Chapter Text
It began with a splash.
For anyone close enough to hear it, the sound should have been suspicious. It should have turned heads. But the fountain was grand, miraculous in the way old sacred things often were. Water surged high into the air and crashed back down in glittering sheets, loud enough to drown out one girl falling straight through it.
Perse knew everything had already gone wrong the moment she hit the old, unpolished fountain.
The water had taken her too fast. One second, she had fallen, the next it had swallowed her whole, dragging her down so hard her mind had barely managed to catch up. Child of Poseidon, she could breathe underwater. She knew that.
But in moments of surprise, it didn’t matter. The very mortal fear of drowning came first.
She surfaced hard, breaking through the water with a gasp she did not need, her hand flying to the stone lip of the fountain. Her palm slipped against slick rock. The cut across it stung sharp, fresh enough to bite, but Perse ignored it for later.
She shoved wet hair out of her face and sucked in another useless breath.
“I can’t drown,” she muttered to herself, voice low and flat with annoyance. “I’m done panicking about this.”
Her feet found the bottom. She pushed herself upright, water rolling from her shoulders as she rose just enough to kneel in the basin, blinking salt and water from her lashes.
Then she saw the crowd.
Her breath caught.
People packed the space beyond the fountain, gathered in a thick wall of bodies before two towering figures that stood above them all.
Gods.
Perse knew that immediately. Knew it in the way the air bent around them. Pressure pressing suddenly against her lungs. In the awful instinct that made every part of her go still.
Not monsters. Not other demigods. Gods!
Panic tightened around her already sore throat. Water slid down her skin in quiet streams, dripping from her hair, arms, and chin. The fountain still poured around her in shining curtains, and for one brief, impossible moment, no one looked.
Or maybe they just didn’t notice? The crowd’s attention stayed fixed on the gods, their eyes lifted, reverent and blind. Perse sank lower in the fountain, pulse hammering, and pulled herself back into the falling veil of water. Hidden, for now, behind the curtain of the water.
First thing was first, escape.
Perse had no idea what kind of show this was, but she knew enough to understand that interrupting it was a terrible idea. These things usually ended in a smiting or death. Very rarely did they end with a scolding.
Keeping low, she gathered the soaked hem of her dress in one fist. The stupid thing clung to her legs, heavy and dripping. Her father had made her wear it on one of his visits, insisting it was more appropriate. Perse had told him it looked like she had been wrapped in decorative fishnet and drowned in it.
Surprisingly, that hadn’t changed his mind. Now it just made moving harder. She turned carefully in the current, trying to find a way out that did not end in immediate divine attention.
The front was impossible—too many people. Mortals pressed shoulder to shoulder, all facing forward, all gathered around the Gods in a dense ring of bodies and reverence. Gods stood in front of them, and somewhere in the crowd she caught the gleam of gold and the unmistakable shape of a crown.
Greattttttt. A king, too. “Not looking too good today, Jackson.”
People crowded there too, though the heavy fall of water gave her some cover, turning the edge of the fountain into a wavering glass wall. It blurred her shape, bent the light, made her harder to see unless someone was looking directly at her.
No one was.
Yet.
Perse crouched lower. Then she heard one of them begin to speak. The voice carried easily over the crowd, distant and spoken in a familiar language Perse knew thanks to her blood.
‘Today shall mark the day the people of Athens choose a patron for this great city. A contest between the Gods. Poseidon of the Sea and Athena, Goddess of Wisdom.’
Perse went still.
That was familiar… Horribly, immediately familiar. And one hell of a bad day for a certain God. Along with centuries of resentment.
A story. Annabeth had explained to her in exacting, deeply offended detail when Perse had once asked why, exactly, Athena and Poseidon hated each other so much.
Athens.
The contest.
Athena had offered them the olive tree.
And Poseidon had made a fountain and brought forth saltwater.
Perse looked down slowly at the pool around her. At the water lapping quietly at her knees. At the stone beneath her hands.
The fountain.
She was standing in the fountain.
“Oh,” Perse whispered, staring in sudden horror. Then, much quieter, “Oh, no. Please, Gods. WHY?” before buttoning her lip before someone heard her very desperate plea.
That meant the gods standing before the crowd, towering in all their impossible grandeur, were Athena and Poseidon. They looked wrong, unfamiliar? Just odd in the way. Different ancient versions of the ones I knew. Gigantic! Far closer to the stories. And yet still the same.
Perse chanced a glance through the falling sheet of water.
Poseidon stood nearest the fountain, sea-green eyes bright as he gestured toward it like a man unveiling something sacred. He looked nothing like the washed-up fisherman she knew from the modern world.
This Poseidon looked like worship.
Sun-warm skin gleamed gold where the light touched him, less weathered sailor and more something carved to be adored. He stood taller, broader, all clean strength and impossible presence, as if the sea itself had been forced into the shape of a man and crowned for it. The waves at the city’s edge did not drag at him. They bent for him. Parted for him. Obeyed.
Maybe this was his prime.
His hair fell in long, straight currents, dark and blue as deep water, and in his hand, he held his trident with effortless certainty. He certainly looked Happy. Not just pleased. Proud in the way only gods could be, standing before mortals and expecting awe. And they gave it to him. The crowd watched the fountain with open wonder, reverent and breathless, as if they were staring at something holy. I tried to hide by pressing my body against the base. And sinking further into the water.
Perse could feel the divine power from where she crouched. It hummed through the water around her. Through the stone. Through the air itself.
This did not feel like some simple salt spring. Not just seawater dragged up through stone as the myths reduced it to. The power in it was too large for that. It weaved something strange into it. Pressing against her skin in a way that made her stomach twist.
This was not a gift meant for thirst.
It felt like something else.
Like a wound in the world… and this was the bandage.
The mortals approached.
One stepped forward, cautious and reverent, cupped both hands, and drank from the water running clear through the stone just as the story said they would. He spat it out immediately. The crowd recoiled in murmurs. And her father looked, with perfect divine offense, personally insulted.
‘A beautiful fountain,’ the mortal king said carefully, voice tight with caution. ‘It would be displayed nicely in Athens.’
Perse was offended for her father. Just pretty? The thing thrummed with enough divine force to split her skull and they were calling it decorative.
The man clearly knew better than to insult a God outright, but Perse could hear the fear tucked beneath the praise. He had chosen his words carefully, balancing them on the thin line between honesty and survival. Something nice to look at. 'Poor Poseidon, didn’t know humans can’t drink seawater.'
Athena’s gaze lingered on the fountain with something far sharper than mortal appreciation. Grey eyes filled with recognition.
Pure, cold understanding.
She was the only other person there who seemed to understand what sat before them. The real worth buried beneath mortal ignorance.
And Poseidon, arms crossed, said nothing. History settled into place with almost painful ease.
He stood there, broad and silent and already offended, with no intention of explaining himself. No longer worth telling them what they were actually looking at. They were too ungrateful and making mortals understand the scale of what he had offered them. Of course he would not. His pride would never allow it. He had given them something sacred and expected them to recognize divinity on sight.
Athena, grey-eyed and composed, looked almost amused.
Perse could see it in the faint shift of her mouth. In the glint in her expression. The Goddess looked one breath away from laughter.
Then Athena stepped forward and brought forth her gift.
An olive tree.
Perse stared.
Athena held it before them with all the poise of a woman already aware she had won.
“An olive tree,” she said, calm and measured. “Its fruit may be eaten. Its oil may be burned. Its branches may be used. Its leaves may heal. From it comes food, trade, soap and a symbol of peace.”
It was so boring compared to my Father's gift. Perse could practically hear Annabeth’s voice in her head, smug and insufferably pleased. But what would she say if I told her the true story. Would she, too, think it was funny like her mom? A shame as I did. Or be proud of her mom's quick wit to think of something like a tree.
And there it was.
The beginning of it.
The moment myth stopped being a story and became history. Where Winners got to tell the tale, and the losers were unnamed to history, or the villains of the story.
Or maybe memory..? Perhaps that was what Perse was gazing at. Perse did not know which made this worse. The air was too hot. The salt clung to the back of her throat. Water soaked her skin and dragged at her dress. Sun burned overhead. The stone bit cold beneath her hands. Dreams did not feel like this. Memories shouldn’t either.
She was in the past.
And if this was real, if this was truly happening around her and not some divine replay she had been dropped into, then there was one very easy way to find out.
Speak.
Interrupt history.
Do something!
Perse stared through the curtain of falling water, pulse thudding hard enough to hurt.
Would it change?
Would they hear her?
Did she dare risk finding out?