He had dreamed of crossroads before — ordinary dreams, the mental sorting of a child who spent considerable waking hours thinking about intersections and choices. But this was different.
He knew it was different the moment he arrived there. The crossroads was in no city he recognized. It was a place that existed outside geography — three roads meeting under a sky that was neither day nor night but something between, a deep blue-violet that had the quality of thresholds. The ground was stone, worn smooth by passage, with no moss and no cracks. The air smelled of night-blooming herbs and something older than herbs.
He was himself. He was ten years old and he stood at the crossroads with his full awareness — both lives, the Codex, everything. He was not a dream-self. He was him.
A woman stood at the center of the crossroads where the three roads met.
Three faces. He had expected this. He had not expected the weight of her presence — the way it filled the space of the dream not as something imposed from outside but as something fundamental to it, the way gravity is fundamental to a room. She was not a character in the dream. She was what the dream was made of.
'You've been here twelve years,' she said. All three voices at once, the harmony of them something that moved in his chest rather than arriving through his ears.
'Ten years,' he said. 'I'm ten.'
Something that might, in a being her age and nature, be described as amusement. 'You arrived here twelve years ago,' she said. 'From the other world. Ten of those years you have been a child. Two of them you spent in transit.' A pause. 'I am counting from departure.'
'I didn't know the gap was two years,' he said. He filed this. He had always wondered about the between-time — the passage between Jason Park's death and Kael's birth. He had not known it had been two years. He did not know what had been in those two years. He did not ask, because he had the sense that some questions were not the right shape for this place.
'You have been careful,' she said. 'You have been patient. You have been building correctly.' She looked at him with all three pairs of eyes, and the looking was not evaluation exactly — more like recognition. 'But you have been thinking with what you know rather than with what you feel. The Sight shows you possibilities. The knowledge shows you what you remember. Neither of them tells you what is true right now, in the moment you are standing in.'
'I try to be present,' he said.
'You try,' she agreed. 'You know the difference between trying and doing. Think about where you are still trying rather than doing.'
He thought about it honestly. He was still, sometimes, observing his life from the slight distance of someone who had read the story. He was still, sometimes, treating the people around him as characters rather than people. Cece, mostly, he had moved past this with — Cece was too present and too real to be a character to him anymore. Theron, increasingly. His parents, most of the time. But occasionally, with people further from his center, he still did it. He still knew things about Luke Castellan and Annabeth Chase that felt, sometimes, like reading rather than encountering.
'I know,' he said.
'They are not characters,' she said. 'They are people in a world that is real. Whatever story you carry from before — it is a story, not a blueprint. Events will differ. People will surprise you. You cannot predict them and you should not try. You can only be present with them and respond to what is actually there.'
He stood at the threshold crossroads and felt the truth of this settle into him. Not as new information — he had known it, intellectually. As something that had just moved from knowing to understanding.
'The blessing,' he said. He had not meant to bring it up, but at a crossroads with its source, it felt relevant. 'You've been there since the beginning.'
'I am always at thresholds,' she said. 'You began at one. I was there.' A pause. 'The seal holds. You will not know what you are, in the full sense, until camp. That is as it should be. The process of becoming should not be interrupted by premature confirmation.'
'Why are you showing me this now?'
'Because you are about to make your first serious mistake,' she said. 'You are about to treat the knowledge of what is coming as a reason not to be afraid. Being afraid is appropriate. Being afraid and choosing action anyway is what courage is. You cannot have the second without the first.' She began to turn. 'Do not mistake numbness for readiness.'
He woke in his room to the sound of his mother making coffee downstairs. The dream had the quality of something that had happened rather than something he had imagined, and he lay in bed for a while processing it.
He thought: she is right. He had been using his foreknowledge, sometimes, as a buffer against genuine feeling. He had known Bianca would die and it had felt like narrative fact rather than the death of a real girl. He needed to fix that.
He thought: she is watching me. Not always, not intrusively, but consistently. And she is, in her way, doing what she promised his mother: preparing him.
He got up and went downstairs and had coffee with his mother — she had started letting him have a very weak cup on weekend mornings — and did not tell her about the dream. But he told her something else: 'I love you, Mom. I don't say it enough.'
She looked at him over her coffee cup. 'You say it all the time.'
'I mean it specifically today,' he said. 'In a specific way. I just wanted you to know.'
She reached across the table and put her hand over his. 'I know,' she said. 'I love you too. Specifically, today and all the other days.'