TERRIFIED . . . annabeth chase

forty five.

VAL HATED IT HERE.

A strong sentence that she'd said multiple times, but it was true. She was literally in Tartarus.

Or . . . at least, falling down to it. She'd been falling for so long that she didn't know if she'd been falling for hours or days.

Val hated being alone, but that was better than having Percy and Annabeth fall down after her. She could totally do this by herself. She's literally the daughter of Death, and also Love, to an extent. She would be fine.

. . . right?

Wind whistled in her ears. The air grew hotter and damper, as if she was plummeting into the throat of a massive dragon. Which was a disgusting thought, she blamed Travis for always putting that analogy in her head.

Travis, Connor, Drew, Will . . . were they still alive? Wherever they were? Val missed them dearly. She missed having more people to depend on.

Annabeth, Leo, and she guessed Percy were fine enough. Hazel was good, she was Nico's technical sister after all, and they agreed on a lot of things. Frank was pretty okay. Piper and Jason were . . . not as close as the others.

And Val just missed the familiarity that her crew brought to her. She missed being safe.

She'd never expected her life to be easy. Most demigods died young at the hands of terrible monsters. Val knew personally. She didn't know how she didn't die when trying to get to the US at the age of 10. That was the way it had been since ancient times. The Greeks invented tragedy. They knew the greatest heroes didn't get happy endings.

But this was just a cruel joke. First she was cursed, then thrown into Tartarus. Figures. She hoped that Aphrodite felt remorse for what she'd done to Val. Because love was cruel, but it shouldn't have been that cruel to her in the first place.

Then, something about their surroundings changed. The darkness took on a gray-red tinge. The whistling in her ears turned into more of a roar. The air became intolerably hot, permeated with a smell like rotten eggs.

Suddenly, the chute she'd been falling through opened into a vast cavern. Maybe half a mile below her, Val could see the bottom. For a moment she was too stunned to think properly. The entire island of Manhattan could have fit inside this cavern — and she couldn't even see its full extent. Red clouds hung in the air like vaporized blood. The landscape — at least what she could see of  it— was rocky black plains, punctuated by jagged mountains and fiery chasms. The ground dropped off in a series of cliffs, like colossal steps leading deeper into the abyss.

But it looked . . . horrible. The worst thing that Val had seen, and the last thing that she would see if she didn't find out a way to not splat on the ground and get killed.

And then she remembered she could fly. She was the dumbest person in the world.

She let her wings appear from her back and flew off, breathing out in relief.

At least, until something flew at her from a cave higher up.

Val yelped and tried to fly away, but the thing had sliced through one of her wings. She winced, taking out one of her knives and thrusting out her arm, hoping that it'd stab into the monster.

Dust settled over her, so she figured that it did. At least monsters died in Tartarus. She probably would've been dead if not for that.

The pain in her wing intensified, and she let out a small whimper as she tried to land near a river that was glowing, in the hopes that it wasn't hostile toward her. She landed and immediately laid down on the ground, her body tired.