Elain. "But I refuse to help you."

Before the monster shrouded in darkness could retaliate, Elain stabbed her sword into the ground, and a fissure opened. Violet's vision shook, the monster wailed, and Elain cried out in pain.

Violet woke up in a film of her own sweat. Her eyes stung, and her head pounded.

Elain. That's what Ms. Aarden had called her. But how? Why? It wasn't like Violet and Elain looked remotely similar; Violet had dark, coily hair and darker skin, and Elain's hair was the color of hay and her skin was practically the color of the pearly snow.

It just didn't make sense to confuse the two.

But how did Ms. Aarden know Elain?

🌷

Hours later, Violet was still feeling shaky when Chiron called for a war council meeting. Technically, Violet wasn't supposed to go as she wasn't head counselor for Cabin Eleven, but since she was one of two who found the Labyrinth, she demanded. ( And Chiron didn't seem to care to put up much of a fight last night. )