Chapter Sixteen:
Working Past the List of Lies.
— But you don't know what Hell you put me through; To have someone kiss the skin that crawls from you, to feel your weight in arms I'd never use. It's the god that heroine prays to !
The Fields of Asphodel looked exactly like its dreary and saddening description.
Imagine the largest concert crowd, maybe a football field packed with a million faces. Then, imagine a field a million times that that big, still packed to the brim with people, and after that, imagine the electricity had gone out — no sound, no light, no beach ball bouncing around over the crowd. Something tragic had happened backstage — whispering masses of people just milling out in the shadows, waiting for a concert that won't ever start. That's exactly what Percy Jackson imagined would be the best description of what he had been looking at: The Fields of Asphodel. The black grass had been trampled on by eons of dead feet. A warm, moist wind blew like the breath of a swamp. Black trees — Grover had told him they were called poplars — grew in clumps.
The cavern above them was so high it might've looked like a bank of storm clouds, except for the stalactites, which glowed faint gray and looked wickedly pointed. Percy had a really hard time trying not to imagine them falling on him and his friends at any moment as they walked, but dotted around the fields were several that had fallen and impaled themselves in the black grass. He guessed the dead didn't have to worry about little hazards like being speared by stalactites the size of booster rockets.
The quartet tried to blend into the crowd, keeping an eye out for the security ghouls. Percy couldn't help looking for familiar faces among the spirits of Asphodel, but the dead were hard to look at: Their faces shimmered, they all looked slightly angry or confused, they'll approach you and try to speak, but their voices sounded like chatter — like bats twittering. Once they realized you couldn't understand them, they'd frown and move away. The dead weren't scary, they were sad.
They crept along, following the line of new arrivals that snaked from the main gated 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, Percy could see people being chased by hellhounds, burned at the stake, forced to run naked through cactus patches, or listen to opera music. He could just barely make out a tiny hill, with the ant-size figure of Sisyphus struggling to move his boulder to the top. And there were other things, worse tortures than those, ones he didn't want to think about ever again.
The line coming from the right side of the judgment pavilion was much better. That one led down toward a small valley surrounded by walls — a gated community, which seemed to be the only happy part of the Underworld. Beyond the security gate were neighborhoods of beautiful houses from every time period in history: Roman villas and medieval castles and Victorian mansions. Silver and gold flowers bloomed on the laws. The grass rippled in rainbow colors. Percy could hear laughter and smell barbecue cooking.
Elysium.
In the middle of that valley was a glittering blue lake, with three small islands like a vacation resort in the Bahamas. The Isles of the Bles, for people who had chosen to be reborn three times, and three times achieved Elysium. Percy could've smiled at the sight of it, chest warming at the thought. Immediately he knew that's where he wanted to go when he died.
