Blaze of Glory - a PJO fanfiction

1. Embers

All my life, I've been running. Running from the monsters on the streets, and the monsters in my home. I wasn't that old when my mother ran away, only 6. I guess it was typically the other way around, but one day I woke up and she was just gone. Apparently it runs in the family, because I did the exact same thing when child services showed up at my door, and one of them had flaming hair and mismatched legs.

In classic six year old fashion, I went to a familiar place, my elementary school, and when I bursted into my 1st grade classroom to find that my teacher had goat legs, it's safe to say I was shocked. It didn't take long for him to drag me out to his car and drive me out to Long Island. Normally I would've been hesitant to get in my teacher's car, but the car could outrun the donkey-legged vampire chasing after me, so I wasn't complaining.

It's been 5 years, and I'm still in this gods-forsaken camp, waiting for my father to take a second out of his busy day to say that I'm his child. I've been here so long that I could've been the head counsellor of my cabin, if I knew what cabin that was. At this point, Chiron's pretty convinced that I'm an Apollo kid. It might be my natural archery talent, or my abilities over both heat and light to a small degree, but without being claimed, I'm still stuck in the over-crowded cabin of the god of travellers.

It's not as bad as I make it sound. After all, one of my best friends Luke, the son of Hermes, is the head counsellor. He and his friend Annabeth arrived only a couple days after I did, and while Annabeth wasn't that fond of me, Luke was like an older brother. I had other friends too, the kids in the Apollo cabin basically treated me like a sibling with a different house, and Chiron had assigned me to do most of my activities with them.

When I wasn't doing archery or practicing my blade-work and staff-work in the arena, I was in the forges with the Hephaestus cabin. Cabin 9 was where my friends were. Hours in the forges working like a human flashlight, and eventually using fire, was enough for the Hephaestus kids to basically adopt me. Though I was never skilled in machine work, they taught me the basics, and I can build some pretty cool stuff. I also forged my own weapon, a metal staff that extends through inner mechanics from about the size of a ruler to 5 ft long.

I was pretty good with my staff, as well as with a bunch of other weapons, like a sword. I was on par with Luke in swordplay, though I could never beat him because of our 8 year age gap, him being 19 and me being 11. I could still kick some ass in capture the flag though, which I loved to play, and win. Clarisse didn't like me much for that, unless we were on her team, which rarely happened.

In short, life was great, and it didn't change much until one day in August, when Grover came back with... an interesting new demigod.

And from there, shit just went downhill for me.