We step up into it to find a single open room.  Spectators are gathered all around the sides, keeping the middle mostly clear.  A handful of people stand in the middle.  The floor is raised at the far end, and on it, is… “a throne?”

“The air whips around my face, and in it is the smell of the river.  Green, mossy, damp, and full of memories.”

“Mummies,” Apollon says softly, his face pressed up to the crack beside me.

“So here I am, trying to give you something that’s not mine. Trying to find some peculiar magic that turns memory into reality.”

Countdown to Jason and Lily

Less than a day, now!

“At the eastern tip of the island, they were playing pirates. I fell in with the freckled boy and his crew. We called him ‘Captain Blood’, and terrorized the eastern shore together for a couple of hours. It was the best kind of pretend—the kind in which I could completely lose myself to my imagination.”

“Our fury was so thick it dove into seething silence. We glared at each other, both of us breathing like bulls.”

“When he finally stopped laughing, there was a pause, and then a groan. I hadn’t known that a boy could make a noise like that—soft, wordless, but rolling inside me like thunder. My thoughts were ricocheting wildly inside my skull, but the first one I could make sense of was, Oh, shit. There was no way that any of this could end well for me.”