The Path Of Glory (Annabeth Chase x Male Reader)

11. Prove Your Bloodline

The river raced toward Y/N at the speed of a truck. Wind ripped the breath from his lungs. Steeples and skyscrapers and bridges tumbled in and out of his vision. He even felt the flames on his clothes extinguish from the wind.

His only thought at that moment wasn't one of a great hero from a story. No, he didn't come to terms with his own mortality, neither did he laugh in the face of death.

The only thing he had in his head was: Aaaaggghhhhh!

And then, everything stopped. Or, to be more precise, everything continued—that was good news; he wasn't dead. He never sank into the river, nor did he splattered on the ground. He just stood there in the air, a hundred feet above his end.

Surely he should have gone into ecstasy at that point, should have been thankful to Hera for whatever was happening. Yet, he mostly wanted to yell. It was frightening to remain there in the air without moving down.

Then Y/N realized something: he wasn't totally still. He wasn't blocked in the air, not quite. He was moving forward, just not downward.

N-No way! I fly! He leaned to his right, and turned. Same on his left. All the fear was gone, now that he had realized he could fly, and had become ecstasy.

He leaned down and landed on the shore of the river. That's when he noticed something else. It wasn't right that the bench he was standing next to was taller than he. Not right at all. Looking around, he realized he had no feet, no hands...no body! He looked like...an eagle?

Panicking, he flapped his wings, trying to get out of this body in which he was. And then, all of a sudden—and this had to be the strangest thing the mortals around him ever saw—he was back in his usual body without really knowing how.

He had half-charred clothes on his back, and his shirt was so ripped it felt on the ground. Shirtless, he looked as if he was going to the beach, except there was no beach here.

An instant after he had taken his human body again, Y/N started feeling the pain of the poison in his leg and chest striking anew. And he understood why people were so panicked. Not because of him—nobody had noticed him—but because of what they were looking at.

The top of the Arch was left to the flames, and everyone stared at it, shocked.

A little girl said, "Mama! That boy fell from the sky!"

"That's nice, dear," her mother said, craning her neck to watch the ambulances.

"He turned into an eagle!"

"That's nice, dear."

A news lady was talking for the camera, "Probably not a terrorist attack, we're told, but it's still very early in the investigation. The damage, as you can see, is very serious. We're trying to get to some of the survivors, to question them about eyewitness reports of someone falling from the Arch."

Survivors. Y/N felt a surge of relief. Maybe the park ranger and the family had made it out safe. He hoped Annabeth, Ethan, Percy and Grover were okay.

He tried to push through the crowd to find them; he needed more than ever those ambrosia squares, and hoped even more they had saved some from the bus.

"...an adolescent boy," another reporter was saying. "Channel Five has learned that surveillance cameras show an adolescent boy going wild on the observation deck, somehow setting off this freak explosion. Hard to believe, John, but that's what we're hearing. Again, no confirmed fatalities..."

Y/N backed away, trying to keep his head down. He had to go a long way around the police perimeter. Uniformed officers and news reporters were everywhere. A gray veil was slowly setting itself before his eyes.