From the silent observatory within the Witness's pyramid, Nicholas watched the threads of fate vibrate with a new, sharp frequency. Percy Jackson's strand was now a taut, quivering line of focused rage. The color had bled from it, leaving a steely grey, the hue of shattered hope and resolve.
He observed the quest's grim conclusion. He saw Percy in the underworld, facing Hades with a contempt that mirrored the god's own. He saw the confrontation on the beach in Santa Monica, where Percy, holding the sky, didn't plead with Atlas or bargain. He endured, his eyes holding the fury of one who has seen the gears of the world turning and found them petty and rusted. The betrayal with the shield, Luke's sneering face, it wasn't a shocking twist for Percy anymore. It was a confirmation. Of course, the gods' neglected children would turn on them. It was the only logical outcome of their neglect.
Most poignantly, Nicholas watched Percy mourn.
Back at Camp Half-Blood, after the fireworks and the hollow praise from a briefly un-petrified Dionysus, Percy would escape to the beach or the woods. He wouldn't cry. He'd sit, stone-faced, turning Riptide over in his hands. But Nicholas, through the threads of fate and the echoes in the Shore of the Unconscious, could feel it. A hollow ache where a friendship had been. Memories of a roof in Queens, of quiet conversations, and of a friend who had seen him and then been erased for daring to speak. Percy wasn't just mourning Nick. He was mourning the last shred of the idea that the world of the gods could contain anything good or just.
"Rather brutal move, don't you think?"
The voice was rich, dry, and came from beside him. Circe, the Lady of the Blood Pathways, had materialized in the observatory, her form a convergence of crimson crystal and starlight veins. She gazed at the same fate-thread, her expression unreadable.
"It was necessary," Nicholas replied, his voice echoing softly in the prismatic space. "The old loyalty had to die. It was a weakness, a leash. He needed to see the leash for what it was before he could think of chewing through it."
"He's a child," Circe said, turning her ancient eyes on him. "A powerful, traumatized child. . You made him watch as someone he cared for was kicked to death for daring to speak out. You orchestrated a personal, intimate tragedy to make a philosophical point. That's not a strategy, Nicholas. That's cruelty dressed in a toga of 'necessity.'"
"The Greek pantheon is a metaphysical parasite," Nicholas countered, a flicker of irritation in his tone. "They stagnate progress, enforce a cycle of violence, and treat sentient lives as plot devices. World War II was their buffet. Percy's life, his mother's, Julian's, Marcus's, all the countless dead demigods and mortals, they are just ingredients. Removing them isn't a power grab. It's a surgical excision of a cancer."
Circe laughed, a sound like shattering wine glasses. "Oh, spare me the revolutionary manifesto. I've heard it from Titans, from Giants, from ambitious demigods with a grudge. The song is always the same: 'The old gods are corrupt, we shall bring a new dawn.' The lyrics just change. You talk of ending cycles, but you're just starting a new one, with yourself as the prime mover. You're not removing a cancer; you're becoming the new, more efficient tumor. You want their thrones, their worship, their authority. You just have a better business plan."
Nicholas was silent. The perfect, crystalline logic of his design met the tarnished mirror of Circe's millennia of cynicism. For a fleeting moment, the image of Percy's grief-stricken face superimposed itself over the fate-thread. The cold calculation wavered. He trusted you. In his way, he loved the friend you pretended to be.
"He will be compensated," Nicholas said, the words feeling inadequate even as he spoke them. "His suffering has a purpose. It will birth a better world. One where no child has to watch their mother vanish because of a god's pettiness. Where no one is turned into a monster for being a victim. Where power isn't a toy for eternal, spoiled children."
"Compensated?" Circe arched a brow. "With what? A seat among your Unknowns? You can't give him back his friend. You can't unbreak his faith. You've taken his childhood and turned it into fuel for your engine. The best you can offer is a reason for the pain, and reasons are cold comfort in the dark."
The truth of it settled in the space between them. Nicholas looked away from her, back to the grey thread of Percy's fate. The internal conflict was a quiet, persistent hum. He was the Shaper, the Architect. Emotion was a variable to be accounted for, not a driver. Yet, the variable named Percy Jackson had become the central equation.
"He will have agency," Nicholas finally said, more to himself than to Circe. "He will have truth. And he will have the tools to forge his own path, which is more than the Olympians ever offered."
Circe watched him for a long moment, then gave a slight, conceding shrug. "Just don't start believing your own pamphlets, Architect. Even weavers get tangled in their own threads." She dissolved back into the network of her Tree, leaving him alone with the tapestry and his thoughts.
It was time for the next phase. Not manipulation, but empowerment. The rebellion needed a general, not just an angry soldier.
First, he addressed the subtle, insidious work of Camp Half-Blood. An enchantment woven into the very magic of the place, a psychic mist that encouraged demigods to see their godly parents as distant but benevolent, their quests as glorious, the system as fundamentally right. It was the reason so many stayed loyal despite the neglect.
Nicholas, with his authority over Fate and Magic, reached out. He didn't tear the enchantment away, that would be detected. He simply… neutralized its effect on Percy's specific thread. He applied a conceptual solvent to that one strand. The comforting fog lifted from Percy's mind. The stories now sounded like propaganda.
The smiling faces on Olympus on the brochures looked like masks. The camp itself began to feel less like a sanctuary and more like a very beautiful training camp for a war he hadn't chosen.
Then, Nicholas turned to the Shore of the Unconscious. As Percy slept in the Hermes cabin, his soul, like all mortals and demigods, drifted into that collective sea of dreams. But Percy's dreams were now guided by a subtle current.
Nicholas didn't appear to him. He changed the landscape, the logic of the dream. Percy found himself not in nightmares of monsters, but in a vast, silent library that felt both ancient and impossibly new. The books weren't on shelves; they floated in the still air, their covers blank.
One drifted toward him. When he opened it, instead of words, he felt concepts flow into him. It was a primer on magical theory, as a discipline of will and understanding. It spoke of magic as a natural force, like gravity or electromagnetism, that could be harnessed by aligning one's intent with the underlying patterns of reality. It was the first textbook of the Atrium's system, stripped of divine symbology and presented as pure, attainable knowledge.
Another book presented principles of strategy, and it taught him to see battles not as clashes of strength, but as systems of leverage, pressure, and breaking points.
A third, more subtle, focused on mental disciplines, shielding one's thoughts, perceiving lies in the very fabric of speech, fortifying the mind against charm and compulsion. A defense against the powers the gods so often used.
The dreams felt like intense, private tutoring sessions. He'd wake exhausted but with strange, crystalline ideas lodged in his mind. He began to look at the world differently. The Mist wasn't just a veil; it was a manipulable energy field. A monster's weakness wasn't just a mythological fact; it was a flaw in its magical cohesion. His own hydrokinesis wasn't a gift from his father; it was an affinity he could refine, deepen, and understand.
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