The Forbidden Daughter | PJO Book One

fourteen

THE UNDERWORLD

Imagine the largest concert crowd you've ever seen, a football field packed with a million fans.

Now imagine a field a million times that big, packed with people, and imagine the electricity has gone out, and there is no noise, no light, no beach ball bouncing around over the crowd.

Something tragic has happened backstage.

Whispering masses of people are just milling around in the shadows, waiting for a concert that will never start.

If you can picture that, you have a pretty good idea what the Fields of Asphodel looked like. The black grass had been trampled by aeons of dead feet.

A warm, moist wind blew like the breath of a swamp. Black trees -  poplars - grew in clumps here and there.

The cavern ceiling was so high above them it might've been a bank of storm clouds, except for the stalactites, which glowed faint grey and looked wickedly pointed.

Ariana tried not to imagine they'd fall on them at any moment, but dotted around the fields were several that had fallen and impaled themselves in the black grass.

She guessed the dead didn't have to worry about little hazards like being speared by stalactites the size of booster rockets.

Annabeth, Grover, Percy and Ariana tried to blend into the crowd, keeping an eye out for security ghouls. She couldn't help looking for familiar faces among the spirits of Asphodel.

The whole place made Ariana feel unsettled but it also made her feel stronger, she had a sense of belonging there.

Their faces shimmer. They all look slightly angry or confused. Sometimes some will come up to Ariana and speak, but they just waffled on and on in her ear.

The dead aren't scary. They're just sad. Ariana felt sorry for them but she knew there was nothing they could do to help them.

They crept along, following the line of new arrivals that snaked from the main gates towards a black-tented pavilion with a banner that read:

JUDGMENTS FOR ELYSIUM AND ETERNAL DAMNATION

Welcome, Newly Deceased!

Out the back of the tent came two much smaller lines. To the left, spirits flanked by security ghouls were marched down a rocky path towards the Fields of Punishment, which glowed and smoked in the distance, a vast, cracked wasteland with rivers of lava and minefields and miles of barbed wire separating the different torture areas.

Even from far away, Ariana could see people being chased by hellhounds, burned at the stake, forced to run naked through cactus patches or listen to opera music.

She could just make out a tiny hill, with the ant-size figure of Sisyphus struggling to move his boulder to the top.

And she saw worse tortures, too - things she didn't want to see. The line coming from the right side of the judgment pavilion was much better.

This one led down towards a small valley surrounded by walls - a gated community, which seemed to be the only happy part of the Underworld.

Beyond the security gate were neighbourhoods of beautiful houses from every time period in history, Roman villas and mediaeval castles and Victorian mansions.

Silver and gold flowers bloomed on the lawns. The grass rippled in rainbow colours. She could hear laughter and smell barbecue cooking.

Elysium.

In the middle of that valley was a glittering blue lake, with three small islands like a vacation resort in the Bahamas.

The Isles of the Blest, for people who had chosen to be reborn three times, and three times achieved Elysium. Immediately Ariana knew that's where she wanted to go when she died.