NOTE: This is a DIRECT SEQUEL to another fic of mine, Hold Tight and Pretend It's a Plan. If you plan on reading this and not being very confused on what is happening, I highly recommend first reading that and then possibly the one-shot it spawned, Luke Castellan and the Age of Heroes.

Happy reading, and hopefully I'll see you back here soon.

Disclaimer: I am not, and will never be, Rick Riordan. Sadly, this means I don't own Percy Jackson.

Warnings: Self-edited, off-screen character death.

"Once the storm is over, you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won't be the same person who walked in."

-Haruki Murakami

What kind of divergence had happened?

Questions were a strange, foreign thing to Clotho. The lack of answers was even stranger.

Her immortal brow furrowed infinitesimally at the sight before her. With nothing new to be Seen, Clotho continued the work she had begun since before the most recent Summer Solstice on Earth.

She pulled apart several threads from a single skein of what manifested as yarn, and as her two sisters watched over humanity, she inspected them for the choices of Perseus Jackson.

Hazel Levesque didn't sleep well in Camp Half-Blood.

Perhaps it was the conversations with Chiron, and the dire warnings he had given her if she let anything slip around another demigod.

Maybe, she often wondered, it came down the suspicious stares, ones she had seen before from different people. She could certainly predict word for word what was being said in the ominous whispers following her every day.

She was used to it by now. New Orleans, Alaska, Camp Jupiter, Camp Half-Blood—they were all the same in this regard.

But this was different. Most likely—and she tried not to think about this too much—because it was the result of generations of war and spilled blood pressing down on them. It was something ugly and dangerous that spoke to the Greek half-bloods around her as they conferred with each other in turn.

Outsider, they whispered. Thief. Conqueror. The enemy.

Hazel did not appreciate it.

Lachesis measured out the life of a god, its golden string shimmering and bright.

It was without end, as was expected. Gods did not simply die.

But it was found to be in their best interests to check, once every measured century or so. Gods may not die, but they were occasionally subject to a very final end.

She looked to a certain area of the godly life, as per her sister's words. After what she had seen concerning Olympus and the Earth Mother. . .

It was in their best interests.

But she only saw a single measured hour. A father watched his green-eyed son on a beach, and let a private smile of relief cross his lips before quietly returning to his realm. The scene was unremarkable and expected in every way.

After all, Poseidon, second son of Kronos, had never been much for following the intent of the Ancient Laws. Not where his children were concerned—a trait the Fates had watched him successfully pass on.

His latest offspring and the lives tied to him in a thick troublesome knot were all true half-bloods, wild and unpredictable things they were.

Luke Castellan tried to remember what Thalia looked like.

Remembering how long it had been since Othrys had stilled from the (blasted escape) shaking run of—their names. He knew their names—Perseus and his friend was a cause long since lost.

Considering he was hosting the Titan of Time, Luke decided with difficulty as he stood in front of a person—sister, such a treacherous, useful sister—he didn't recognize, one would think he would process the passage of it better. He felt as if he were burning away, battered by the sandstorm that was the mind of a Titan.

Luke fell in and out of it. Sometimes, he barely recalled his own name before everything tilted around him and became goldenburningbright, and he fancied he could almost predict the passage of the stars. But he still remembered Thalia Grace.

(Millennia passed, and immortals would feel it eventually, whether through the passage of favored mortals or the wear on their souls, but not him, never him—)

(They never spoke her name. Not that it would cross his mind more than once a century or so. Or if anyone knew whether she had faded—)

Time was tricky.

(—Quite.)

Sometimes he fought. Or something would bring him back, and Luke would claw for control. The taste of electricity, a familiar fighting style, black hair (Your descendants will be your undoing, Lord of Time—).

Her eyes were blue. Luke knew that. Electric blue that cut right through a person, inherited from her father (Oh—); they were unforgettable, but that didn't stop them from melting into a familiar gray that almost bled green.

(Them—)

He knew the second one sometimes. Solemn gray that was too old for her seven—twelve, fourteen, was that really her at sixteen?—years, blonde curls beneath a Yankees cap that survived everything—a cap that survivors of the eruption saw on top of black hair with a bronze sword, but Mt. Saint Helens had never been active in Luke's lifetime—alongside its owner, whom Luke had given a knife—that knife.

It was important. It mattered.

It mattered to everything.

(But why?)

But what was everything? As they lounged across a throne that Luke had no memory of being built—rebuilt—they did not remember.

(Your descendants will be your undoing, Lord of Time—)

Atropos gazed down on another thread and severed it. It had belonged to a child of Youth—executed under a Titan's hand for crimes not their own.

Death had not been intended. Originally. But now there had been change, if that was even the correct word for something so far-reaching it had broken laws that gods and immortals lacked a sufficient word for.

And where divergence went, consequences always followed. The Fates always saw this, and it was only now that the eldest of them could see a little more.

Atropos could see that there was more. Perhaps it would have chilled her, if she could know fear.

There would not be two parties to begin this familiar war.

No, she decided. There would be three.

Annabeth Chase downed another cup of black coffee as she practically glared at the incomplete maps in front of them.

No one had returned from the Sea of Monsters alive since Camp Half-Blood had been located elsewhere and their resources suffered for it—live account of a quest she was about to repeat or not. But something else worried her.

"He's not going to like it," she warned darkly. "Not when he's already convinced he's responsible for everything that's happening."

Chiron sighed. "Then he'll have to learn to share duties, if he could do so the last time. He will be needed here, and I couldn't justify otherwise."

Annabeth looked down at the maps in front of her again. She couldn't help but think of how Percy had explained in detail not only the faraway mythical dangers of Cyclopes and a sorceress, but the much closer dangers that would be found in returned murderers and a poisoned tree.

All of it, of course, eventually stopped, thanks to interference from him. He tried to downplay his past heroics when they spoke, but he could never fool her.

It's hard to share a job you know how to do by yourself, Annabeth never said to Chiron.

The Fates observed the soldier.

She watched the Lord of Time walk by, biting back a sneer at his arrogance. Instead, she saluted him. She did not bother to hide the cold look in her eyes.

With immortals and. . .others in charge, they were reckless in regards to the human world. Just last month the city of her birth, all the way in the Deep South, had suffered under one of their operations.

She watched their plans. She ingratiated herself further in the aftermath of Perseus Jackson and Hazel Levesque's escape. She made sure another demigod was executed in her stead for failing to stop it.

And she waited.

As he was late for school, Perseus Jackson tried not to think of his nightmares.

They weren't the usual ones either. These nightmares—if they were only that, with things that Percy didn't know—were the ones where he woke up feeling like he was burning from the inside out with cold and had a Titan's whisper in his ears.

It took a very specific nervous look in the kitchen to make all thoughts of Kronos flee his head. He knew that look; he hated it, considering how often it preceded some kind of death.

"What is it?" he demanded.

Hazel Levesque grimaced. "Chiron issued the quest for the Golden Fleece this morning. Without you."

A/N: Welcome to the sequel of my absolutely mad Percy Jackson & the Olympians rewrite, where canon has been killed in its sleep and I don't know what regrets are. Please keep all appendages within the bus at this time, don't feed the local monsters, and watch attentively for maximum ridiculousness as I gleefully take questions and conspiracy theories.

It's very good to be back, y'all.