Chapter 26 - A Dragon Hunter's Tale

"So, why Austria?" The Dragon Hunter posed the question, easily pulling herself up a rock face and over the edge, lithly maneuvering around the mild obstacles that they faced. She didn't have to watch to know that Artemis had done it with just as much ease if not more.

"I've learned that it's better to just roll with it at this point. He has a way of naturally just sensing this thing… I think." Artemis replied with a slight sigh.

Here they were, investigating with nothing of their own to go off of, simply the word of Percy.

Not that it mattered to either of them. His word was enough.

"I don't think I could have argued with him even if I wanted to." Artemis added quietly as the two of them continued to hike around the base of the mountain.

From the preliminary assessment that she'd made, Artemis had figured that the Pithos wasn't above the mid way line for the mountains, it was well under a thousand feet, luckily.

She didn't know who or what was shielding it thought as she could only faintly sense it and something like Pandora's Pithos would normally stick out to her like a sore thumb in the small mountainside villages that sat around the bases of the earthen skyscrapers.

"Yeah…" Kareah replied with a long slow annunciation, "About that." She began with another breath, "That's what he calls 'The Law of the Dragon God'. It was apparently something that he'd inherited from Azazel's soul, but obviously it's evolved now that it's his." Kareah explained, slowing her march down.

The Dragon Hunter took a moment to appreciate the situation that she was in. Artemis didn't cause a rolling pressure to fall over her, not like Percy did. It wasn't a harmful or malicious pressure, just something that naturally followed him around, but that wasn't the case with her.

She was soft, gentle, well natured, a facade of defencelessness that covered an unholy wrath of the ages that Kareah hoped she wouldn't accidentally unleash on herself.

She felt pretty safe, strong enough to hold her own against the Goddess if it came down to it, but things were starting to feel slightly different.

Kareah's awareness of everything about Artemis was starting to raise.

That scent… Cinnamon.

It was intoxicating. This must have been what Percy felt like whenever he was around her. She knew that it was similar to what she'd once felt for the Dragon God before he'd used that damned power on her and thrown her back down.

Things were different now thought…

For all of them.

Cinnamon. Pine. Nature.

Kareah's eyes grew wide in the light every time Artemis stepped too close. She wondered whether or not the Moon Dragon was experiencing anything like that for her?

No. Probably not, she only had eyes for the Dragon God.

Thump.

Thump.

Thump, thump, thump.

That was her heartbeat, the rhythm of the Goddess raised in the mere moments when they got closer. So she felt something as well, something that her heart literally could not deny, something that made her blood pump harder and faster.

"I've got to ask you something personal, something that I feel like I can do without going around your back anymore." Artemis broke the silence that had built up around them.

It had taken Kareah a good few moments but it suddenly struck her that Artemis didn't look the same as she did when they'd first walked through the entrance to the Dragon Sanctuary.

Back then the silver Goddess looked like a twelve year old compacted with all of the power of an exploding sun, but now…

She looked exactly like she did on the island after Lavalleri had laid her and Percy out, but she hadn't noticed quite what it was that had gotten Kareah's engine going, but now it was right in front of her.

She was, more or less, her own physical age, and of a similar height. She'd adjusted herself physically. What reason could she have had for that other than for physical intimacy?

Surely there was none, that was a sure sign that the Goddess was opening up. Of course, it was Percy that had started that process, gaining her trust and causing the change in appearance but to Kareah this fresh Dragon was fair game, she couldn't see any signs of a bond on her.

A bond…

Kareah thought hard about that for a moment, pretending to hold a stoic face in response to Artemis' upfront change of attitude.

There WAS a bond, but it wasn't like anything she'd ever seen before. It was established, a very confused and confusing thing, and it was dim, like there was something still missing, an element of the bond that just wasn't present.

"Who actually are you? We've got quite a way to go and there's no sense in stressing ourselves on this, we might as well take the time and rest up." Artemis reasoned, breaking Kareah out of her intent thoughts on what it could mean about the bond she'd sensed on the Moon Dragon.

"That's quite a question, isn't it?" Kareah asked in response, raising a brow and kicking a small stone down the path to their side, watching as it tumbled down into a stone filled ravine.

"Who were you before being cursed by the Pithos?" Artemis clarified, taking out a throwing knife and casually twirling it in her fingers as they walked. It wasn't a show of power or intimidation, she'd just found that it helped her to think and react, knowing that a weapon was within her reach.

"Ooh." Kareah looked down, breathing in as she did. That was a lot of old memories that she didn't really want to think about, but it was Artemis that was asking, did she mind for the sake of that?

"I was once from a very complicated upbringing. I'd grown up hearing about parts of the family that specialized in hunting specific things, branching out from the Old Family that were supposedly Demon Hunters from thousands of years ago, but we don't really know the truth about the Old Family anymore." Kareah sighed.

Artemis had found herself staring silently through wide eyes. Demon Hunters?

"And to make matters worse, the OTHER side of my family, MY other side of the family had… Tainted blood, the kind that the Old Family didn't like." Kareah explained, trying her best to keep her eyes on her boots as her feet rhythmically marched onwards.

"So, you're ascended from Demons and Demon Hunters?" Artemis asked, not holding any tones of disbelief in her words which struck Kareah as odd.

She knew that it wasn't something you could explain to an ordinary human but she half expected it to be a mission in of itself to try and explain that to a Goddess.

"Well…" Kareah began, "Allegedly. I've never seen a Demon and I've never experienced anything that would suggest I'm descended from one, whose to say any of it was real?" Kareah shrugged honestly. Artemis hadn't ever seen anyone disregard their heritage so easily, not something of that scale at least.

"Demons exist in capacity within every pantheon and religion around the world, they always have, they just take different forms and names." Artemis offered, walking along the high ridge that hugged the side of the mountain, gaining on Kareah's heels with each passing moment.

"Yeah…" Kareah mused, looking off into the distance, looking absent for a moment, "I guess there was probably some kind of merit to it. There was a training facility that was made by the Old Family, there was definitely a lot of money at some point because they had enough to get the new generations to study and train to abhorrent degrees." She sighed, clearly not having enjoyed that particular portion of her previous life.

"So then… How do you end up here?" Artemis asked, unsure of how point A had led to point B.

"It turned out that I'm, what's the scientific term? Fucking awesome, and the family wanted an old artefact that was said to be able to capture and house Demons, which turned out to be Pandora's god damn Box." Kareah cursed, sighing heavily as she did. She couldn't really hide the fact that she was still tired. She couldn't heal anywhere near as fast as Percy could, thought she was willing to wager that she was fairing better than him right now.

"Wait, I thought the Dragons had only been released after Percy had been cursed, but you must have been hit by it way before him, how does that one work out?" Artemis asked, narrowing her eyes as she focused on the sounds across the ravine at the side of the mountain, pebbles being displaced as a large bird landed gracelessly, flapping it's great wings as it looked around for some kind of food.

"The Dragons were always released, I was cursed by that box with one of the first cases of contained corruption, sticking with me for the long game it seems," Kareah told her, tapping her temples delicately, "But when Percy hit that box, man, he got the worst side of the deal, he was hit with everything as the box unleashed all of the corruption from the source, tainting all of the Dragons in the process. That was when our mission began." Kareah explained. There was a certain poetic sadness to it but she'd spent way too long living with the slowly growing corruption that she no longer felt bad about it.

"So Percy has got the corruption as well?" Artemis asked, letting her eyes fall to the floor as her brain started to race, thinking about the worst possible scenarios all at once, unable to filter her thoughts.

"No, that's the weird thing. He was hit with everything, and I mean everything, and yet he still managed to resist the corruption. He was at the very source of it all and managed to walk away as a God." Kareah tutted with a small smile playing across her lip. It was only ever going to be him.

"He's always far exceeded the expectations put on him, that's just the kind of person he is. How far are we, do you think?" Artemis asked, feeling the slight tug in her gut start to build into something greater as they crossed the terrain, coming closer and closer to what looked like a swirling mass of malevolence holding high above a series of grand peaks that caressed the sky.

"No idea, but I'm willing to bet that it's over there. I'd be seriously surprised if the Box was just… There, and not being guarded by whatever started this whole thing, so I reckon we'll probably receive some kind of exchange when we get close enough." Kareah reasoned, only glancing at Artemis slightly from the corner of her eye, again there was the thump of her heart whenever the Goddess got close enough.

"I've been meaning to ask you something, kind of personal." Kareah stopped in front of the silver Goddess, slowly turning on her heel with a hopeless look in her eyes.

"Before any of this began, before you forged a bond with him, what exactly was your relationship to him?" She asked, desperately trying to claw together any semblance of a picture of what she'd tried to compete against.

It wasn't long at all that she'd been feeling the thump in her heart when he was around, but it was strong, full of instinct and dangerously intoxicating.

"I was a Goddess, an Olympian, respected by most, feared by the rest. He was a Demigod, the son of Poseidon and one of the strongest even when he was younger. As time went on he finished his quests one after the other. There was a point where I had been imprisoned under the sky and he'd taken that weight off of my shoulders without hesitation." Artemis explained, slowly kicking pebbles as she overtook Kareah and continued to walk, seeing no reason that they should stand around to have this particular conversation.

Before Kareah could continue with her questioning, they were both brought to the edges of tension as their senses sent them both into combat mode. They both stopped, eyes wide like a predator as they closed in on the same thing.

Standing there, so far from where they were was the undeniable form of a human at the precipice of a plateau that wasn't much higher than they were.

There was nothing distinguishable about this body except for the fact that it was engulfed in purple and black vapours, the air above rolling in waves of heat as it stood there, burning placidly.

"What the hell is that?" Artemis asked, already having a horrible notion that she knew what it was just from the things she'd been able to piece together from Percy.

"Yeah…" Kareah began as she pulled her sword free, her grip turning her knuckles white, her heart thumping hard against her rib cage but for a different reason.

"THAT, is the real Defiler."

A/N: Yo. Sorry about the delay, I kinda 'fell' into a seriously heavy side project. I'm rewriting the first PJo story I ever wrote, The Hunter And The Guardian, which doesn't exist publicly anymore. So far I've written, edited, and refined 90K+ words and I'm only about halfway, so, that's taken most of my attention away, I could begin releasing it if enough people want to read it.