PHILOXENIA ➸ Percy Jackson¹

δώδεκα

TWELVE—To Ashes

─── ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽☼☾.* :☆ﾟ｡ ───

For as long as humans have been alive, they have wondered about their dreams, wanting to understand why their minds were capable of pulling them into another world when they close their eyes.

There must be a deeper meaning to falling teeth and plunging from heights, faces long forgotten and unfamiliar places that feel like home, ghostly apparitions and sparks of magic, something normal that happens every day, being chased by a random celebrity dressed like a cop and falling from a cliff into a sea made of cotton candy and then saved by the Monopoly Man who gave you a Get Out of Jail Free card.

Some dismissed these dreams as nothing more than the product of an overimaginative brain. But the demigods knew better.

They knew how much the god of dreams Morpheus and his father Hypnos liked to be creative when it came to messing with people's heads, and must delight in watching the demigods fret over their dreams, especially when they tend to slip an important vision inside a stack of nonsensical ones.

Some dreams are easier to interpret than others. They are straightforward, pulling them into the past or astral projecting themselves to places they've never been before, a spectator in someone else's life. There are times they were even offered tantalizing glimpses of the future. 

Other times, these visions are like modern performance art, buried in so many layers and metaphors that they wonder if it can ever be made sense of.

Lux did not often dream.

Whenever she fell asleep at night, she yielded herself to a darkness so deep that this must be what the universe was like before the beginning, before even Chaos.

It felt like a shell. It felt like the last breath of air. It felt like liquid. It felt like nothing. It felt like drowning.

It felt like she would never wake up, but as long as the sun would rise, so would she.

It was rarely a good thing for her to dream.

It began with the sensation of being dropped from a great height, the feel of damp soil weighing her down. She was scorching hot and freezing cold at the same time, and she wondered if there was ever any difference between flying and falling.

The ground shifted beneath her. She saw a murky river with all matter of strange things floating on it—cracked photo frames, dusty wedding rings, trophies and awards twined with cobwebs, memorabilia that were once so dear now bobbing along a place that led nowhere.

There were faceless spirits standing like statues on a field of dark obsidian grass, those being pushed into a river of boiling lava, people wearing all types of clothing from different eras lounging under the hazy sun. 

She saw a garden with luminescent shrubs and trees bursting with pomegranates. She saw her brother asleep in a black-marbled room with no ceiling, curling on a dais where sat a throne made of fused bones. She reached out her arm and wanted to scream his name, but her mouth would not form the syllables.

Instead, all she heard was an ancient, gravelly voice that must have come from a mouth that hadn't been open for ages.

"You shall leave one behind, and fail to save what matters most, in the end."