The Tower of Nero

by Rick Riordan

  I had done my best. Surely, Zeus would see that and be proud. Maybe he would send down a lightning bolt, blast Python into tiny pieces, and save me!

  As soon as I thought this, I realized how foolish it was. Zeus didn’t work that way. He would not save me any more than Nero had saved Meg. I had to let go of that fantasy. I had to save myself.

  I squirmed and fought. I still had my arms free and my hands full. I stabbed Python’s coil with my broken fretboard so forcefully that it ripped his skin and stuck in his flesh like a massive splinter, green blood oozing from the wound.

  He hissed, squeezing me tighter, pushing all the blood into my head until I feared I would blow my top like a cartoon oil well.

  “Has anyone ever told you,” Python rasped, “that you are annoying?”

  I HATH, the Arrow of Dodona said in a melancholy tone. A THOUSAND TIMES.

  I couldn’t respond. I had no breath. It took all my remaining strength to keep my body from imploding under the pressure of Python’s grip.

  “Well.” Python sighed, his breath washing over me like the wind from a battlefield. “No matter. We have reached the end, you and I.”

  He squeezed harder, and my ribs began to crack.

  I FOUGHT.

  I squirmed.

  I pounded on Python’s skin with my tiny fist, then wriggled my ukulele thorn back and forth in the wound, hoping to make him so miserable he would drop me.

  Instead, his giant glowing eyes simply watched, calm and satisfied, as my bones developed stress fractures I could hear in my inner ear. I was a submarine in the Mariana Trench. My rivets were popping.

  DIEST THOU NOT! the Arrow of Dodona implored me. THE TIME HAS COME!

  “Wh—?” I tried to wheeze out a question, but I had too little air in my lungs.

  THE PROPHECY WHICH PYTHON SPAKE, said the arrow. IF THOU MUST FALL, THEN SO YOU SHALL, BUT FIRST, USETH THOU ME.

  The arrow tilted in my hand, pointing toward Python’s enormous face.

  My thought process was muddled, what with my brain exploding and all, but its meaning jabbed into me like a ukulele fretboard.

  I can’t, I thought. No.

  THOU MUST. The arrow sounded resigned, determined. I thought about how many miles I had traveled with this small sliver of wood, and how little credence I’d usually given its words. I remembered what it had told me about it being cast out of Dodona—a small expendable branch from the ancient grove, a piece no one would miss.

  I saw Jason’s face. I saw Heloise, Crest, Money Maker, Don the Faun, Dakota—all those who had sacrificed themselves to get me here. Now my last companion was ready to pay the cost for my success—to have me do the one thing it had always told me never to do.

  “No,” I croaked, possibly the last word I would ever be able to speak.

  “What is that?” Python asked, thinking I had spoken to him. “Does the little rat beg for mercy at the end?”

  I opened my mouth, unable to answer. The monster’s face loomed closer, anxious to savor my last sweet whimpers.

  FARE THEE WELL, FRIEND, said the arrow. APOLLO WILL FALL, BUT APOLLO MUST RISE AGAIN.

  With those last words, conveying all the power of his ancient grove, the arrow closed the reptile’s prophecy. Python came within range, and with a sob of despair, I jabbed the Arrow of Dodona up to its fletching in his enormous eye.

  He roared in agony, lashing his head back and forth. His coils loosened just enough for me to wriggle free. I dropped, landing in a heap at the edge of a wide crevice.

  My chest throbbed. Definitely broken ribs. Probably a broken heart. I had far exceeded the maximum recommended mileage for this Lester Papadopoulos body, but I had to keep going for the Arrow of Dodona. I hadeth to keepeth goingeth.

  I struggled to my feet.

  Python continued flailing, trying to dislodge the arrow from his eye. As a medical god, I could have told him that this would only make the pain worse. Seeing my old Shakespearean missile weapon sticking out of the serpent’s head made me sad and furious and defiant. I sensed that the arrow’s consciousness was gone. I hoped it had fled back to the Grove of Dodona and joined the millions of other whispering voices of the trees, but I feared it was simply no more. Its sacrifice had been real, and final.

  Anger pumped through me. My mortal body steamed in earnest, bursts of light flashing under my skin. Nearby, I spotted Python’s tail thrashing. Unlike the snake that had curled around the leontocephaline, this serpent had a beginning and an end. Behind me yawned the largest of the volcanic crevices. I knew what I had to do.

  “PYTHON!” My voice shook the cavern. Stalactites crashed around us. I imagined, somewhere far above us, Greek villagers freezing in their tracks as my voice echoed from the ruins of the holy site, olive trees shuddering and losing their fruit.

  The Lord of Delphi had awoken.

  Python turned his remaining baleful eye on me. “You will not live.”

  “I’m fine with that,” I said. “As long as you die, too.”

  I tackled the monster’s tail and dragged it toward the chasm.

  “What are you doing?” he roared. “Stop it, you idiot!”

  With Python’s tail in my arms, I leaped over the side.

  My plan should not have worked. Given my puny mortal weight, I should have simply hung there like an air freshener from a rearview mirror. But I was full of righteous fury. I planted my feet against the rock wall and pulled, dragging Python down as he howled and writhed. He tried to whip his tail around and throw me off, but my feet stayed firmly planted against the side of the chasm wall. My strength grew. My body shone with brilliant light. With one final defiant shout, I pulled my enemy past the point of no return. The bulk of his coils spilled into the crevasse.

  The prophecy came true. Apollo fell, and Python fell with me.

  Hesiod once wrote that a bronze anvil would take nine days to fall from Earth to Tartarus.

  I suspect he used the word nine as shorthand for I don’t know exactly how long, but it would seem like a long, long time.

  Hesiod was right.

  Python and I tumbled into the depths, flipping over one another, bouncing against walls, spinning from total darkness into the red light of lava veins and back again. Given the amount of damage my poor body took, it seems likely that I died somewhere along the way.

  Yet I kept fighting. I had nothing left to wield as a weapon, so I used my fists and feet, punching the beast’s hide, kicking at every claw, wing, or nascent head that sprouted from his body.

  I was beyond pain. I was now in the realm of extreme agony is the new feeling great. I torqued myself in midair so that Python took the brunt of our collisions with the walls. We couldn’t escape one another. Whenever we drifted apart, some force brought us back together again like marriage bonds.

  The air pressure became crushing. My eyes bulged. The heat baked me like a batch of Sally Jackson’s cookies, but still my body glowed and steamed, the arteries of light now closer to the surface, dividing me into a 3-D Apollo jigsaw puzzle.

  The crevice walls opened around us, and we fell through the cold and gloomy air of Erebos—the realm of Hades. Python tried to sprout wings and fly away, but his pathetic bat appendages couldn’t support his weight, especially with me clinging to his back, breaking his wings as soon as they formed.

  “STOP IT!” Python growled. The Arrow of Dodona still bristled in his ruined eye. His face oozed green blood from a dozen places where I had kicked and punched him. “I—HATE—YOU!”

  Which just goes to show that even archenemies of four thousand years can still find something to agree on. With a great KA-PHROOOOOM! we hit water. Or not water…More like a roaring current of bone-chillingly cold gray acid.

  The River Styx swept us downstream.

  If you love category-five rapids on a river that can drown you, dissolve your skin, and corrode your sense of self all at the same time, I highly recommend a giant serpent cruise on the Styx.

  The river sapped my memor
ies, my emotions, my will. It pried open the burning cracks in my Lester Papadopoulos shell, making me feel raw and unmade like a molting dragonfly.

  Even Python was not immune. He fought more sluggishly. He flailed and clawed to reach the shore, but I elbowed him in his one good eye, then kicked him in the gullet—anything to keep him in the water.

  Not that I wanted to drown, but I knew Python would be much more dangerous on solid ground. Also, I did not like the idea of showing up on Hades’s doorstep in my present condition. I could expect no warm welcome there.

  I clung to Python’s face, using the Arrow of Dodona’s lifeless shaft like a rudder, steering the monster with tugs of torture. Python wailed and bellowed and thrashed. All around us, the Styx’s rapids seemed to laugh at me. You see? You broke a vow. And now I have you.

  I held on to my purpose. I remembered Meg McCaffrey’s last order: Come back to me, dummy. Her face remained clear in my mind. She had been abandoned so many times, used so cruelly. I would not be another cause of grief for her. I knew who I was. I was her dummy.

  Python and I tumbled through the gray torrent and then, without warning, shot off the edge of a waterfall. Again we fell, into even deeper oblivion.

  All supernatural rivers eventually empty into Tartarus—the realm where primordial terrors dissolve and re-form, where monsters germinate on the continent-size body of Tartarus himself, slumbering in his eternal dream state.

  We did not stop long enough for a selfie. We hurtled through the burning air and the spray of the abysmal waterfall as a kaleidoscope of images spun in and out of view: mountains of black bone like Titan scapulae; fleshy landscapes dotted with blisters that popped to release glistening newborn drakons and gorgons; plumes of fire and black smoke spewing upward in darkly festive explosions.

  We fell even further, into the Grand Canyon crevasse of this horror world—to the deepest point of the deepest realm of creation. Then we slammed into solid rock.

  Wow, Apollo, you marvel. How did you survive?

  I didn’t.

  By that point, I was no longer Lester Papadopoulos. I was not Apollo. I’m not sure who or what I was.

  I rose to my feet—I don’t know how—and found myself on a blade of obsidian, jutting over an endless churning sea of umber and violet. With a combination of horror and fascination, I realized I was standing on the brink of Chaos.

  Below us churned the essence of everything: the great cosmic soup from which all else had spawned, the place where life first began to form and think, Hey, I am separate from the rest of this soup! One step off this ledge, and I would rejoin that soup. I would be utterly gone.

  I examined my arms, which seemed to be in the process of disintegration. The flesh burned away like paper, leaving marbled lines of glowing golden light. I looked like one of those transparent anatomy dolls designed to illustrate the circulatory system. In the center of my chest, subtler than the best MRI could capture, was a haze of roiling violet energy. My soul? My death? Whatever it was, the glow was getting stronger, the purple tint spreading through my form, reacting to the nearness of Chaos, working furiously to unknit the golden lines that held me together. That probably wasn’t good.…

  Python lay beside me, his body also crumbling, his size drastically reduced. He was now only five times larger than me—like a prehistoric crocodile or constrictor, his shape a mixture of the two, his hide still rippling with half-formed heads, wings, and claws. Impaled in his blind left eye, the Arrow of Dodona was still perfectly intact, not a bit of fletching out of place.

  Python rose to his stubby feet. He stomped and howled. His body was coming apart, turning into chunks of reptile and light, and I must say I didn’t like the new disco-crocodile look. He stumbled toward me, hissing and half-blind. “Destroy you!”

  I wanted to tell him to chill out. Chaos was way ahead of him. It was rapidly tearing apart our essences. We no longer had to fight. We could just sit on this obsidian spire and quietly crumble together. Python could cuddle up against me, look out over the vast expanse of Chaos, mutter It’s beautiful, then evaporate into nothingness.

  But the monster had other plans. He charged, bit me around the waist, and barreled forward, intent on pushing me into oblivion. I couldn’t stop his momentum. I could only shuffle and twist so that when we hit the edge, Python tumbled over first. I clawed desperately at the rock, grabbing the rim as Python’s full weight almost yanked me in half.

  We hung there, suspended over the void by nothing but my trembling fingers, Python’s maw clamped around my waist.

  I could feel myself being torn in two, but I couldn’t let go. I channeled all my remaining strength into my hands—the way I used to do when I played the lyre or the ukulele, when I needed to express a truth so deep it could only be communicated in music: the death of Jason Grace, the trials of Apollo, the love and respect I had for my young friend Meg McCaffrey.

  Somehow, I managed to bend one leg. I kneed Python in the chin.

  He grunted. I kneed him again, harder. Python groaned. He tried to say something, but his mouth was full of Apollo. I struck him once more, so hard I felt his lower jaw crack. He lost his grip and fell.

  He had no final words—just a look of half-blind reptilian horror as he plummeted into Chaos and burst into a cloud of purple fizz.

  I hung from the ledge, too exhausted to feel relief.

  This was the end. Pulling myself up would be beyond my ability.

  Then I heard a voice that confirmed my worst fears.

  “I TOLD YOU SO.”

  I never doubted those would be the last words I heard.

  Next to me, the goddess Styx floated over the void. Her purple-and-black dress might have been a plume of Chaos itself. Her hair drifted like an ink cloud around her beautiful, angry face.

  I wasn’t surprised that she could exist here so effortlessly, in a place where other gods feared to go. Along with being the keeper of sacred oaths, Styx was the embodiment of the River of Hate. And as anyone can tell you, hatred is one of the most durable emotions, one of the last to fade into nonexistence.

  I told you so. Of course she had. Months ago at Camp Half-Blood, I had made a rash oath. I’d sworn on the River Styx not to play music or use a bow until I was a god again. I’d reneged on both counts, and the goddess Styx had been dogging my progress ever since, sprinkling tragedy and destruction wherever I went. Now I was about to pay the final price—I would be canceled.

  I waited for Styx to pry my fingers from the obsidian ledge, then give me a raspberry as I plummeted into the soupy, amorphous destruction below.

  To my surprise, Styx wasn’t done talking.

  “Have you learned?” she asked.

  If I hadn’t felt so weak, I might have laughed. I had learned, all right. I was still learning.

  At that moment, I realized I’d been thinking about Styx the wrong way all these months. She hadn’t put destruction in my path. I’d caused it myself. She hadn’t gotten me into trouble. I was the trouble. She had merely called out my recklessness.

  “Yes,” I said miserably. “Too late, but I get it now.”

  I expected no mercy. Certainly, I expected no help. My little finger slipped free of the ledge. Nine more until I fell.

  Styx’s dark eyes studied me. Her expression was not gloating, exactly. She looked more like a satisfied piano teacher whose six-year-old pupil had finally mastered “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”

  “Hold on to that, then,” she said.

  “What, the rock?” I murmured. “Or the lesson?”

  Styx made a sound that did not belong at the brink of Chaos: she chuckled with genuine amusement.

  “I suppose you’ll have to decide.” With that, she dissolved into smoke, which drifted upward toward the airy climes of Erebos.

  I wished I could fly like that. But, alas, even here, at the precipice of nonexistence, I was subject to gravity.

  At least I had vanquished Python.

  He would never rise again. I could
die knowing that my friends were safe. The Oracles were restored. The future was still open for business.

  So what if Apollo was erased from existence? Maybe Aphrodite was right. Eleven Olympians was plenty. Hephaestus could pitch this as a reality TV show: Eleven Is Enough. His streaming-service subscriptions would go through the roof.

  Why couldn’t I let go, then? I kept clinging to the edge with stubborn determination. My wayward pinky found its grip again. I had promised Meg I would return to her. I hadn’t sworn it as an oath, but that didn’t matter. If I said I would do it, I had to follow through.

  Perhaps that was what Styx had been trying to teach me: It wasn’t about how loudly you swore your oath, or what sacred words you used. It was about whether or not you meant it. And whether your promise was worth making.

  Hold on, I told myself. To both the rock and the lesson.

  My arms seemed to become more substantial. My body felt more real. The lines of light wove together until my form was a mesh of solid gold.

  Was it just a last hopeful hallucination, or did I actually pull myself up?

  My first surprise: I woke.

  People who have been dissolved into Chaos typically don’t do that.

  Second surprise: My sister Artemis was leaning over me, her smile as bright as the harvest moon. “Took you long enough,” she said.

  I rose with a sob and hugged her tight. All my pain was gone. I felt perfect. I felt…I almost thought, like myself again, but I wasn’t sure what that even meant anymore.

  I was a god again. For so long, my deepest desire had been to be restored. But instead of feeling elated, I wept on my sister’s shoulder. I felt like if I let go of Artemis, I would fall back into Chaos. Huge parts of my identity would shake loose, and I would never be able to find all the puzzle pieces.

  “Whoa, there.” She patted my back awkwardly. “Okay, little fella. You’re all right now. You made it.”

  She gently extricated herself from my arms. Not a cuddler, my sister, but she did allow me to hold her hands. Her stillness helped me stop trembling.