PHILOXENIA ➸ Percy Jackson¹

τέσσερα

FOUR—Never Feed Pigeons

─── ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽☼☾.* :☆ﾟ｡ ───

It was rare for Lux to be mad at someone. She was not talking about the quick bursts of anger that make her scowl and maybe say a snide remark or two, like how she acted with Matt Sloan. She was talking about the kind that made her unable to think straight, that made her hands shake with fury whenever she thought about it, to the point that simply spotting that person from afar would make her feel like she was burning from the inside out.

Percy had never made her feel this way before.

Sure, they had their arguments—the unresolved best place to get a bacon, egg, and cheese, another unresolved argument about where to get the best slice of New York pizza, whether the Disney movie Hercules should've stayed accurate to the mythologies or not. One time, they had a particularly heated debate about whether or not cereal was soup.

But now, she was so pissed at him that when she saw him at the pegasus riding lesson, she immediately turned around and walked away. She told Silena Beauregard, the counselor of Aphrodite's Cabin, about her fight with Percy and asked for her permission to skip the riding lesson, promising that she would work an extra shift in the stables as compensation. Silena, bless her beautiful heart, was very understanding about the situation.

Lux was immensely relieved, not only because she didn't have to see Percy, but also because she was able to stall her first pegasus riding lesson for a while longer. Being so high up made her stomach turn. It was also the reason why she had yet to conquer the climbing wall. The first time she climbed, she almost fainted after making the mistake of looking down.

Lux did the shift at the stables as promised. She picked strawberries in the fields with the Demeter kids and attended archery class. She kept missing the target, and it frustrated her so much that she nearly strained a muscle from pulling the bowstring so taut.

She took the earliest patrol shift and walked around the border, her eyes peeled for any signs of danger. Even though Tantalus had insisted they forget trying to protect the camp, some of the campers have kept it up and worked out a schedule during their free time.

At the near end of her patrol, Lux would watch the dryads emerge from their trees and go over to sing to the dying pine tree. Satyrs brought their reed pines and played nature magic songs, and for a while the pine needles seemed to get fuller. The flowers smelled sweeter and the grass looked greener. But as soon as the music stopped, the sickness would return. It was a putrid smell that swirled around the entire hill, saturating every leaf and blade of grass with the poison that flowed from the roots of the pine tree.

It reminded her of the recurring nightmare she had been having over the past few nights. A nightmare of death and decay that showed a barren wasteland against a smoke-covered sky. There were times when she would smell the metallic scent of blood soaking through the ground and the sound of someone laughing that became more manic and distorted the longer she listened to it. She shuddered to think about who that laugh could belong to.

Whenever Lux passed by Thalia's tree, she would press her palm on the trunk and briefly rest her forehead on the bark. She wondered if there was still a conscious part of Thalia Grace left in the tree, and if there were, how much was she suffering right now?

Lux screwed her eyes shut. Gods, how could Luke have done this? Was he truly so callous? How could he be the same person who helped make this camp feel like home?

She opened her eyes to take in the yellowed canopy of needles that had replaced the verdant foliage and feel the rotting wood under her fingers. In this world of monsters and mythology, there has to be something that can save the tree. Whatever it was, Lux vowed to find it.