A/N: After A BILLION AND ONE chapters, it's done. Finally, right? Last chapter of a Golden Autumn. The idea at the end is the awesome idea of Hunter00, whose name is now AspiringAuthor00! Thanks so much!!!
On a more important note, ANNABETH HAS BEEN CAST! That's right, Alexandra Daddario. She's SO pretty! What I think's funny is that so many middle schoolers were thinking they were going to get the part because they had blond hair and gray eyes...and Alexandra is brunette and has blue eyes (hahaha me too). She's a really good actress, which is good cause Annabeth's not really a one-dimensional character.
Issue: she's 23. And Logan's 17. What a strange, strange world we live in.
Before I get started on a sequel, if y'all want a sequel, I think I'll post a chapter of my original fic. I don't know where to post it though. Whatever.
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It looked awful.
The camp wasn't so much a camp as it was a huge pile of ruins and fog. It looked like someone--like Kronos--had personally sucked all the color out of the landscape, leaving not a lot more than a few smoky gray acres of dirt and tree stumps. My eyes stung, which was mostly thanks to the dust, but if I was like Silena they would have been stinging from an oncoming onslaught of crying. Silena, as it was, was delicately wiping away tears already.
The Hunters, including Thalia, were unfazed. Why not? It wasn't like this was their home for almost ten years.
"This sucks," Travis Stoll piped up, breaking the silence.
Silena sniffled. "I can't even tell...where did the strawberry fields begin?"
I walked slowly to the right and knelt gently by a silvery pile of rubble. Brushing away a few gray pieces of wood and the cold wing of a stone owl, I pulled out a thin leather strip. Nine glazed ceramic beads and a once-shiny class ring were strung on the leather, their glassy coat marred by soot and dust.
Thalia nodded brusquely. "All right, then," she turned to Rose. "No use moping over how gross it is now. Bring out the energy, Rose!"
Ariel blinked as Rose pulled the cage of glowing stars from her pack. "Wait, we're using the stars? What for?"
Rose snorted, a little more rudely than necessary, but Thalia just smiled. "You'll see. Care to do the honors, Elizabeth?"
Elizabeth flew to the cage's side, barely containing her excitement until she saw me kneeling over my cabin's ruins. "Oh, don't be so sad, Annabeth," she said sympathetically. "It'll all be better soon."
Right. It'll all be better soon. Oh, except, even if we still fix the camp and everything, Luke's still trapped as Kronos without us being sure we can fix him. And we still are outnumbered probably a hundred to one. And the gods still need to quit being petty and stupid and get over their differences.
While I was numbering my depressing thoughts, Elizabeth gently unlatched the cage door. With a shimmering zinging noise, the five stars shot out in opposite directions, like they were happy to be free. But that wasn't what everyone was watching--instead, our eyes were locked on their trailing starbeams. They left these translucent, glittering trails behind them, and wherever they touched...
"It's reviving," Beckendorf said in awe. "Camp Half-Blood's coming back."
He was telling the truth. The stars were painting a trail of healthy green grass where there used to be ashy soot. All of the charred sticks had their blackened exteriors wiped away, and soon, dark green tendrils of strawberry plants curled around them again. When the stars swept across the cabins, it was even better. Bricks and hunks of stone floated from the ground, lifted by the Callistan energy, and their dust swept off until they shone better than before the attack. They reassembled and soon, all twelve cabins rose mightily from the ground in a perfect U.
Everything, from the stables to the forest to the Big House, glittered as good as new around us. And the stars had even added some extra stuff, like an orange grove by the arena and benches here and there. And a koi pond, which confused me just a little.
Susannah, my sister, whistled beside me. "Wow."
"No kidding!" the Stoll brothers shouted, snickering and racing each other to the brand new koi pond. Probably to poison all the fish.
Nobody except them went berserk, but everyone was almost glowing with happiness. After months without a home...it felt good to be back.
"Wish Chiron could be here," Percy said beside me.
I nodded. "I even miss Mr. D."
"I wouldn't go that far," he muttered, taking a seat on one of those new stone benches under two arching red, orange, and golden leafed maple trees. I joined him.
"A wedding," I said to myself, taking a peek at Percy. "What do you think?"
"Has Silena completely forbidden Las Vegas?"
"Completely."
"Well, I don't care," he shrugged. "Take your pick."
I smiled broadly. "It's on a beach."
"Awesome!" he laughed, pulling me onto his lap. The camp's magical borders were revived, so there weren't any more clouds. It was a cool, almost windy day, but the sun was warm against my face. I laid back on Percy's shoulders and closed my eyes.
"Don't move," I mumbled when he tried to stretch.
"Fine," he sighed close to my ear. After just laying there a few moments, he struck up a conversation again. "Remember when you had to teach me constellations?"
I yawned. "Cause you were uneducated and didn't know Orion from Ursa Major."
"I was looking at stars last night," he told me. "And started matching them to reasons I love you."
"Oh, so cute."
"I know. Like, that sparkly one is because she always gets me out of trouble, and the one to the left is how she looks when she's concentrating really hard in a book."
I snorted. "How long did that last?"
"Well, I was doing just great until I ran out of stars."
I finally opened my eyes, looking at him with huge eyes like one of Thalia's deer. "Really?"
"Well...yeah."
I sat up in his lap and brushed the back of my hand against his face. "That's a lot of stars."
"Yep."
"You're crazy."
"Um, so are you!"
I shook my head, leaning forward to kiss him. I felt something tingle behind my neck--a golden maple leaf, torn from the trees above us by a gentle gust of wind. At first I thought it was just because it was a kind of windy day, but I stopped kissing for a moment and looked around us. A sunset-colored shower of leaves was swirling around us in a perfect spiral, glittering in the afternoon sun.
"Aphrodite," I forced through gritted teeth. "I swear..."
"No, no, it's fine," Percy pulled me back into another kiss. "You can try to kill her later."
Yeah, right. That kissing session lasted long enough that "later" wasn't a strong enough word. But hey, don't think I'd totally let my guard down. It wasn't like I'd forgotten about all our problems just cause I was 115% in love with Percy Jackson. I'd just...forgotten about all our problems.
Whoops.
Well, there was always tomorrow. And tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after, and the day after that, our forces at Camp Half Blood would just be getting stronger, with some help from me and my partner in crime.
And by "partner in crime", I mean the only guy I've ever loved this much in my life.
THE END