Chapter 3: Dreaming of electrical horses

The rain didn't fall so much as it hung in the air, a billion silver needles suspended in the moment before they decided to pierce the earth. It made ghosts of the pine trees and turned the summer camp into a watercolour painting left out in a storm. And in the centre of it all, standing between a packed-earth volleyball court and a cluster of nervous kids clutching bronze weapons, was a war horse. The back half, anyway. The front half was a man, or something like one, with a beard that had probably been wise and grandfatherly before the world decided to begin its formation.

His eyes weren’t grandfatherly. They were old, the kind of old that sees empires as brief, flickering things. Right now, those ancient eyes were fixed on me, and they held a glint of something that could curdle milk. Or hope.

“Who are you?”

The voice wasn’t a shout. It was low, a cello note played in a tomb. It was the kind of voice that didn’t need to ask twice. It was worthy of a godly, of a divine existence who had been recorded in myths, the voice of Chiron. Son of a Titan, more precisely the Titan King. Trainer of Heroes like Heracles, Asclepius, Achilles and the like. And currently, my more than likely biggest problem with the way he was looking as if I had murdered his father and his brothers and desecrated said murdered family members by having sex on them with his mother and his sister.

I took a long, final drag on my cigarette, the ember flaring like a dying star in the damp gloom. The smoke tasted like ash and bad decisions.  Nothing but the usual. I let the silence stretch, punctuated only by the relentless pit-pat-tap of rain on leaves and the nervous shuffle of feet in wet soil. Let him wait. Let them all wait. I didn’t care how It would be seen. I was soaking wet, I was lost, and I was in a profoundly bad mood.

“Well?” he prompted, his tone still calm, but with a layer of impatience now, like a teacher waiting for a unprepared student to finally admit he hasn’t done the reading.

I exhaled a plume of smoke that the rain immediately tore to shreds. “Someone who realises he’s taken a wrong turn at the edge of the universe and ended up in someone else’s story,” I said, flicking the butt into a puddle where it died with a hiss of protest. It was the truth, or a version of it so polished it felt like a lie. Telling him I’d apparently fallen out of a reality where his life was a series of books for teenagers seemed… unwise.

The centaur’s gaze didn’t waver. The rain beaded on his broad, human shoulders and dripped from his horse’s flanks. The kids behind him shuffled, their weapons—swords that glowed like captured sunlight, bows that hummed with potential energy—looking suddenly less like toys and more like the deadly things they were. A girl with frizzy blonde hair and a bow nearly as tall as she was nocked an arrow without even thinking about it. The motion was smooth, practiced.

I guess it could be called worrying, this situation, Terrifying even. I probably would be scared and panicking if it wasn’t for the beats inside my body, of Avalon, Excalibur and Rhongonymiad without mentioning my essences which all combined was broken as hell made it impossible.

Chiron and the demigod children behind him may have training, inherited talent, might and authority from their godly parents but I knew that nothing less than the entirety of the sky itself actively going after me would give me trouble and even then, I would still bet on myself because with my essences, with the ever distant utopia in my chest, no matter how much stronger, how much experienced, how much powerful adversaries could be, I would still always bet on myself.

“Perhaps that is true,” Chiron rumbled, and the ground seemed to vibrate with the sound. “The world is a bag of broken mirrors, each shard reflecting a different horror or wonder. It changes nothing. I can feel it inside you. Something… akin. Almost as bright. As punishing as their light.”

He said ‘their’ like it had a capital letter, like it was a brand. I had no damn clue what he meant. Faction? Light? I’d just watched a kid with too much plot armour with his unconscious goat friend and his blue loving mother get chased by a… monster … that smelled of a butcher’s dumpster and now that I thought about it kinda moved like a giant spider on amphetamines.

An annoyance. The thing had been loud, smelly and had tried to kill me. It probably was not logical but I blamed the way this evening had gone both on Poland and that half-banyard animal fuck.

“Others of your… persuasion… would have let it happen,” Chiron continued, his voice a blade wrapped in silk. “They would have watched. Perhaps applauded. They call children like that one… unsightly.”

Ah. So that was the line in the sand. I was being measured against a yardstick I couldn’t see, judged for a uniform I wasn’t wearing.

I knew my knowledge was far from perfect with how long it had been since I read the original books but I think that I would have, should have an inkling of what he was talking about but I was drawing blanks. Apparently, my light and I could be wrong but it was probably related to the fact that Excalibur and the other weapons of Artoria were when not corrupted could be considered holy/light weapons and that light kinda was associated, was one in such case that should come with nobleness, kindness, not cheering for kids no matter how shitty their parents were to be devoured alive by a mythological monster.

I couldn't see it which meant that it was either one of those things not clearly explained or mentioned or shown or written in the Riordanverse or this world was already different even before my intervention which in all cases made my knowledge less reliable and it wasn’t good.

I was in this world for less than a hour and I was already having a headache. The actual fact that I am in another world, that I had been isekaied with overpowered bullshit powers and weapons was something I could marvel/panic/think about later preferably not under the rain.

The would be protagonist of this world with his mother and his half goat friend were now shivering under a tree while a girl in the orange camp T-shirt tried to drape a blanket over his shoulders, was the litmus test. And I, by complete accident, had passed.

I guess that if I hadn’t tried to do anything, If things had ended like in canon, with the tone the Centaur had used when speaking of their light, I don’t think that we would have gone this far, that we would have event talked.

I looked past the centaur’s wise-old-man facade, past the teacherly posture, and saw the soldier beneath. The muscles coiled for a fight that would shatter trees. I saw the millennia of watching bright young things march off to die for causes they barely understood. I saw the exhaustion.

“My persuasion?” I finally said, my voice rough from smoke and the cold. “You keep talking like you’ve got me pegged. Like you know my mailing address and my favourite brand of existential dread. You feel something in me? Join the club, pal. I’ve been feeling a whole lot of ‘something’ since I woke up here, and none of it’s been particularly friendly. It’s mostly been cold, wet, and trying to create a stop to my existence.”

A few of the younger kids gasped which was surprising. You would have expected that living in a world where literal monsters roam the world to eat them alive,  they would be more chill and less about how dare you talk to him like that!. One of them, a boy with elven features and a sword that shimmered like a heat haze, as if it had just been taken out of the furnace of a forge actually took a half-step forward before a look from Chiron froze him in place. With his looks, was probably a son of Hermes.

The centaur’s expression didn’t change. “Deflection is a common tactic. But it does not answer the charge. Your essence is… loud. It has a flavour to it. One I have tasted on the wind before, usually preceding a great deal of trouble.”

“My essence,” I repeated, deadpan. “Is it a smoky flavour? With hints of cheap coffee and regret? Because that’s all I’m working with right now. Look, your… horsey-ness… I saw a kid about to become a snack. I threw an insult, got its attention and obliterated to kingdom come . It was a simple equation. Monster plus kid usually equals a mess, and I’m wearing my only pair of decent shoes.”

That got a reaction. A snort. It came from a girl leaning against a tree, near Percy, the unconscious Grover and Sally with what basically seemed like a baseball cap pulled low over her eyes which meant that she was probably Annabeth. She had a knife in her hand, flipping it end over end with a lazy, practiced grace.

“Decent shoes,” another girl, one that probably was a daughter of Hermes said muttered under her breath, a laugh hiding in the words. She looked as if she could not wait any more for me to quill over so that she could mug my corpse for my shoes which sure my shoes were cool but really? That wasn’t a reason.

“He’s worried about his shoes.”

Goddamn, I was. She wanted to mug my corpse.

Chiron’s eyes flickered to her for a fraction of a second, a silent command that shut down the commentary. His focus returned to me, heavier than before. “A simple equation,” he echoed, and the words were laced with a sadness so deep it felt geological. “You reduce a act of potential sacrifice to mere calculation. That, perhaps, is the most telling thing of all.”

The accusation hung in the air, thicker than the rain. He wasn’t just asking what I’d done; he was asking why. And ‘because it was annoying’ didn’t seem like it would cut it.

I met those gold-flecked eyes. The rain chose that moment to remember its job and began to fall in earnest, plastering my hair to my skull, soaking through my jacket. I was tired. I was confused. And I was fresh out of clever quips.

“Alright. Fine. You want a better answer?” I said, my voice losing its edge, just leaving the weariness behind. “I did it because the world is already full of enough people who see something wrong and just… look away. They cross the street. They change the channel. They tell themselves it’s not their problem. And bit by bit, the darkness gets a little bigger, the monsters get a little bolder, because they learn that no one is going to stop them. Maybe I don’t know what I am. Maybe my ‘essence’ is loud and trouble-flavoured. But I know what I’m not. I’m not someone who looks away.”

And I already regretted talking. It was true but cringe as fuck. Please, somebody put me out of my misery. I should be aura farming right now, not feeling as if I was losing aura.

Silence.

Not the absence of sound, but a new kind of sound entirely. The shhhhh of the rain on the leaves, the drip-drip-drip from the weapons, the shaky exhale of a dozen demigods holding their breath. It was a vacuum, sucking all the air out of the world to make space for my monumentally naive statement.

Chiron stared. For a heartbeat, two, his ancient mask of composed authority just… slipped. His brow furrowed. His lips, usually set in a firm, knowing line, parted slightly. He looked… bewildered. As if I’d just started speaking in a language lost since the fall of Atlantis which he would probably know with how geriatric he probably fucking was.

Then a sound ripped out of him. It started as a low rumble in his chest, a seismic event, and erupted into a full-bodied, head-tossed-back laugh. It wasn’t a nice laugh. It was the sound of a man who’d heard every joke the universe had to tell, and this was the one that finally broke him. It was bitter and bright and shattered the tension into a million useless pieces. It was a laugh that had seen the Siege of Troy and the fall of Rome and the invention of the selfie stick even though it was before 2010 and found them all equally absurd.

He laughed until he had to put a hand on his equine flank to steady himself. He laughed until tears mingled with the rain on his cheeks. He laughed like he was coughing up shards of his own history.

The kids stared, utterly bewildered. The Hermes girl with the knife stopped flipping it. The boy with the shimmering sword looked offended on behalf of, well, everything.

When he finally finished, gasping for air, he looked at me not as a threat or a curiosity, but with a raw, aching recognition. Like he’d just seen the ghost of a friend he’d watched die a thousand years ago. The laughter had washed everything else away, leaving behind something terribly fragile and honest.

“Oh, my boy,” he wheezed, wiping a tear from his eye. “Oh, you have no idea. No idea at all. ‘The darkness gets a little bigger’… He said that once, you know. A long time ago. Before the darkness ate him whole.”

I had no idea who ‘he’ was. I didn’t ask. The pain in his voice was a private thing, and I felt like an intruder for having witnessed it and to be more honest, I was tired of standing in the rain and something tell me Chiron speaking what was probably a tragic backstory because did you truly live long if you hadn’t many that would make us standing here longer.

He took a deep, composing breath, the great barrel of his chest expanding. The laughter was gone, but the strange, wistful light remained in his eyes.

“What’s your name?” he asked, the question softer now.

A name. Right. I couldn’t give him my real one. It belonged to a different life, a different world, a guy who paid taxes and worried about things that honestly felt less consequential. That guy was gone. Washed away in the rain. The man standing here now, smoke and rain-soaked and staring down a myth, needed something else. Something that fit the new, jagged shape of his life. A name that wasn’t a lie, but a starting point.

“Allen,” I said. It felt foreign on my tongue. It felt right.

A slow, genuine smile spread across Chiron’s face, weathering the centuries etched there. “Allen,” he repeated, tasting the word. He nodded, as if confirming something to himself. “Then I welcome you, Allen, as a guest. To our home. To Camp Half-Blood.” He gestured with one powerful arm, taking in the dripping woods, the silent kids, the sheer, terrifying absurdity of it all. “A sanctuary for those who do not fit. A forge for heroes. I have a feeling you will fit in perfectly.”

The way he said it, it didn’t sound like a blessing. It sounded like a diagnosis. A prophecy of the most inconvenient kind.