Julius POV
The fog that had been my mind was all but gone and with it I returned in control of our body. The Vampire Killer was now tied to my waist, like a belt, its bronze surface still warm from whatever flames had engulfed it during our transportation to... wherever the hell this was.
I was tired beyond belief, exhaustion seeping into my very bones like poison. My body ached from the fight with the Mormo, then the encounter with Artemis and her hunters, and now whatever the hell had just happened with that empousa. But I couldn't stop the questions from racing through my mind, each one more pressing than the last.
For one, what the hell?
For two, where was I?
For three? And the most important one. Why?
Why had Eudoxia come to my home?
I thought back to our interaction, trying to piece together what had happened. She had been waiting for me, sitting there in my room like she owned the place. She wasn't some random monster that had caught my scent and followed me home. No, she knew who I was, who Richter was. Or at least had an idea about us.
But that raised even more questions. How did she know? How long had she been watching? And was killing the Wilsons really just an action born from boredom?
The memory of her voice still made my skin crawl. That silky, hypnotic tone that had wrapped around my mind like chains, making me want to stay, want to listen, want to... I shuddered.
Whatever power she'd used on me, it had been strong.
Strong enough that even Richter had been affected, trapped in the depths of our shared consciousness.
Why hadn't she killed us? She could have. Hell, she'd demonstrated that easily enough when she made the Vampire Killer disappear with a thought.
She lulled me into a defenseless state, which she had been able to do, but she didn't finish the job then. No, in fact she was going to do something else, but I had stopped her when I asked her a question.
My questions broke it. Why had they broken it? Why had her gaze gone blank? Why had she smiled?
So many whys, so little answers. And by little I mean zero, there were zero answers.
Then the mist around my mind had lessened and Richter came out, full of rage and violent as always. But even he couldn't touch her, not really. Well he did punch her in her beautiful face.
I thought and thought but had no answer to my questions.
"Gods," I muttered, my voice sounding small and lost in the vastness of whatever forest I'd been dumped in. "I wish I had taken Artemis's first choice and had gone with her, at least then I'd know that the chicks by her side were going to try and murder me in the night, but not this. This is just... what is this?"
The forest around me was eerily quiet. No birds singing, no insects buzzing, no small animals rustling through the underbrush. Just the almost imperceptible sound of wind through leaves.
'Don't get down,' Richter spoke up, something he almost never did. Usually he was content to stay in the background unless there was a fight to be had or he felt the need to criticize my lack of combat prowess.
"Down? Why would I be down?" I asked, injecting as much sarcasm as I could muster into my voice. "This is just another fuckup in what is our life. We'll get past this and get our answers, won't we? I mean, it's not like we've been teleported to some unknown location by a psychotic vampire who just murdered our foster parents. Everything's peachy."
'Y-yeah,' Richter replied, and for the first time in a long while Richter stammered. That was new. Richter was never uncertain. Violent, yes. Reckless, absolutely. But uncertain? That required thinking, and thinking was my thing.
I guess finally losing a fight, hurt him worse than I thought.
"Now however," I continued, pushing down the growing panic in my chest, "the most pressing question is a simple one. Where are we?"
The first rule for being lost was actually staying put so you wouldn't get more lost, but that only worked if someone was looking for you. Remembering the fact that my room had been a burning hell before I was dropped here, the chance of anyone looking for me was pretty much zero.
The Wilsons were dead.
The apartment was probably ash by now. Even if someone did come looking, they'd find nothing but crime scene tape and questions no one could answer.
I looked around more carefully this time, trying to take in details instead of just wallowing in confusion and fear. The trees were tall, really tall, towering above me. Their trunks were massive, easily three or four feet in diameter.
I walked over to the nearest tree, running my hand along its trunk. The bark was scaling, rough and uneven under my palm. But as I dug my nails into it, it peeled off easily to reveal a large smooth patch of inner bark underneath, white in color.
"Hmm," I hummed, letting the bark fall to the ground as I tilted my head back to look up at the tree's branches. They spread out in a distinctive pattern, and I could make out the shape of the seeds hanging from them. Globose heads, clustered together in groups.
'What is it?' Richter asked, his mental voice curious despite everything.
"The tree looks like a plane tree, but the bole is too wide and it's a little too small to be a sycamore," I muttered, walking around to get a better look at its overall shape.
I liked reading, even if the words were almost always jumbled up, my favorite thing to read was about poems, but I pretty much read anything that peeked my interest.
I looked around at the other trees in the immediate area. All of them had the same characteristics, boles too wide for typical american plane trees otherwise known as sycamores trees, height a little too short. The more I studied them, the more a suspicion began to form in the back of my mind.
"They kind of look like..." I trailed off as realization hit me finally.
It dawned on me with the force of a sledgehammer.
Greek myths are true. That's what Artemis had told me. Every story, every poem, every god was real.
The vampire thing, the empousa, was from....Greek mythology.
These were oriental planes. Trees native to... Greece.
But that couldn't be right. If I was in Greece, it should be daytime by now, shouldn't it? The sun should have started to rise. Yet it was still dark out, the forest shrouded in darkness.
Unless...
I looked toward the tallest tree in my immediate vicinity and up into its foliage, my mind trying to think of an answer to all of, well... this.
"We need a better view of the sky," I said aloud, my voice steady for the first time since getting teleported here.
With that decision made, I unfurled the whip at my waist, the bronze length still warm in my hands, it was.. nice, all things considered. I circled it around the massive trunk, which, being as thick as it was, provided plenty of surface area to work with.
I grabbed both ends of the whip in my hands, testing the hold, then tied them securely behind my back. The bronze bit into the bark slightly, providing extra grip.
My hands rested on the now tense whip, feeling the vibration that ran through it. I placed both of my feet against the tree trunk and began to climb. It wasn't that hard. Heave the whip up first, then walk my feet up the trunk to match its new height. Heave and climb, heave and climb, heave and.
It took little effort, since I was able to put almost all of my weight against Vampire Killer, which thank the gods.
I heaved the whip one more time up but...
It stopped.
I had finally reached the first branches. Thick, sturdy limbs spread out from the trunk like massive arms, easily wide enough to support my weight. I pulled myself up slowly, my arms shaking from the exertion, and carefully undid the knot at my back.
I made sure to keep a firm grip on the whip as I coiled it back up. No way was I letting the Vampire Killer fall to the ground, I needed to get back down after all.
I settled onto the branch I was on, breathing slowly. In and out. In and out. I still hadn't had a real moment of rest since this whole nightmare began. Good thing Brad and his cronies shoving me into that locker had given me a solid six or seven hours of sleep, or I'd probably have passed out by now.
Looking through the leaves, I could see the tree's seeds more clearly. Bristly seedballs that hung in clusters of two at least and up to five from what I could observe. The pattern was distinctive, to say the least.
Yeah, this definitely wasn't a sycamore. A sycamore's seeds were smooth, pendant, and normally hung by themselves rather than in clusters.
I sighed, again, gods I was gonna develop a sighing tick, if I kept doing it. My injuries from the fight with the Mormo were mostly healed, guess demigod bodies come with perks, that was an answer, not to a question I had but still an answer nonetheless.
But gods did I hate today. No matter what Richter said about not getting down, this was definitely shaping up to be the worst day in what could generously be called my short life.
But I'd come this far. Might as well finish what I'd started.
I continued climbing, branch after branch, each one thinner than the last. The trunk narrowed as I ascended, and the branches became less reliable.
More than once I had to test my weight carefully before trusting a limb to hold me. The last thing I needed was to fall and break my neck after surviving everything else that had happened.
Finally, after what felt like hours but was probably only ten minutes, my head broke through the foliage. I found myself perched in the crown of the tree, branches swaying gently in a breeze I could finally feel on my face. I gripped the now-thinning trunk carefully and looked up toward the sky.
The stars looked the same. That was both reassuring and disturbing. No new constellations over the horizon, no obvious shift that would indicate I'd been transported to the other side of the world.
The timezone seemed to be the same, or at least similar enough that I couldn't detect any significant change in the positions of the celestial bodies I recognized.
Wait...
City lights. I just realized I couldn't see any. My head turned in a slow circle, scanning the horizon in every direction, trying to catch even a glimmer of artificial light. But there was nothing.
No orange glow on the horizon indicating a distant city, no scattered points of light from houses or streetlamps. Just darkness stretching out in all directions.
However, I did see something. Oh boy, did I see something that made my heart sink into my boots.
As I looked south, I could see water. A vast expanse of it, dark and seemingly endless, stretching out to meet the horizon. The light of the night reflecting off its surface. Waves lapped against the shore with a rhythmic sound which I couldn't hear but could see from my height.
The sea.
I turned around slowly, dreading what I might see, and looked to the other side. My sight couldn't make out the far edge of the landmass I was on, but something deep in my gut, my sixth sense or whatever you wanted to call it, made me shiver.
"We're on a damn island," I muttered into the wind that was hitting my face and making my hair run wild. "This day just keeps getting better, wait, actually isn't this tomorrow. I guess it's grown from the worst day of our life to the two worst days of our life, just great."
A/N: Julius as you can tell is one smart cookie. Not smart enough to figure out everything, but still smart enough to do the best of a really, really, really bad situation.
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Hope you all enjoyed it. Thx for reading. Author out