The Second Thief

Battle of the Heroes

Alright, last chapter. Maybe, I'm not actually sure. After this, I will be working on the sequel to "The Betrayed Guardian." Make sure to check that out. But enough about the future, let us get into the finale of this story, maybe...

Theo P.O.V.

Percy and I hopped into a taxi and we headed for the Empire State Building. The typical New York traffic made it take 30 minutes, but didn't have a time limit looming over us so it doesn't matter.

We walked into the lobby, looking a little roughed up, but not too much worse than you would if you had just fallen down in the street, so it wasn't too weird.

I walked up to the guard at the desk. He was reading his book, and ignoring everyone and everything. "600th floor please." I say.

He waits for a few moments before responding, without looking up from his book. "Ain't no such thing kid."

"We need an audience with Zeus." Percy says.

The guard looks up with a disbelieving smile. "I'm sorry, who?"

I roll my eyes before dropping the backpack with the master bolt in it, slightly open, into his lap. "This fix your memory?" I ask.

The guard looked inside at the metal cylinder, not getting what it was for a few seconds. Then his face went pale. "That isn't..."

"It is. Now we need to get to the 600th floor." I say, speaking like I'm talking to a 3 year old.

The guard looks at me with slight distaste before handing me the keycard that takes us up to Olympus. "Insert this in the security slot. Make sure nobody else is in the elevator with you." he adds.

Percy and I walked towards the elevator. We waited a few minutes for an empty elevator before stepping in.

As soon as the elevator doors closed, I slipped the key into the slot. The card disappeared and a new button appeared on the console, a red one that said 600.

Percy pressed it and then our ride to Olympus began. With a few minutes of questionable music choice, the elevator doors opened.

Now, I've always had a fear of heights, even in my previous life,, but this is a big nope. We were standing on a narrow stone walkway in the middle of the air. Below us was Manhattan, from the height of an airplane. In front of us, white marble steps wound up the spine of a cloud, into the sky. My eyes followed the stairway to its end, where my brain just could not accept what I saw.

Now, Olympus is hard to describe, but seeing it was definitely infinitely better seeing it than reading about it. From the top of the clouds rose the decapitated peak of a mountain, its summit covered with snow. Clinging to the mountainside were dozens of multileveled palaces, a city of mansions, all with whitecolumned porticos, gilded terraces, and bronze braziers glowing with a thousand fires. Roads wound crazily up to the peak, where the largest palace gleamed against the snow. Precariously perched gar-dens bloomed with olive trees and rosebushes. I could make out an open-air market filled with colorful tents, a stone amphitheater built on one side of the mountain, a hippo-drome and a coliseum on the other. It was an Ancient Greek city, except it wasn't in ruins. It was new, and clean, and col-orful, the way Athens must've looked twenty-five hundred years ago.

We didn't have a time limit, so we took a little time navigating our way through the city. The market place was incredibly busy, and we drew a number of curious looks walking past it. Some dealers tried to sell us ambrosia on a stick, how that's better than normal ambrosia, I'm not sure. Another was selling shields. A different one was offering a genuine replica of the Golden Fleece. Is that non-intentional foreshadowing? Was it intentional? Am I thinking too far into it? Who knows?