The Other Prophecy Child

J-Man

Months passed by with little excitement after Morenci. I was eager to get ahead and refused to stop for even the most basic of reasons. After hearing that Emily might be close by, my hopes had never been higher. Of course, after everything that had happened with Sarena, I ended up wasting nearly two months in Michigan. If Emily had been close by, she had already gotten too far ahead than I would have liked.

As far as monsters went, I barely ran into any. There were a few stray hellhounds, and a few of these weird half-horse half-rooster things that I had never heard of before. I did end up having a run in with another dragon though. Actually, it looked a lot like the one that I had run into down in Georgia. Luckily, Elice and I managed to evade it again. I wondered if it was following me.

I didn't see much of my father after Morenci either. He told me that it was because it was too risky to be in contact while Athena was watching, but it still bothered me. It felt like I was just a weapon, a tool that may be useful to him. If it wasn't for the fact that I was so sure that the rest of the Olympians would kill me, I would have revealed my presence to them a long time ago. If nothing else, it would have at least foiled Hades' plans.

That brings me to Athena, who, I was sure, was still watching me closely. I was careful not to use my powers unless it became an absolute necessity. Regardless, I was sure that her suspicions were high enough that she would have already told the other Olympians of my existence. With all of the Olympians watching me, I would have to be extra careful if I wanted to keep my godly parent a secret.

And then there were the weird dreams that I was having. Every few weeks or so I would have this dream where I was sitting in the Underworld, or a place that I thought was the Underworld. It wasn't Hades' palace, but it gave me the same cold feeling of death that the palace did. I was in a cave though, and a rather large one at that. In the center of the cave was a massive pit. I would sit and stare at it for hours. I didn't know what was down there, but I knew that I was afraid of it. More recently, I started hearing a very low, barely audible laughter echoing from the bottom of the pit. A voice would speak every few minutes. Even though I could barely hear it, I knew what it was saying. "Soon, I will come for you."

I had no idea what that dream was supposed to mean, but I knew that it couldn't be good. After I started having that dream, I also started to get the strange feeling that someone was watching me. Of course, I already knew that the gods were watching me, but this was a different feeling. This new presence felt ancient, even more so than the gods. That made three groups that were paying attention to me now. First Hades, then Olympus, and now this new presence, whatever it was, it looked like all eyes were on me.

Anyway, aside from the weird dream and the strange sense that I was being watched, the passing months were, more or less, normal, or as normal as it can get when you're a demigod. Close to two years had already passed since I left New York. My thirteenth birthday came and went like any other day. I didn't even realize until I managed to get to a town and found out it was January 2003, over a year since Emily had disappeared. By the time I made it to Gackle, North Dakota, it was already May, just a month before I turned fourteen.

Elice and I had crossed the border from Minnesota into North Dakota and made our way through the south of the state. It wasn't long before she was running through wetlands. The ground was nothing but mud, which made it hard for Elice to run, and we would come across a pond every couple of feet. Elice ended up slowing to a walk when running through the mud became too difficult for her. We traveled through the wetlands through the rest of the day and a good ways into the night. It was just past midnight when we came upon the town called Gackle.

It had been a long time since we had actually stopped anywhere so I decided that we should probably find somewhere to sleep in town. Besides that, there was no way that I was sleeping on the ground when we were surrounded by wetlands. I'm pretty sure that Elice felt the same way.