Page 153 of The Sun and the Star

Yet he slowed. Ahead of him, there was an eerie glow at the end of the path. Was something else on fire?

‘Go!’ Bob shouted from behind. ‘Do not stop, Nico!’

No, no, something was wrong.

Nico jogged to the end of the path and absolutelyhatedwhat he saw.

The earlier inconsistency finally made sense. The first time he’d found Nyx’s realm, he had stumbled upon it out of a dark and starless forest. The second time, he and Will had discovered it in the middle of a clearing.

And now Nico was standing at the edge of a cliff, looking down upon the convergence of two rivers. One was absolutely the Phlegethon, and it was the source of the unnerving glow. The other, he knew, was the Cocytus.

The River of Lamentation.

The two rivers flowed down towards the pit of Chaos, then smashed into one another about fifteen metres from where Nico stood. The sound was horrible: pain and punishment clashing, the heat of the Phlegethon meeting the frigid waters of the Cocytus and hissing. They slammed against the cliffside, and as they did so Nico could hear the souls trapped in them. Crying out. Begging for respite. Beckoning to Nico to jump in.

‘It moves,’ Nico said softly, and he backed away from the cliff’s edge.

Bob set Will down next to Nico, panting. ‘What … did … you … say?’

‘It moves,’ he repeated. ‘Nyx’s realm. It’s never in the same spot in Tartarus. That’s why it’s so hard to find!’

‘That’s convenient,’ groaned Will, whose skin was deathly pale. ‘Hopefully, we’ll never have to find it again.’

The four of them stared down at the converging rivers in a collective silence of dread.

‘We must go in,’ Bob said matter-of-factly.

‘Inthere?’ said Will. ‘Do we have to?’

‘I don’t know that we have any other choice,’ grumbled Nico. ‘It’ll be awful, but not impossible.’

‘This quest has involved a lot of falling,’ said Will. ‘I would like to be on solid ground for the rest of my life after this.’

Bob picked up Small Bob and rubbed his face against the cat’s head. ‘I missed you, my friend. Are you ready?’

Small Bob mewed, and for a moment warmth filled Nico’s heart. Here was Bob the Titan, alive and reunited with his friends.

They had done it.

And then Nico was immediately reminded that, no, they hadnotin fact completed the quest.

Nyx’s furious shriek split the air around them, and Tartarus cracked with thunder.

Fear tore through Nico’s body as he watched smoke pour out of the stone archway across the pit, and soon Nyx and her chariot materialized in the endless darkness above the rivers. Her vampire horses pulled her forward, and once they made landfall on the cliffside, she seamlessly stepped from the dissolving chariot. Her starry whip cracked alongside her, and in her eyes Nico saw …

Rage. The rage of dying stars, the rage of the darkest night, the rage of destruction.

‘Howdareyou!’ she screamed, and her voice shook the very belly of Tartarus. ‘You think you can hurt me?’

‘I don’t care what you think or what you do, Nyx,’ said Bob defiantly. ‘You will let me and the demigods leave without any more interference.’

‘After you set fire to my home?’ she yelled. With a flick of her wrist, her two vampire horses came forward. ‘Shade, Shadow, if any of them so much as twitch, devour them.’

‘Your quarrel is not with us,’ said Bob. Then he pointedbehind her. ‘Why don’t you ask one of your children what really happened?’

Nico saw that Hypnos and Nemesis had also made the crossing, and they were joined by a third sibling.

The now-regenerated Epiales.

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