We Have Some Family Reunions - *000000*

""DRAGON'S DOWNFALL!""

The monolithic spell descended, magic and spear and all, and it was like the world ended.

The howling winds.

The raging waves.

The storm that churned them both together over and over, and the deafening thunder that drowned all of it out.

None of them were spared - dragon flame met dragon flesh, and a cataclysmic explosion immediately devoured them all, whiting out everything up to the horizon in an all-consuming flare of red-gold fire.

FWOOM!

The air burned.

The sea boiled.

The heat alone went from searing to apocalyptic, and crossed the finish line as the only thing that mattered at all.

Down at ground zero, the mythical Cetus didn't just die - He was immolated.

Serpent's Downfall speared straight down into the crown of his skull and pierced right on through without an ounce of resistance. Glowing fissures instantly tore open and spider-webbed across his hide, and every last one of his scales followed suit and splintered before bursting away with cracks of pressure and flames so thick they might as well have been erupting magma.

All of this, even as the rest of the inferno kept incinerating his coiled flesh from the outside in.

Inescapable.

Hell from within, and hell from without, and trapped as he was in between the two, the Beast of Andromeda lasted only a few more seconds - just long enough to let rip this final, agonized bellow, echoing out for what felt like miles - before he just crumbled.

Literally.

The bulk of that colossal, serpentine form broke apart in the next beat, reduced to quickly withering pieces that were seared away until not even dust remained, and even his death throes were brief and snuffed out by the surging of the fire.

In the end, not a bang or a whimper or so much as the ghost of either made it out past that first instant, and the flames devoured just about everything.

And then, all at once - like someone, somewhere, had flipped a switch - they abruptly winked out.

Fwoosh.

The fire died and the light show ended.

The heat pulled back, and the white noise of fiery, crackling doom petered out into nothingness.... right in time for me to finally start falling out of the sky.

Straight down from above the scattered cloud cover, limbs splayed out and with the feeling of renewed wind whipping past my ears, against my skin and through my hair like it had something to prove - and I laughed, all the way down.

I couldn't not.

Even when the water's surface hurtled up to meet me, I didn't flinch - if anything, I leaned into the rush of things that much more, spinning a couple of times before letting gravity do the rest of the work in its own good time.

Sairaorg didn't try to stop me - Hell, I could hear him losing it just as wildly as I was, and that just made it better.

We were always on the same wavelength like that.

Swoosh!

Plunging feet-first through the surface didn't faze me -

The impact was nothing, and the pressure beneath the waves was a total non-factor, but the sensation of it?

Of deliberately letting myself sink twenty feet below the waves and then some, just to feel that special, floaty kind of peace you could find when your head was submerged and all of your problems suddenly seemed quiet and fuzzy and a million miles away?

Glorious.

I let myself float there for a few seconds, enjoying the easy pull of the current and the lingering warmth of the firestorm we'd unleashed - it was downright toasty even that far down - and despite where I technically was…

For the first time in about a day and a half, I felt like I could finally breathe again.

Funny, that.

Or maybe not, but it didn't suck, at least, so that was that.

…

Still, all good things end eventually, and the Sea of Monsters wasn't exactly a great place for a swim to begin with.

I got my head on straight in record time, and then I was kicking out and surging back up again, before breaking through the water's surface in one smooth, arcing leap - complete with a flip and everything, just for the extra style points.

Sai furled his wings away and dropped down at about the same time, catching the spray from a rising wave when he dipped low enough, and then we both stuck our landings on the only solid footing close enough to count, outside of the Gale behind us.

Most of it dipped underwater, and what stuck out was a still-large patch of unevenly charred ashen grey bone, bobbing along above the waves and topped off with the remnants of broken horns, chipped eye-sockets and fractures like lightning-burns that led back to the glaringly obvious puncture wound where my spear had punched clean through it.

Cetus's skull - or what was left of it, at least.

A Spoil of War.

We both wordlessly stared at it for a bit, and a nice, low breeze whistled by as we did, salty and refreshingly free of the scent of burning dragon flesh.

Even the gore that had splattered Sairaorg minutes ago had quickly flaked off and disintegrated, helped along by Touki, fiery heat, and sea spray, and for a moment, all was quiet.

Then I cleared my throat.

"So… that happened."

"It did, didn't it?" My best friend nodded sagely, before his eyes panned over to the remnants of one of the broken horns. "'First and oldest of all Greek Sea dragons', huh?"

"Yep."

"Let me guess - Your uncle got him. The one that got Regulus, too."

Heracles.

I snorted.

"Nah. Right track, wrong uncle - Perseus got there first."

The son of Zeus, and pretty much the most successful and upstanding Greek hero to ever hero - and even he needed Medusa's head to pull it off in what was essentially one big lucky twist of fate.

We did it with pure, raw power.

Another pause passed as I thought about that.

"Sai?"

"Yeah?"

"How strong do you think we are, now?"

"High-class." He answered immediately, which was how I knew he'd been thinking right along the same lines as I was. "And I mean really high-class, the peak of it, and not the whole 'barely there, only just scraping over the line' thing most of the Pillar heirs I used to know had going for them."

Right.

The devil ranking system, the one they used to stratify and break down the competitors in their Rating Game scene - the low, mid, high, and ultimate classes.

Or, roughly: irrelevant, bog standard, respectable, and elite, ranging up to scarily god-like - in power, at least, and gods were more than just that.

Especially the greater ones.

There was also a lot of wiggle room inside and in between each of the classes, too - the strongest high-class was orders of magnitude superior to the weakest, and there was a whole world of difference between the strongest high class and the weakest ultimate-class, and on and on it went.

And all of that was just for average devils, with the natural peak of the species represented in Serafall Leviathan and Falbium Asmodeus - two of the Four Satans.

The other two - Sirzechs Lucifer and Ajuka Beelzebub - didn't even belong on that scale at all, because they weren't natural.

Monstrous outliers, with power that couldn't be quantified with something so small.

It was the same for a whole host of ridiculous beings across Sairaorg's birth world - higher gods and forces and things so absurd that most everybody else just threw up their hands in disgust and gave up trying to pin labels on them a long, long time ago.

A real-life, never-ending case of 'if you have to ask, you're not strong enough.'

Compared to that...

Reaching the pinnacle of High-class was a feat - an awesome one, even if we'd probably have to fact check it with Chiron - but it was like climbing to the top of a high hill and realizing that the next peak you had to get to was all the way up on Everest, and that there were plenty more so much higher that you couldn't even imagine them yet, let alone see'em.

Demigod or not, that was downright humbling.

And also just a little bit... exciting.

"We've gotten stronger," I told Sai, still idly looking down at Cetus's skull - a real wild trophy if there ever was one, never mind the alchemical value the thing probably had. Dragon bone was always dragon bone and all that. "But not as strong as we could be."

"Not even close." He agreed on the spot. "We're not the strongest around, after all."

We both glanced at each other, perfectly in sync, and grinned.

""Not yet.""

See?

What'd I tell you?

On the same wavelength, every time.

...

It only took a minute for me to recall my well-sated spear and for us to pack away our new Spoil of War - into Sairaorg's storage band this time, because it couldn't just be me hoarding away random loot and assorted monster bits - and then we leaped back onto the Gale.

And when I say 'leaped', I meant it.

One jump, a hurtling trip through the air, and we landed back on the rocking deck with a skidding stop and a heck of a better mood than we started with, honestly.

Nothing like extreme and murderous violence to turn a couple of frowns upside down - or maybe that was just the Greek in me talking.

Either way, we were feeling all sorts of amped up.

The Gale's crew, on the other hand?

Not so much.

Some of them were pale and shivering, looking like a light breeze could tip'em over.

Others - Reed and Gleeson, mostly - were blank-faced and shock-still, like they'd paused hard trying to process what they were seeing and turned into marble somewhere along the way.

The rest...

Past the ridiculous fear - because that wasn't going anywhere anytime soon, I bet - they looked awed, in a way that stretched the word to the absolute limit.

I'm serious - they stared at the pair of us with a light in their eyes that was almost disturbingly worshipful.

"Gods." I heard someone whisper, and I almost cringed at the tone.

Then the kill-stealer butted in.

"Oh, please," Regulus grunted flatly, sprawled as lazily as ever in his spot near the prow and barely looking our way with half-lidded eyes. "One measly dragon throws a hissy-fit and you mortals start embarrassing yourselves? Classic."

Sairaorg just laughed under his breath, because of course he did.

"Thanks for the help, Reg."

That roar...

"Don't thank me, you brat. It took you long enough to finish the job, and you infants are only mildly less pathetic than you were a couple of months ago. Do better."

I rolled my eyes silently and refused to take the bait - shocking, I know - and Sai shot a thumbs up his way.

"We'll take it!"

The lion snorted at that, and tried to fix me with a gimlet eye before he went straight back to napping under the sun - or pretending to, at least.

Great.

Glad we got that out of the way - now for the infinitely more important thing that only I could pull off, right here and now.

"Sairaorg, I'm doing it now."

His head snapped back to me and the look on his face went dead-serious in an instant.

"You're sure?"

Absolutely - we'd crossed into the Sea of Monsters now.

It was time to get serious and do something more than a little crazy.

"Damn straight."

I took off at a light jog, darting past the jittery, still-silent satyrs and heading for the hatch that led down into the cargo hold.

"Don't get too close," I told Sai before I started climbing down the rickety thing. Then I thought about it some more and grimaced. "In fact, get off the ship. I'll call you back when I'm done."

And I wasn't just talking to him, either.

All it took was a sharp glance down.

"You heard me."

I felt a burst of reluctance at first, and then, at blink and you'll miss it speeds, a patch of shadow broke off from mine, flickered across the space between us and sank into Sai's own in under a second.

Credit where credit was due, because he didn't even question me on it - he just leaped clean off the deck, unfurled his wings, and shot up a safe distance away in the same beat.

Good, that.

Better safe than sorry - I didn't want any 'dark creatures' around for this next bit.

I ignored Reed's startled curse and crouched down to lift the hatch, letting the thing creak open with a sound that was sharp, rickety, and plain old tired.

The ladder leading down into the hold looked about the same, but I slung a leg over easily enough and climbed down two rungs at a time until my feet splashed down onto the wet deck.

Turns out the sudden storm hadn't played nice around these parts - the planks were slick with saltwater, the supply crates were only a few steps away from totally waterlogged, and the smell of old wood, rusty iron, and salt was just a mess.

I ignored that too.

The relative darkness down there didn't bother me as I dragged a good-sized crate out of the stack to my right, and then I hopped right on and sat down, cross-legged and everything.

Then I took a deep, bracing breath, and reached for my storage band.

In a burst of golden light, a familiar weight materialized in my hand.

The sapphire that Dad had given me months ago.

The gemstone settled in my grip easily enough, warm to the touch and pulsing with a soft, steady blue glow, and I almost stopped to admire it on reflex.

Almost.

This next part…

It needed explanation.

Getting to the Golden Fleece was the goal.

I knew it was somewhere on an island in the Sea of Monsters.

See, the easiest way to find it - the most straightforward way for any halfway decent wielder of magic to find anything not warded or hidden away by greater powers - was to scry for it.

Which sounds a lot easier on paper than it really is when you get down to it, but what doesn't?

On the plus side, as a son of Apollon, simple divination magics like that should, in theory, come as easily to me as just about any of the other powers I can tap into through his domains and authorities.

On the extra plus side, the sapphire was a gift that had symbolic weight to Dad's myths of knowledge and prophecy-making, and was personally touched by the god himself.

As a scrying focus, it was top-tier, and since we were already in the Sea of Monsters, trying to find something that was also inside of it would be that much easier.

With me so far?

Fantastic.

Here's the bit where life goes out of its way to kick me where it hurts: I can't use my divine thaumaturgy in this world, for obvious reasons.

Subtle stuff, maybe, but nothing as 'loud' and attention-grabbing as that - I may as well stand under a giant billboard sign with the words 'I'M HERE!' splayed out over it in big neon letters, complete with foghorns and disco lights out the wazoo.

Yeah, I'm opting out of that one.

Luckily - or maybe just on the flip side of things - I had another source of divinity inside of me, didn't I?

One that should be at least as divination-friendly as the original stuff.

I took another careful breath, really tasting the salt-choked air, and then I put the sapphire down right as I raised my other hand-

Fwoosh

-called on Incinerate Anthem.

Purple flames welled up in my palm, streaked through with arcs of crackling gold as the Holy Cross's presence ignited on command, painting away the darkness in shades of ghostly light.

Just its presence alone would have made Sairaorg uncomfortable at range, never mind the hellhound that practically lived in my shadow most of the time.

But it wasn't enough as is in this state.

I drew on more of the fiery power, refusing to let it surge out and focusing it in the palm of my hand.

Less fire, I ordered it, more light.

The flames dimmed, but the light didn't.

If anything, it sharpened dangerously - less volume, more intensity - until it reached the point where just a single moment of distraction from me would see the power exploding out and incinerating the Gale tip to bottom in a heartbeat.

No pressure.

Slowly, with all the nerve-wracking care and tension in the world, I closed my eyes and moved both hands in tandem, gingerly pressing my palms flat against one another - like I was praying.

And technically?

I was about to.

"'Nothing in all creation is hidden from God's sight.'" The words of the Bible verse I'd memorized for this stunt especially seemed to shake the air, resonating with everything all the way down to the Sacred Gear nestled in my soul. "'Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of Him to whom we must give account.'"

In the end, it was all pretty straightforward.

I couldn't use my Greek, personal thaumaturgy?

Fine then.

I'll just use the Abrahamic kind instead.

"I hereby I̸n̸v̵o̵k̸e̷," The words were a roar of thunder in my ears at this point, and I slowly opened my eyes... to reveal pits of purple, gold, and off-white brilliance. "The Principle Of His Omniscience."

The spell finished taking hold, and I directed the bulk of its power into the sapphire, allowing it to erupt with an otherworldly shine.

The Gale and the world around it trembled.

Then-

"Eyes Of The Almighty."

And I.

Saw.

Everything.

...

É̶̡̺̹̜̙̂͒̋͂̈͛̇̈̈̋͛̈ͅV̸̭̞͈͙̰͉̠̝͇͙̎͋̏̚͝ͅE̴͓̦̭̣͈̎̿͂͛̿̾̇̈́̽̋͋̄͠͠R̸̛͉̋́̄̽̓̃͂̕Y̵̨͖̣͍̟͙͖̌̀͋̐̓̀͊̌̔͑̊́̚͝T̶̡̧̢̗̥̪̬͇̻̣͖̱̬͍̗̺̝̒̂͂H̴̨̨̡̡̧̫͉̦̯̻̝͚̱̙͇̠͚̍̈́̅̈̓̅͝Į̸̢̡̞̣̯͈͇̭̰̣̲̭̗̍̏͛̆̓̓̽̕̚ͅŅ̷̻̞͂̒͂͋̑͋̑̕̚̕͜͝͝͝͝G̶̘͆̂́̏̿̀̒̈̉̉̐̽̽͂͝͝Ė̶̺̱̳̳̭̼̙̺͙͙̞̦V̶͔̞̣̞͉̹̙͎̜̤̳̪̣̰͑͌̐̄͗͋̃È̶͕̻̤͖͕̣͎̗̜̖̝̯̫̜̠̅̈́̒̋̌̑̋͐̀̍̍͜͝͝͝ͅŖ̵̛̪̙̱̥͉̝͔̠̺̤̗͊̓̾̎͝Y̶̱̦̣̽͋̓̊̑̾̍̚̚̕T̶̡̡̢̢̢̩̺̬̥͉̻̼͚͚͍͉͌͊̕H̶̢͙̻͓̫̝͍̘́̈͐̿ͅĮ̸̛͇̞̗̭͖͓̬͕̻̤̗̜͉͕̿̊̔͐̽̒̾̎͂̽͛͜͝N̸̤̮͔̥͐̿̐̊̂̓̽Ģ̶̩̰͖̟͚̻͙̳̈́̍Ę̴̣̗̲͉̫̯͙͛͒̐͝V̴̛̖͇͈̖̜̱͇͕̫̺̫͇̰͑̀̈́͛́͊̈́͛Ę̴̧͎̣̦̣̱͖̬̠̍̅̕͝R̴̛̻̣͉͇̠͈̰̠̦͉̯̞̀̒̋̿͐̆̚Ŷ̵͉͋͊̎̎͌̾̓̋̕͠Ţ̸̨̻̙̻̹̭̲̘̦̳̙̀̐͋̀̍̅̈́̉̂͠ͅH̴̺̙͌̓͋́̌͌̏̾͂̿͗̍̐̈́͘͝I̵̢̧̝̬̣̭͐̀̋̀̂̃̇̀̀̋̑̓͐̚̕N̶̡̢̢̠̦̣̤͕͖̅͝G̸̛̬̦͕̠̀́͂̇̉͐̂̏

The first second of insight was the most overwhelming.

The Gale - Age-worn hull full of knots and angry little splinters, with tightly wound lines and sails and subtle magic weaving it all together.

Ṃ̵̡̯͙͋̂̄́́̈͂̉̋͗̐̓̑͂͘̕ͅṌ̷̢̢͖͉̻̩͖̺̲̮̹̞̯̼͐̆̔͗́͌͘͜R̵̨̖̹̠̭̿͗̈́̆̈́̾̓̔̈̋̑͘Ȩ̷̱͍̦̙͆͗̂͌̊̀̔̆͊̒̿̕

The sea - Dark depths loaded to the brim with more monsters than anyone would ever bother to count, with too many grasping, pulsating limbs and shapes that twisted in on themselves in horrifying ways, all swimming out into the dark or slumbering in ancient wrecks and lairs far, far below the surface.

Ṃ̵̡̯͙͋̂̄́́̈͂̉̋͗̐̓̑͂͘̕ͅṌ̷̢̢͖͉̻̩͖̺̲̮̹̞̯̼͐̆̔͗́͌͘͜R̵̨̖̹̠̭̿͗̈́̆̈́̾̓̔̈̋̑͘Ȩ̷̱͍̦̙͆͗̂͌̊̀̔̆͊̒̿̕

Even more - A swirling vortex filled with something reeking of danger from miles and miles away, an island shrouded in Mist, and an incomprehensible, endless checklist of so much that it was impossible to keep track of it all.

Ṃ̵̡̯͙͋̂̄́́̈͂̉̋͗̐̓̑͂͘̕ͅṌ̷̢̢͖͉̻̩͖̺̲̮̹̞̯̼͐̆̔͗́͌͘͜R̵̨̖̹̠̭̿͗̈́̆̈́̾̓̔̈̋̑͘Ȩ̷̱͍̦̙͆͗̂͌̊̀̔̆͊̒̿̕

And somehow I still did.

The moment the spell was cast, my awareness magnified, grew, and overtook them all.

I could sense - feel - every detail with equal intensity, with a perspective that was meticulously detailed to a stupid degree, in every which way.

A bird's eye view from infinite directions.

I… couldn't describe it, past that - it was impossible even to start.

And then there was the pain.

It kicked in right from the beginning, but it was distant, at first, like I couldn't fully process it - deep and white-hot, the kind that made you stop breathing and made the thoughts in your head sound impossibly loud.

Then I did register it, at about the same second that I felt wet warmth seeping down my face and iron on my tongue, and a part of me almost seized right then and there with the effort it took not to scream.

The rest of me pushed past it - somehow - and focused on the most important thing I had to do.

Find the Fleece.

Now.

I focused on what I knew of the myth of it - the remnant of the golden ram, Chrysomallus, sacrificed as a gift to praise and thank the gods.

A relic so potent its powers of health and prosperity could affect even the divine-

There.

My ridiculous field of vision collapsed, and for just a second, I caught a glimpse of it.

Just one.

A golden, ephemeral thing hanging off a tree branch in the distance, on a small isle covered by bright, tropical green wildlife, and-

Big, bright and moving spots of fluff.

Were those-?

I didn't have time to question it, because the spell chose that exact moment to shatter.

The holy power cut off. The awareness I gained snapped back to normalcy like a rubber band that'd been on the verge of ripping in half, and the recoil of the magic hit me like a brick to the face at terminal velocity.

"Ulrghlgh."

My gut heaved, and I toppled clean off the crate in a flailing sprawl, blood pouring down my nose like a faucet and more of it already in my mouth, where I bit through the inside of my cheek. Pressure throbbed behind my eyeballs like a second heartbeat - and third too - and it felt like they were right on the edge of popping out of their sockets.

Breathing in and out didn't help, and I couldn't even get up for the first couple of minutes; it was that nasty.

The rocking of the ship made everything worse - my hands spasmed, my ears kept ringing, and my head was a total right-off. Frankly, the fact that I still had one at all and that it didn't explode from the sensory overload was a miracle all on its own.

Still.

As soon as my brain stopped trying to leak out through my ears, the first thing I did was smile.

Manically, sure, with bloody teeth straight out of a Halloween nightmare, but that didn't matter, because it worked.

Broken spell or no, that last image and everything in it had stuck with me clear as day.

I knew where the Fleece was.

"Gotcha."

...

It took about twenty minutes to get ready, after that.

Ten of them were solidly filled out with me leaning against the railing, taking sips out of one of the nectar flasks we'd packed for the quest and trying to power through the residual headache.

It took Sairaorg about fifteen before he could comfortably drop back onto the ship - apparently, some of the residual holy element I'd put out had leaked into the wood.

Not a lot of it - the satyrs barely felt the difference, besides a subtle shift - but it was there, though fading fast.

I'll admit, I managed to laugh through the pain when he dropped down for a second and reared right back up again like a cat dipped into a cold shower.

It wasn't deadly or anything - he could withstand it with Touki, and relatively easily at that, but it wasn't comfortable and there wasn't exactly a point, so he waited up in the air for the most part.

Pity it didn't have the same effect on Regulus, but I suppose you win some and you lose some.

I'd take what I could get.

It was around the twelve-minute mark that the last person I wanted to talk to stepped up close enough to matter.

Damn it.

"Don't take this the wrong way." I started first, and I tried to sound as level-headed as I could - I really did. "I appreciate you helping us get here, but I... don't really have anything to say to you."

'I don't want to talk to you' is what I was going for there, but I ended up smoothing it out on reflex.

Probably the residual good mood from the double-shot of success with Cetus and the spell.

On his end, Gleeson didn't seem surprised, or even upset.

He just nodded.

"That's fair."

I expected him to talk more.

Ask about the fight with the dragon, like the entire crew was clearly just about dying to.

Maybe make a fuss about everything.

Instead, he stuck out a hand and held something out to me.

"Here."

I blinked.

It was... a dagger.

Not long enough to be even a small sword, but with a little more reach than a small knife, sheathed in a plain scabbard and with a grip that was all dark leather, and well kept too.

"What's this supposed to be?"

"It was your mother's."

...

Deep breaths, Winchester.

"What?"

"It was your mother's." He repeated shortly, but not quite flatly. "Nothing special, and it was only one of her little tools, but it's celestial bronze. Reliable stuff. It's yours."

Deep. Breaths.

"...Why do you have this?"

"She had it on her, before she-"

He stopped himself, and I was stupidly glad that he did, because the meaning there wouldn't have been lost on anyone.

"I meant to give to your uncle, years ago. I even tried, but he was angry and grieving, and he threw it back in my face."

I almost twitched, but there was no judgment there, and no blame.

Just words that bordered on monotone.

"I almost left it there, and maybe I should have, but I saw it lying out in the dirt, and I... couldn't." He cleared his throat roughly, and stuck his hand out a little more. "So I'm handing it over to you now."

"..."

I slowly looked at him, then down at the dagger and back at him again.

Then I reached out and took it, just as silently and three times as carefully.

I didn't look at it again, small and unassuming as it was, and I let it disappear into my storage band without so much as testing its weight.

I wasn't really thinking about it, and what it meant.

I refused to - not right now.

Gleeson didn't flinch at the flash of light or the magic, even as he tried to track it with his eyes. When that inevitably failed, he just nodded a second time and turned to walk away.

"Thank you."

He stopped again.

I did too, because getting those words out was like trying to upchuck gravel.

A pause.

"I get that bad things can happen outside our control, and I don't want to talk about it any more than that." I swallowed and looked away, back to the horizon. "But thank you."

That was all I could say, and all I was going to.

I didn't turn around again until he walked away, and Sairaorg finally dropped back down again just a few minutes later.

I knew he'd heard all that, but he didn't say anything either, and I was more than happy to move way past it myself.

"Ready to get started?"

"Dan, I've been ready for literal years."

That's the spirit.

I pulled out the sheaf of papers I'd been keeping in reserve until now - a small stack of standard-sized sheets with circles placed on them front and center, and filled out with interlocking geometric shapes and patterns that crisscrossed all over the place.

Sairaorg recognized the basic formation and raised a brow at me.

"Teleportation circles?"

"Sort of." I tilted my free hand side to side and held them up with the other. "No coordinates wired in yet."

Chiron had made them for us - deliberately incomplete spatial transportation arrays, pre-loaded with all the power you'd need to get anywhere reasonable.

They just needed an end destination locked in, and they'd do all the work from there.

"Alright then." I pictured the island in my head again, and the circles' patterns began to shimmer with green sparks, the knowledge imprinting on them easily enough. "Annnnndddd.... done."

The sparks shimmered brightly, and then the circles on the three top pages expanded vertically, rising up and out and stacking back to back until an entire wave of them hovered just over the Gale's railing, stacked back to back and wide enough for any one of us to just leap right into.

Sairaorg frowned and tilted his head at the formation as Regulus prowled up behind him.

"Not the kind I'm used to."

"Wouldn't think so." I agreed. "Those are like tunnels where you get pulled along from point A to B. These are more like... spatial railguns."

Obscenely more heavy-handed and costly in terms of power, and not necessarily any more precise - or, you know, safe - but once they were primed, they were a lot harder to mess with.

"When you say railguns-?"

I smirked, and he blinked.

"Huh."

"Well? What're we waiting for?"

Nothing, apparently.

On cue, we all leaped up and into the circles.

The moment we passed the boundary of the first, all three shuddered, space warped around us and collapsed into a single point, and we were gone in a burst of wind.

...

It worked perfectly.

Boom!

Also loudly, but at this point, that was just par the course.

Our reappearance was nothing special - a rush of magic, a shimmer of more space, and then we were on the island. We didn't even stumble, despite the fact that it felt like we'd just jumped off a rollercoaster mid-dive.

I could tell you more about the island, too - the looming cliff and steep drop to one side, opening up to the ocean. The lush green hills and colorful flowers, cut in half by a deep valley and connected by a rickety old rope-bridge, the greenery on either side so healthy and vibrant it flat-out couldn't be natural - but honestly?

Who cares about any of that?

"Sai-"

"Yeah." His eyes had gone wide. "I see it."

We appeared, looked up, and there it was, just a little ways away.

The giant oak tree in the middle of the island rose out of the ground with all the more flowers and thick, curling vines wrapped around its base, shimmering in a way that had nothing to do with the sunlight. The growths curved around its bark too, stopping right at the long-reaching branches and the big, bright leaves, swaying in the wind.

And there, hanging off its lowest bough, just like in my vision, was the Golden Fleece - large and shiny - like sunlight turned into an Ancient Greek fashion accessory.

"Woah."

Even at a distance, I could feel its power radiating across the island, spewing health and vitality without measure.

I even felt it seep into me, unwinding knots I hadn't realized were there and just... dissolving what was left of my headache like nothing at all.

Even Regulus seemed to close his eyes in something like quiet peace as he took it in.

"This feeling is... not all that bad." He mused, before looking up again and huffing wryly. "The sheep do takeaway from it, though."

Oh yeah.

The sheep.

At first glance, they were big - and I mean monstrously big relative to normal sheep. Several dozen of them were just milling around the tree, and each one was the size of a hippo and change.

They'd noticed us too, with our entrance being what it was.

A whole sea's worth of beady black eyes turned on us, and one of them trotted up, nostrils fanning out with breath as it pawed at the ground like a bull about to charge.

I knew what these things were supposed to be, vaguely, but I still crouched down, hefted up a palm-sized rock and tossed it overhead, just to make sure.

One second, the stone was moving towards the thing. Then it got too close, and the head honcho of wool moved. Its head darted up and its mouth unhinged like a python, revealing rows of serrated teeth that chomped down and through the thing like a cheese cracker.

The force of the bite was so intense it scattered pieces of rock and dirt everywhere, even pelting some of the rest of its buddies, who took that as their cue to form up and flash their own too-sharp and absolutely charming gnashers.

At us.

"Holy Mary and her little lamb." I whistled in surprise. "Murder sheep. That's a new one."

"BAAAHHHH!"

With that fearsome, guttural battle cry, the whole lot of them charged right at us. A wall of wild-eyed, bleating and fluffy missiles of doom, pounding the ground with their hooves and closing in on us, fast.

I almost laughed.

This quest, man.

I'd have gone for Serpent's Downfall and the barbecue option therein, but I didn't have to.

The moment the first of them got too close, the shadows at our feet darkened, and a howl sounded through, deep and bone-rattling.

If you weren't used to it, at least.

Then the patch surged out wide, heading for the stampeding horde.

The first sheep's charge buckled in shock and the beginnings of fear, but it didn't have time to do anything about it before Courage came flying out of the darkness, crimson eyes shining, and clamped his jaws down around his neck.

Crack

Fun Fact - Hellhounds grow quickly.

Ten months ago, Courage was barely bigger than a Labrador pup.

A couple of growth spurts later, and he stood almost as high as a grey wolf, with sleek black fur, a slightly sharper muzzle, and enough strength built up from all the little training courses he followed us along in that he was a menace all on his own.

"BAAAA-!"

SCHRRIPP

Still my little buddy and sweet as anything, but I doubt the sheep watching him snapping and then ripping off their friend's head with a single, savage jerk are going to agree with me there.

Shame, that.

Some of them tried to pull back, but the hellhound wasn't having it - He batted the disintegrating body of the first away, sending it into the crowd and scattering an easy dozen of them like bowling pins.

Then he jumped into the fray himself, claws flashing, and things got messy.

Horns were cleaved off. Skulls were shattered. Bellies were torn open, and blood and wool went flying everywhere.

By the time he was only a quarter of the way through, I almost felt bad for them.

Regulus didn't.

"The dog has the right idea." He almost sounded like he was admiring the massacre. His teeth gleamed with cat-like malice. "And I could use some lunch."

Without another word, he jumped ahead and joined in on the carnage.

The sheep didn't last long after that.

Yikes.

At least they'd leave behind some Spoils.

They were magical, and they had been exposed to the Fleece for who knows how long, which had to have some effect.

Sai wasn't focused on any of this, though, which didn't surprise me at all.

The moment Regulus went for the sheep, he went for the tree.

For the Fleece.

I followed.

In the end, pulling it off its branch was... almost anticlimactic.

No fuss, no muss, no golden sparks or relevant light show.

Sai reached it first, seized it with a hitched breath - because of the magic that was even more intense this close up, or maybe out of sheer anticipation - and pulled it right up into his arms.

"This is it." He whispered, watching the relic glow in his hands. "We did it."

I grinned.

"We kind of did, didn't we?"

In less than three days at that.

Quest objective successfully accomplished!

... Which, given our track record, should trigger some kind of natural consequence-

"OY!"

-And there it is.

"YOU!"

The roar echoed over the island, and then its owner appeared over the chasm past the bridge, and-

I stepped back.

"Okay, wow."

I'd known going in who this place belonged to - the famous cyclops that Odysseus dude ran into back when he was doing his whole thing after the Trojan War.

Polyphemus the Man-Eater.

Whatever it was I expected him to look like, it wasn't anything so... that.

The cyclops was wearing sheep and animal-skin wrappings over a brown-loincloth tied around his waist, and he was already enormous at something north of fifteen feet tall.

His arms and legs were nearly as tall as I was, and his frame so swollen that he looked like a grapefruit with big, angry limbs duct-taped on. His skin was almost human adjacent, with a sicklier tint to it, and his one eye was an enormous, acrid yellow orb in his head, narrowed in fury.

He made every other cyclops I'd met to date look downright puny in comparison.

"Intruders! Tresspassers! Thieves!"

I'm pretty sure his eyesight was supposed to be limited, but he locked onto us just fine - Me, the Fleece in Sairaorg's hands, and the...leftovers of all his pets.

"YOU KILLED MY SHEEPIES!"

"'Sheepies'?" I heard Regulus scoff incredulously. "You can't be serious."

He was.

I knew that, because he came at us at a dead run, bounding over the rope bridge with his arms flailing and a murderous bellow on his oversized lips.

"RAAAAGH!"

How the thing didn't collapse under weight, I don't know, but he made it across... and about five steps over.

Courage growled.

Regulus scoffed some more.

I even went for Serpent's Downfall.

But it was Sairaorg who raised his hand and scowled at the rampaging monster.

"I don't have time for you."

Polyphemus might not have heard the irritated words, but he sure as anything felt it when the ground rumbled out underneath him. The tide of abundant natural energy changed, and an entire forest's worth of roots and long-reaching vines erupted out of the ground and soil, bursting through growing cracks and surging up towards him.

The first wave wrapped around his ankles and heaved, jerking his legs out from under him. Then the next thirty shot over them, wrapping around his fleshy body, twisted his arms back until they snapped with terrible, choked off screams, and then they twirled around his neck.

I saw his eye widen with uncomprehending, slow-witted disbelief, before the force of his run toppled him face-first into the ground.

Wham.

He roared in pain and tried to shake them off, but they didn't stop growing. Even when he managed to lift his head out of the way and open his mouth, they took the chance to surge down his throat and grow in there, too.

Not too deep, and not enough to kill him, but enough to hurt like all hell.

In seconds, Polyphemus was cocooned in the stuff, trapping him and burrowing through his flesh. It shook with the force of his garbled screams.

Sairarog could have finished him off right then. One clench of his fist, and the cyclops would have been a goner.

But killing Polyphemus was the last thing we wanted to do.

His dad, Poseidon, had a track record of cursing mortals who messed with him… or not quite.

Technically, it only happened once, and arguably half of it was because Odysseus couldn't help but be a gloating idiot, but it was a risk we couldn't afford to take.

Luckily, we had a workaround.

"Dan."

"On it."

A flash of light, and I was holding a small vial filled with bubbling red liquid - another gift from Chiron, for exactly this purpose.

I lobbed it at the cocoon, and when it shattered against the trembling wood, blood-red rushed out into the air like a cloud of poisonous blood.

An alchemical dragon's blood potion - because Smaug was the gift that just kept on giving.

The miasma seeped and hovered in the air for a moment longer, before beginning to seep down through the cracks in the wood. The tremors gradually petered out until they stopped completely.

Then Sairaorg pointed down, and the now-silent thing began to sink into the dirt, the roots and soil sealing up behind it.

Before long, it was completely gone.

Cyclops, done and not dusted.

He'd stay there, asleep and entombed, incapable of calling out to Poseidon for help.

At worst, he'd wake up in a few days and claw his way back out again.

At best, he'd wake up and still be trapped, incapable of forcing his way out again. He was immortal, so even if he starved he wouldn't 'starve', and Poseidon could always let him loose if he cared so much.

All's well that ends well.

Now onto more important things.

I turned to Sai.

"Since when could you do that so quickly?"

Senjutsu was all about manipulating nature, but he usually favored touki and physical enhancement.

The more complicated stuff was a work in progress.

He shrugged.

"It's this island. It's loaded with natural energy."

From the Fleece, then.

I knew it was too vibrant by half, and odds are it'd slowly degrade down to something more natural over time, now that we were taking the thing away.

Good to know.

Also-

"Just letting you know now that if you use that move against me in one of our spars, I'm going for Incinerate Anthem."

"Heh. We ready to go?"

I'd have said yes - I could feel his tense excitement - but Courage suddenly came running up to me from wherever it is he'd quickly dipped off to, barking up a storm.

"Aarf!"

"What is it, buddy?"

"Aarf!"

He wanted us to follow him.

"Aarf!"

Scratch that - he really wanted us to follow him, with enough urgency there that it pickled uneasily with something at the back of my head.

Sai and I exchanged a look, before I shrugged.

Might as well.

"Fine, fine." He was darting off before I was done getting the words out. "But if it turns out you're just looking for more sheep to decimate, we're going to have a long, long talk about proportional violence, mister!"

...

It wasn't the sheep, even though we found plenty more of the non-carnivorous kind, and goats for good measure.

In a way, I almost wish it was just that.

Polyphemus's lair was, predictably, a giant cavern that opened up from the base of one of his island's hills and stretched out in a maze's worth of smaller ones, reeking like barnyards and with the highlight of their internal decor being the skinned pelts hanging off every second turn and stalacites galore descending from above in sharp, uneven, and jagged formations.

We followed Courage down long-winding tunnels littered with old decaying bones scattered in between all kinds of junk - Trash. Plastic figurines. Broken-down furniture that belonged anywhere but here.

Polyphemus either really needed to have a yard sale, or else he was robbing them in his spare time.

We passed a hundred other insignificant bibs and bobs just like that until the tunnel curved steeply and we walked into a smaller, darker cavern, one that reeked of something nastier than sheep-stink and was barely lit by one small burning torch hanging off the rock-wall furthest to us.

Even without it, the four of us would have still been able to see the satyrs just fine.

"Oh..."

Three of them, bunched up together in a cage barely big enough for all of them to huddle in, the bars bronze and rusty in the firelight. They looked haggard and gaunt inside of it, covered in grime and old wounds, with one having a horn snapped off at the base and another with a leg twisted at an angle so wrong I nearly cringed just looking at it.

Dear Artemis.

At a guess, those two looked something around Gleeson's age, but the third was younger - a lot younger.

Not far off from us, actually.

He looked at us with glazed eyes, at first, like he was a million miles away.

Then they slowly cleared up, and he blinked.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

I raised an awkward hand, more out of reflex than anything else.

"Hello-"

"Please!"

He was up against the bars so fast his head nearly bounced off of them, arms outstretched towards us and wailing at the top of his voice, and that stirred the other two.

I didn't hesitate - it was three steps to the bars, before I seized them in a vice grip and tore them off their hinges with a sechoing shriek of tortured metal and a shower of sparks.

The other two satyrs started yelling about then, just in time for the first one to collapse at my feet and sob with great, shuddering heaves that were going to stick with me for a long, long time.

Five minutes later, and the water works were still going strong - even when Sai came close with the Fleece and slowly healed their wounds with proximity alone.

If anything, the sight of it somehow made the satyrs sick, even as their skin started to glitter and their wounds closed up and shimmered away in real time.

"He had it." One of the older ones croaked. "Its nature magic is so powerful, it smells just like the great god Pan! We all came here, thinking we would find salvation... but it was only him waiting."

Searchers, then.

"There were more of us." The other one murmured, hollow-eyed and shattered. "He... all of them...one by one, until it was only us left. We were going to be next... soon, he said."

The youngest of them just kept crying.

Even without the context that I had, it wasn't hard to put two and two together.

I thought about all those bones lying forgotten - so many they seemed nearly endless, and no way were all of them animal bones.

The realization made me sick.

Sairaorg wasn't any better.

"Should have buried him deeper." He whispered furiously, before nodding at me meaningfully. "We should get them back to the ship."

"Way ahead of you."

The crew there would help their own, after we left.

Even Regulus didn't say a word as we led the satyrs out of the cave, and we didn't take anything else with us - I already had the wool from the sheep Courage had decimated, and I wanted nothing else from Polyphemus's hoard.

Nothing of value stood out, and I was more tempted to set the place on fire than go looking for another prize to take back with us.

Enough was enough - and if Sairaorg took a minute on our way out to force Polyphemus's prison that much further into the earth, nobody would ever hear it from any of the rest of us.

...

Getting back to the Gale was the easy bit.

One charge spatial array, a crack of thunder, and we were landing on the deck

Immediately, my hackles went up.

All of ours were.

The ship wasn't moving.

Not in the sense that it hit a patch of calm waters, but that it had stopped moving entirely - absolutely stillness, from bow to prow.

It'd been grounded, somehow.

If I were a betting man, I'd say it was the mist... and the Mist - Both kinds were there, thick and cloying, to the point where everything I could see on the ship was shaded by it and everything around it was hidden away behind wall after endless wall of the stuff.

The crew was worse off - All of them were down, slumped against the railings or splayed out along the deck, eyes milky-white and mouths spitting out complete gibberish.

Every once in a while, one of them would twitch and jerk, but that was about it on that end.

"Oh, come on."

"Right?" Sairaorg mirrored my annoyance and clenched his fists impatiently. "What's doing this now?"

"That, little interloper," The voice was high and polished, and deliberately smarmy in a way that would grate on anybody's nerves at once. "Would be me."

The woman stepped out of the Mist on the other end of the ship - or solidified out of it, at least.

She had bronze-tanned skin and green eyes, with long dark hair braided with threads of gold, and a silky black dress woven through with models of stars and animals, shimmering and moving in real-time.

Just like the air surrounding us right now, she gave off the feel of sharp, focused magic, and something that much harder to place.

Besides her, a smaller, less glamorous figure stepped out - A girl half an inch or so taller than I was, decked out in bronze and leather polished armor, with a helm covering her head and her hand wrapped around the pommel of a sword hanging from her belt.

"So you're the cause of all the fuss, are you?" The woman gave me a smile that was one part ego and one two parts pure condescension. "Aside from the interloper, I don't see it."

"And I don't know who you are." I offered right back, tilting my head to the side. "So I guess we both have questions that need answering."

She laughed - it wasn't a nice laugh.

"Ah, heroes." Her smile was half a sneer this time. "Take note of that arrogant tone for the future, Hylla. It tends to get dreadfully repetitive with half-bloods of his kind."

The girl at her side said nothing, but the grip she had on her sword tightened.

"And as for you-" She gestured, and the Mist seemed to grow heavier and thicker, more tangible - like it was bracing for breath. "You will be coming with me."

Her eyes panned over all of us, Regulus and Sairaorg included.

"All of you."

Is that right?

I smiled, all nice and cheerful.

"Can I ask why?"

"To sate curiosities. My own-" Her sneer flattened out into a grimace. "And others before even that, annoying as that bargain will be to fulfill."

"And, hypothetically speaking, if we say no...?"

She laughed again, and spread her arms out theatrically.

"Little demigod, I am Circe."

...

Ah.

Should of seen that one coming, honestly.

Now we're two for two on Odysseus's greatest hits.

"Come again?" Regulus snapped somewhere behind me, with more feeling than I'd heard from him in days, but nobody turned back to that just yet.

"It has been some time since I've made an example of those who defy me." She continued monologuing like a Saturday morning cartoon villain. "I will get what I want one way or the other, but by all means..."

Her eyes gleamed through the layers of Mist.

"Give me a reason."

...

I clapped my hands together.

"Great."

Circe blinked, but I didn't stop.

Why would I?

"Isn't this just great, Sairaorg?"

"All I needed to hear."

She blinked again.

"W-?"

And then we were on her and her lackey.

Instantly.

No warning.

Her expression couldn't even flicker before I slammed my fist into it and felt her nose start to give away for a split-second before the impact sent her flying off the ship and into the Mist beyond.

"TALKING ISN'T A FREE ACTION!"

Her bodyguard - Hylla - managed to cry out and get her sword a quarter inch out of its sheath, before Sairaorg backhanded her into the Gale's mast so hard she nearly bounced right back into his fist before collapsing onto the deck and heaving for lost breath.

Good luck with that.

Regulus, of course, stood behind and watched in twitchy disbelief.

"No, seriously, what?"

I'd have stopped and asked what his deal was, but I wasn't stupid enough to lower my guard.

Circe was a goddess.

A local one, sure, and was cut from a different cloth than the ones I knew, but there's no way one measly punch would have ended things.

And sure enough, not a few beats later-

"YOU DARE?!"

The shriek tore at the air like a chainsaw with a score to settle, vicious and ugly and filled with malice that scraped away at the eardrums more than the sheer volume did.

It echoed in the Mist, over and over again until it was nearly unbearable.

"BRING THEM TO ME, WRETCH!"

....

A second of silence.

Then I felt it - something shifting far out to my side, suddenly just there where nothing had been before.

Something big.

Another twist of the Mist.

A third shriek went up, and this one was nothing like the other two.

SKREEEEEEEEEEE!

Agonized and frenzied.

Uneven and off-note in six different ways, all at once.

Utterly furious.

And heading right towards us.

SKREEEEEEEEEEE!

...

All the while, through the Mist, another continued to watch.

...

Dan and Sai continuing to be absolute menaces:Spoiler

Everyone else:Spoiler

As always, leave your comments and ideas, and if you don't like it, please be courteous.

It was all a trick of perception and magic, but the figure - the thing - didn't so much emerge from mists beyond the ship as appear to form out of them, and calling it a living horror didn't do the monstrous shape justice.

SKREEEEEEEEE!

Its upper half was a collection of six scaled and violently swaying necks, surging out longer and thicker than the Gale's masts and whipping out in every which way like deranged, sentient pool noodles.

Each of them was capped with a serpentine head, almost draconic, but misshapen and with wavy, clumpy growths pulsing atop each one - like wet hair woven out of seaweed and human skin. Every one of those was horned, armored in skeletal bone plate and overgrown barnacles, and fitted out with a pair of sunken, rabid yellow eyes, slitted and filled with maddened malice.

Its lower body was somehow worse - The chest and underbelly were a chimeric nightmare, divided between twelve long-winding tentacles and a ring of braying dog heads, no two alike and all utterly enormous. They snarled and snapped at the air with sprays of acidic drool and a chorus of terrible howls, and patches of fur and scales around them parted in ragged rents with no rhyme or reason at all, revealing pits of flayed open muscle and hideous, bloated flesh.

The rest of its form trailed down into the beginnings of a spiked tail and more than half a dozen uneven legs pumping away beneath the surface of the frothing water, but I didn't need - or want - to see them to know what this thing was.

Who she was.

Scylla, the Bane of Sailors.

Another beastly child of Phorcys and Ceto, just like Cetus - or at least she was in one story, back home.

In Sairaorg's world, I mean.

If that had been the truth there, then the shriek she kept letting loose made me doubt that it carried over in this one, too.

SKREEEEEEEEE!

An orchestra of horrible sounds spilling out from all of her heads at once, canine and serpentine alike, filled with frenzied bloodlust, pain, and poisonous, grieving rage - and that was just the tip of the iceberg.

Something about the noise of it all immediately brought up one of the other versions of her myth I knew about - the one where she'd started off as a beautiful nymph before being cursed by Circe for the crime of winning the heart of the immortal fisherman, Glaucus, who the witch-goddess wanted for herself.

Only he didn't want her back, and Circe took it out on Scylla out of pure, unbridled spite.

Bring them to me, Wretch.

Even if I'd never heard of the rest of her old-school reputation, I'd known the woman for all of thirty seconds now and I still wouldn't have put it past her.

Then Scylla bellowed again and surged towards the Gale, kicking off a legitimate tidal wave as she flailed towards the ship, and I stopped thinking about the little details altogether.

"Sai!"

"Doing it!"

The flat of his palm snapped out at the air, and a wall of force erupted and met the wave before it had made it even halfway out to the ship. It broke like glass, but Scylla's tentacles were right behind it, shooting out of the scattering spray and heading right for us at speed, each with enough power behind it to snap the hull apart like a cheese cracker.

They didn't get any closer than that - Sairaorg threw both hands out and clenched his fists, and an invisible grip caved around them and constricted like a coiled python's grip. The writhing limbs exploded into gory chunks and the Bane of Sailors screamed, snake-like jaws unhinging to flash triple rows of jagged teeth, and the dog heads braying in furious pain.

Sai made to move again as the beast readied to attack, but I had to duck out of the way as a gleaming bronze blade suddenly swung over the spot where my head had just been.

The girl, Hylla - Circe's armored lackey - was standing behind me, sword in hand and glaring at me through the slits of her helm. Her frame shuddered against the violent rocking of the deck, if only barely.

I stared at her for a split second, unimpressed.

Honestly, I'd almost forgotten she was there to begin with.

"Taking potshots from the sidelines? Seriously?"

She yelled and darted forward, trying to swing for my neck, but I deflected the blow off my armguard and tore her sword out of her grip, sending it arcing off and over the ship's railing. She went for a small dagger at her belt immediately, but I grabbed her wrist and twisted well before she could jab at me with it, and then I kicked her in the side, hard.

Armor or no, the blow still drove the air out of her lungs for the second time in less than two minutes and sent her flying back against the mast Sairaorg had only just backhanded her into, the impact frame-rattling and leaving her slumping down its surface in a boneless, keening heap.

"Next time, wait your turn."

I turned away right in time for Scylla to fall into view - and I do mean fall.

The entire ghastly bulk of her toppled forward in a deliberate crushing surge, heads snarling and remaining tentacles curling inwards, looking to flatten the Gale and us with it, but Sai was already on it.

He gestured, and winds so powerful they parted waves before they even formed surged around her. Clouds of trapped water vapor swirled around the growing vortex, spinning faster and faster and compressing the gargantuan beast even as she bellowed. Sparks of not-lightning - crystallizing natural energy - began to rumble across the miniature hurricane.

"No!" Circe's voice screamed out over the mist and Scylla's budding shriek. "Stop that!"

"Sure I will," Sairaorg muttered, and then he swung his hand up.

The stormy prison rose with it, lifting Scylla's ridiculous form straight out of the water. The surviving tentacles tried to pry their way out, and the many heads snarled and spat globs of poison and howling screams at the funneling clouds, but the waters snuffed them out every time.

The power in the air grew and grew without end, hundreds of thousands of gallons of water and pressurized air compressing with every passing second.

Then Sai clenched his fist.

Instantly, the hurricane caved inwards, force and lightning and all.

Scylla...

She lasted a few seconds.

Even when the scything winds shredded flesh and scale, the pressure caved her myriad skulls to splinters, and the rest of her started looking like the world's most rancid fruit going through a blender - she still survived, long enough for a garbled, warped scream to billow over the carnage and shake the mist.

SKREEE-!

Then, like Cetus before her, she gave out.

Violently.

Pop.

The watery prison darkened under a wave of bursting black blood, internal sludge that was probably toxic enough to kill a whale with a single drop, and the beginnings of crumbling dust trapped in the middle of it all.

"No!" Circe howled again as Sairaorg let his hand drop, dispersing the storm and releasing the mess trapped inside. "She was mine!"

Neither of us turned to look for her, even as we kept our guards up.

Instead, we watched gold-bronze dust disperse in the distance over the side of the ship, and just before it finished doing just that, something strange happened.

For an instant - Just a fleeting, barely-there moment - the essence seemed to linger, resisting the whipping winds trying to scatter it every which way, and a ghostly figure appeared.

Human-like, pale and translucent, with long, wavy hair wreathed with streaks of sea foam and brilliantly clear eyes.

A sea nymph.

She stared at us for one infinitely long second, and then she smiled, widely and more gratefully than anything I'd seen in recent memory, tears wafting down her cheeks in endless streams.

Then she faded away, carried off by a sound like a sigh someone had held in for far too long and finally had a chance to let go, full of aching relief, and something small and bright and somehow not at all dangerous despite the chaos all around us came flying over our way on a final gust of wind.

Sairaorg's hand - coated in touki, naturally - lanced out and plucked it out of the air, right as Circe's furious scream shook the Gale right down to the individual timbers.

Frankly, the fact that none of the unconscious satyrs had been tossed off the deck from the tremors of it all was nothing short of a miracle - and believe me, I was keeping watch.

"'Fine then!" Her voice crackled with murderous rage, still thundering from everywhere and nowhere at all. "You think the wretch was the only one I had?"

Naturally, she wasn't bluffing.

We could both feel it - from far on out, further past the clouds of mist, something was beginning to draw closer.

Waves broke against sharp, grisly bones, their owners swimming in beneath the currents. Dorsal lines like the edges of serrated saw blades shimmered off to starboard. Little thuds and scrapes peppered against the hull, like something massive kept gliding in a little too close.

Scratch that - Many somethings.

"Monsters scent through the Mist, little pigs." Circe's voice crooned, sickly-sweet and all kinds of nauseating. The fog grew cold and sharp enough that icy hoarfrost was beginning to spread across the deck. "And I've just rung the dinnerbell."

She sure did - we could feel them closing in, like sharks slowly circling prey.

Only no shark was stupid enough to swim close and share legroom with the things in these waters.

"Well," Sai only sighed, straightening slightly and storing away whatever it was he'd had in his grip into his band. "That's not what you want."

"No." I glared out at the mist, fingers twitching at my sides. "It's not."

The witch goddess must have heard, because she laughed, long and hard.

"Surrender, little pigs. Beg for mercy, and perhaps when I'm finished, I won't wear whatever's left of you like a-"

And that was about he point where I stopped listening.

"Okay, no."

We had the Fleece.

We had a way home.

Indulging this psycho was literally pointless - time to pump the brakes on this ride.

"Sai, get back."

He didn't question it - one second he was there, and the next he was way off to the side, next to Regulus, who still looked like someone who'd just taken a sip of milk and realized it was three days past being labeled as an active war crime, but whatever.

Incinerate Anthem surged in my soul, and my hands blaze with purple fire, pushing back the biting cold and instantly melting the ice spreading across the planks beneath our feet.

"What?" Circe snapped. "What power is this!?"

I grinned.

"Let me show you."

Then I threw both hands forward and let the Longinus loose, just a little.

Fwoosh.

It was like having flamethrowers for palms - everywhere I gestured, Holy fire rushed out in torrents, igniting the Mists in real time. The leftover chill and the taste of divinity in the air recoiled with something almost akin to a scream. The purple firestorm still followed, rushing out and bringing the seawater beneath it to a raging boil.

Beneath that, the monsters I'd been sensing immediately hightailed it away, retreating deeper beneath the surface as fast as their fins and whatever other misshapen limbs they had could propel them.

Smart, that.

It only lasted a few seconds, but by the time I pulled back, the local temperature had jumped up twenty degrees and the dome of Mist blocking out the horizon had come apart at the seams, with only scattered puffs of the stuff melting away underneath the pressure of lingering Holy power.

"You-!"

And there was Circe, hovering well, well of the prow on a gust of spiraling wind, looking at me with a bug-eyed stare and her mouth flapping open and shut uselessly.

"How?"

I shrugged and raised my hands, still coated in my sacred gear's flames, and readied one other trick.

"I just rock like that. Or maybe you're not half as powerful as you think you are - food for thought."

For some reason, that seemed to make her snap.

With an incoherent howl of rage - and man did she like doing that, over and over again - she snapped a hand out over her head.

Maybe it was to try and prove some kind of point, but instead of Mist, it was her own fire that lit up on command - a great scorching pillar of the stuff, bright orange and just about reeking of divinity.

Right.

Circe, daughter of Helios - the second-generation titan who represented and managed the Greek aspect of the sun before my dad replaced him.

Neat.

It still didn't help her any.

Before she could lob it at me - and likely cleave the Gale in half, crew and all - I splayed out one palm and pulled back my other hand, like I was nocking air against an invisible bow.

Incinerate Anthem's flames followed my lead and shaped out to match, sparks pooling inwards and wrapping around a spine of pure light. At its tip, a crackling, fiery broadhead flattened into existence, and the oversized Holy arrow finished taking shape in less time than it took for me to breathe in.

Then I let it loose.

Circe's eyes started to widen, and her own pillar came down as a descending wave to burn it out, but she was too late.

The streak of deadly purple shot into the descending inferno, overtook and blasted most of it away, and then shot through it - smaller, but only marginally less deadly - and struck the witch just beneath the shoulder as she tried to throw herself out of the way.

And Circe-

"No!"

-wailed.

Her robes ignited.

Her skin vanished under a blaze of writhing purple.

Her limbs flailed under the scorching heat, and the force of her desperate convulsions somehow lifted her that much further up, like a burning scarecrow out in the distance.

And all this, over the span of a single heartbeat.

Not enough power to kill her - she was a goddess - but maybe-

"̴̳̇͑͗͝Ê̵̟̈́̈́̌n̷̺̠͙̦̣̈́̑̽̑̏o̶̗̜͓̲̺͋̐ͅù̴̱̭͙̀͑g̴̬̰̲̍͑h̶̞͍͚̖͓̾.̸̰̽̿̇͘͜͝"̴̲̭͓̖̤͍̉̏̏̎

My breath stalled.

Across the ship, so did Sai's.

A presence had just slapped down across the space surrounding us, and a figure stepped out of... nowhere at all, actually, appearing between one blink and the next.

She stood in the air under her own power, tall and deathly pale, with the blackest eyes I'd ever seen. Her hair was an off shade of platinum blonde tied back in a high knot, and her robes were white with silvery streaks and ornate symbols, almost like runes and alchemical patterns.

When she moved towards Circe, her form flickered - for a moment, there were two more figures overlayed on top of her.

A crone with ashen hair, and a girl with darker locks and bright green eyes

Three in One, and One who was Three.

That was all I needed to see to know who she was.

Hecate raised a hand, and the flames eating away at the screaming Circe buckled.

Mist poured forth out of thin air in droves, similar and yet different to what came before, closing around her and muffling the sounds of her wails and the hungry light of Incinerate Anthem's fire.

No...

It did more than just that.

The Holy Power was quashed underneath there, and when the greater goddess snapped her fingers, the flames were gone, and Circe with them, whisked away to who knows where, just like that.

Then my great-grandmother - blank-faced, nearly expressionless, with black eyes like endless pits and maybe the faintest, most minuscule trace of a frown pulling at her lips - turned, and looked right at me.

...

Oh, for the love of-

That's about as far as that mental train went.

Everything about her felt absurdly more dangerous than Circe -Just comparing the two was either a bad joke or a terrible insult.

Her attention alone felt like having knives poised to peel you open like a grape.

I̴ Ş̸͎̀ḙ̷̬́̈́e̴̘̔̌͜ Ỵ̷̖̉ǫ̸̘͆u̸̧̓

I didn't have time to question why she was here.

I didn't let myself stop and think about it, or even consider talking to her - for once.

Cards on the table?

My knee-jerk impulse was to throw everything I had into my sacred gear and blow everything in her general direction to kingdomcome.

But it was the other Longinus onboard that beat me to it.

Regulus didn't do anything, technically.

He didn't say anything.

He just prowled up in front of me and looked the goddess dead in the eye.

No words. No threats.

Just sheer, unspoken challenge.

Hecate stared back, and her expression turned more disbelieving, uncomprehending, before it smoothed out again.

But only for a beat.

In the next, she snapped her fingers, and there was a shift of Mist to my side. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the girl, Hylla, melting into it and disappearing just like her mistress had.

Hecate turned back to me, then, one final time.

Assessing.

Acknowledging.

Memorizing a puzzle piece that didn't fit right with anything she'd expected before.

Then her image flickered, and poof.

The mist dispersed, and just as quickly as she'd appeared, she was gone, and so was the force of her existence.

...

I didn't relax.

If anything, the vanishing act just made me tense up harder, even as the satyrs on the deck finally started to groan and stir.

A second, far more ominous goddess had just taken notice of us.

...

Even if she didn't come back - even if she wasn't still watching us right now - there could be more.

...

Yeah, hard pass.

We had the Fleece, and this quest was officially over.

"Sai?"

He was next to me in a flash.

"Time to go?"

"Yesterday."

Better safe than sorry - and Greek gods were especially good at making you feel all kinds of sorry.

On the flipside, we couldn't just tap out and leave the crew and the other satyrs we'd just rescued out in the middle of the Sea of Monsters - not after the day they'd just had.

So... I had a plan.

A bad one.

Objectively terrible, really, and stupid enough to give a brick conniptions, but I had zero intentions of sticking around to deal with the fallout, so here went nothing.

I crouched down and pressed both palms against the deck, and focused.

"What?"

That was Reed croaking, finally awake and getting helped up by Gleeson, and both of them stared at us through a haze of bleary eyes and unsteady footsteps.

"What happened? What're you doing?"

"Long story for another time, and I'm cutting your trip short. Sorry not sorry, captain." I looked over to Sai and Regulus "Get ready to move fast."

Then, for the first time since we'd left Chiron's, I let go of my divinity.

Heat pooled out of my gut and straight into my blood, and my muscles jumped to attention with renewed strength. My skin glowed in shades of warm gold, and deeper down sang with delight, because this was what I was all about - sunlight, brilliant and loud and free.

Incinerate Anthem was more powerful, maybe, but it couldn't compare to my fundamental nature.

I channelled more and more of it, letting the glow surge out past me, across Sai and Regulus and the crew, and through every plank and stretched rope and flapping sail until it swallowed the entirety of the Gale.

All of it.

Odds are you could have seen the little bright blip from outer space, but I didn't linger on that.

Couldn't - not now.

Move. Fast.

Instead, my mind went to the pier we'd set off from three days ago, give or take.

The Brooklyn Marine Terminal.

I saw it.

Locked onto it on my head.

Focused, again.

Then-

"Reach Of Sunlight!"

I teleported the entire ship away.

...

We arrived with a burst of light and sound that probably set off the alarms of half the parked cars in Brooklyn. The Gale appeared in the water just beyond the pier and displaced so much of it with its sudden arrival that it kicked up a wave ten feet high.

The pier and a good chunk of the terminal beyond it were flooded. Stray crates were flung into the water, and a couple of satyrs standing too close definitely went for a swim they didn't see coming - the startled screams were a bit of a giveaway there.

Beyond the bare minimum, I wasn't really paying attention to any of that.

Moving something of the ship's size, plus the crew and the rest of us over hundreds and hundreds of miles hit like a sucker punch and a half.

Not enough to ground me, but it was no walk in the park, either.

And I still wasn't done.

My senses were going haywire, and my brain was roaring at the top of a current of raging adrenaline.

The skin at the back of my neck was prickling, and I could almost feel the moment when one god in particular sat right up and turned his attention on me, like a divine spotlight shining down from above.

He was looking at me right now.

I spared one look at Gleeson - just one, snapping my focus over to the wide-eyed satyr's gaze.

"Thanks for the help. Ciao!"

Then I just about tackled Sairaorg, reached out for Regulus, and cast us into the chaos between worlds.

"̴̲̓̎̓̀̋N̸͔̗̻̑͋͌o̵͍̩̭̰̦̚͠!̴̙͎̰̊͝"̷̢̮͔͓̯̚

...

I didn't send us back to Chiron's.

As much of a no-brainer as that would have been, my mind was running on autopilot and I'd focused elsewhere just before we jumped.

The reason we went off on this quest to begin with.

That's why, when we popped back into existence and left behind the endless and the infinite, it was in another familiar place instead.

High-raised ceiling?

Check.

Gold and silver decor?

Double check.

Carpeted floors that probably cost several fortunes all on their own?

Three for three.

The grand, too-fancy-by-half half entry hall of Sairaorg's Castle.

Safe.

"That," I gasped, and nearly sank down to my knees, head on the verge of spinning like a top. "Was way too close."

And too much.

All of it had been.

Sairaorg half-laughed, half snorted, and sounded about as relieved about it as I was.

"You're telling me."

Regulus just stared at us both, flat as a cardboard cutout.

"I have questions."

"..."

Something about the way he said that...

""Pffft!""

It cracked us right the hell up, and we both started losing it.

That's pretty much how Anton Vapula found us when he came running in half a minute or so later, red-faced and with tears in our eyes.

Regulus looked mildly murderous on his end, but really, when didn't he?

"Lord Sairaorg!?" He looked from him to us and back again, and cleared his throat mildly. "Apologies, my lord. I was not expecting you or your... guests."

In case you can't tell, that's diplomatic speak for: 'Politically dangerous demigod and sentient killing machine of stupid proportions.'

"Don't worry about it, Anton." Sai grinned at the moon and tossed him a thumbs-up. "We weren't expecting us either."

Does anyone ever?

Questions for later.

Until then, though...

I looked up at my friend, and we both sobered up quickly.

Here goes.

Anton was still looking at us funny, but we didn't stop to talk to him.

We didn't even answer Regulus's obvious question, which, in hindsight, could have gotten messy if he'd chosen to push the issue and get mean about it.

"Rrrghr."

"My lord-?"

Instead, we just up and sprinted right past'em both, and towards the one place that mattered more than any other right then and there.

It'd been a little over a couple of months and Misla Bael's room hadn't changed any, besides the fresh flowers in the vase by the bed and a different floral scent in the air to match.

The woman herself remained exactly as she had been before, tucked in up to the neck under spotless covers and looking for all the world like the slightest noise could wake her up.

Maybe that's why we went so quiet around her as soon as we stepped into the room.

Even our steps were on low and measured, though Sairaorg's nearly froze once when he first laid eyes on her, and came close to it again when he held out his hands and summoned the Fleece out onto them with a shower of golden light.

This was it.

Slowly - and ever so carefully - he stepped right up and laid it down over her covers, letting the glow of it wash over her and slowly seep out everywhere.

Just like the satyrs we'd rescued from Polyphemus's cave, the first effects were instant.

Her skin coloured in, like sparks were running wild just beneath the surface. Vitality soaked in without pause, pulsing across her entire body and glittering in ways that were brilliant and too complicated to describe past that.

We both watched in frozen, silent hope as the Fleece worked its magic.

At some point, even Anton arrived and joined in, standing off to one end of the room and looking over like he couldn't believe what his eyes were telling him.

But...

A minute passed.

And then another.

And another.

Nothing changed.

Her eyes stayed closed.

Her breathing was nonexistent.

She didn't so much as stir.

That was it.

It wasn't working.

No.

No, no, no.

I was up front and pressing my hands against the Fleece in a flash, letting my fingers seep through the dense and springy wool.

"Healing Touch Of Asclepius."

My emergency-healing spell: The one that targeted grievous wounds first and worked down from there on demand.

Channeling it through the Fleece was...

It felt strange.

Off.

Like nothing, actually, but also not quite.

The Fleece's life-giving energy spewed out at my command, filtering back into me and everywhere all at once, but I vaguely got the sense that it just... didn't understand what to do with Sairaorg's mother.

As far as it was concerned, there was nothing to heal there.

Or maybe it was something else, and I was just reading it wrong.

Either way, I was having exactly none of that.

She's not okay, I thought furiously, pouring my own power right back into the thing even as it tried to heal me too. She's supposed to be awake. Now do your thing, or so help me Artemis, I'll shred you into twenty-four-carat confetti and make Dad-damned oven mitts out of you!

The Fleece grew brighter as I grit my teeth, and I refused to look anywhere but at it.

The last thing I needed to do was see the look in Sairaorg's eyes if this didn't-

No.

It would work.

After everything else, it had to.

With that in mind, I pressed on the Fleece further and tripled down on everything.

More power.

More light.

More shimming sparks in the air.

I lost myself in it, and I didn't register a single change, even as I kept going and going and going.

Not at first.

It wasn't until the Fleece abruptly dimmed and some kind of feedback recoiled at me that I finally moved, stepping back and away as the spell and my focus both shattered one after the other.

Only for a second, though.

When the Fleece stopped thrumming with power, we all held our breaths.

On the bed, nothing.

No movement. No change.

Nothing.

My stomach plummeted.

Then, all of a sudden, Sai's mother inhaled in a breath that was almost a soft gasp.

My heart nearly punched it's way out of my rib cage. Anton let out a strangled wheeze.

Sairaorg might as well have turned to stone, all the way through.

It started with a twitch.

A slight movement, here and there.

Then a full on stretch - but just before that, the most wonderful thing happened.

A pair of purple eyes fluttered, once and twice and a little more for good measure, before finally - at long, long last - blinking open.

With a quiet sigh, Misla Bael awoke.

...

Extra:

Hecate.

The Three-Faced-One.

Torch Bearer, Star Walker, Keeper of the Paths, and so on and so forth did that list continue.

All were names and titles that belonged to her - that were of her - and each represented only one aspect of her myriad nature.

It was that goddess of many faces who intervened, whisking Circe away before the weight of her... heavy-handedness could damage her any further.

As it was, her current state was disastrous enough - and a comeuppance almost entirely of her own making.

The Witch of Aeaea had always been among the more temperamental of her children, and Hecate had advised her time and again to temper her cruelty and learn to stay her hand, but in the end, the Keeper of The Paths did not decide which one another was to walk.

Not entirely.

Guiding, influencing, and even tipping the scales by her own means and to her own ends - all of that she could do, in theory, but such actions did not so easily come without equivalent cost, and there were limits to her willingness to interfere.

Those did not apply here.

It was her will that had Circe act, and therefore she was well within her own rights to step in and deliver her away from further harm.

That power that burned her...

She recognized it, even as she snuffed it out.

Wrathful

Divine.

Foreign, and yet not unknown to her.

How... dangerous.

With barely a moment's consideration, she took her daughter's mortal servant as well - the daughter of Bellona.

Interacting even indirectly with the Roman demigod did nothing to inconvenience her - she was no Olympian or lesser deity to be harmed by the consequences of that harebrained, arrogant scheme concocted at the dawn of Roman expansion, to disastrous effect.

The fools had overreached and continued to pay the price to this day with the pantheonic schism that followed, but she was above such a banal thing.

Hecate or Trivia… the two aspects stood apart, and yet remained one and the same, and both acted to send the girl away, back to her sister on Circe's island.

In doing so, the goddess knew she was willingly playing into the machinations of Fate, as her domains ever and always did.

That island was no longer a 'safe haven'- Her daughter's foolishness had stirred up the slumbering beasts of the deep and more besides, and without her there to protect it, it would soon be overrun by monsters far beyond her servants' abilities to repel.

The daughters of War would flee with her blessing to even their odds, and greatness and strife would be their companions in equal measure.

To what end, only time would truly tell.

With that settled, Hecate turned her attention back to the greatest disruption yet.

The Greek demigod.

She knew this one.

Daniel Winchester.

One of her mortal legacies, and one she had personally blessed at birth as a reward for his mother's earning of her favor.

She saw him, once he passed the Symplegades and their boundary of thick, powerful Mist.

A brief flicker in her awareness that had drawn and become a far greater degree of direct attention when he battled the Beast of Andromeda and emerged victorious, with a spectacle far beyond what most could have possibly expected at first glance.

That was why she had driven Circe into action - to study the anomaly that defied her expectations, because Daniel Winchester… was supposed to be dead.

Completely and irrevocably.

She had foreseen it, once, and idly accepted it for the likely possibility that it was - another demigod pecked off monsters of no great import, a consequence of one too many poor choices aligning and snuffing out a spark of potential before it could truly be realized.

A shame and a waste, considering the talent that bloodline had recently spawned, but her priorities lay elsewhere.

His fate had been all but sealed.

And yet…

It hadn't come to pass.

Instead, the boy had disappeared.

She knew, because his father had approached her on the matter, demanding answers.

She had none to give, and had played no part in it.

Daniel Winchester had vanished, and yet…

There he was.

She watched him invade the lair of the man-eater and seize the Fleece with the interloper and the absurd creature that was of their roots and also not.

She witnessed his battle with Circe - if it could even be called that - and observed him calling upon that power, from a source so deep within his very soul all but a few would not fathom it to be anything other than a claim.

There was more there as well - something familiar but far fainter and less potent, akin to the blessing of the Moon Huntress?

Absurd.

She kept watch all the same, even as he seized the entire ship with a thaumaturgical application beyond any equivalent demigod she was currently aware of and transported it back and away from whence they came, and then-

"̴̲̓̎̓̀̋N̸͔̗̻̑͋͌o̵͍̩̭̰̦̚͠!̴̙͎̰̊͝"̷̢̮͔͓̯̚

-He slipped out of her sight entirely, and his companions with him.

That disarmed Hecate more than anything else.

She tried to peer further, past Apollo's predictable, furious descent in response, but there was nothing there to see.

Between one moment and the next, the boy had simply done as he had before and disappeared.

Gone.

Taken.

Hidden from their sight.

…

Whatever this meant... It was an ill omen.

Perhaps the worst amongst many.

The portents were laid out for those willing to see, and the pieces were set in place, ready to scatter at the lightest touch.

Plots were coming to fruition. Old forces stirred, and down in the Pit, the Crooked One was set to make his move at last.

Soon, now.

A year at most, if even that.

And now this.

The Three-Faced one saw all of this, and grimly pondered the obvious - and inevitable - question.

What fresh chaos was this era hurtling towards now?

...

Hylla, trying to take on Dan Solo:

Spoiler: Spoiler

Hecate watching everything go down like an episode of a drama flick:

Spoiler: Spoiler

Apollo trying to pin his son down and failing every time:

Spoiler: Spoiler

As always, leave your comments and ideas, and if you don't like it, please be courteous.

Chapter 826 - We Have Some Family Reunions