Nicholas observed the changes in Percy Jackson with the detached focus of a scholar watching a controlled experiment yield perfect, predicted results. From the silent observatory of the Witness's pyramid, he tracked the demigod's grey, steely thread as it wove through the tapestry of Fate. It was no longer a vibrant, hopeful strand; it was a conductor, humming with a cold, transformative energy.
The dream-tutoring in the Shore of the Unconscious was having its intended effect. Percy's development was no longer the haughty, instinctual growth of a favored demigod. It was systematic, intellectual, and fiercely independent. Nicholas watched as Percy, in stolen moments at the camp beach or in isolated corners of the woods, practiced not just controlling water, but understanding its essence. He saw the boy sketch crude runic arrays in the sand, attempting to stabilize and focus his power based on half-remembered principles from his dream-library. They were clumsy, but the intent was there, a demigod mind seeking to command magic on its own terms, bypassing the need for divine favor.
Percy's journal, which Nicholas's awareness discreetly skimmed, was a revelation. Between notes on Greek mythology were scribbled equations for fluid dynamics, diagrams of ley-line intersections he shouldn't have known existed, and furious, analytical rants deconstructing the flaws in the gods' regime. The anger was still present, but it had been refined into a razor-sharp tool for critique and a relentless drive for self-mastery.
"He learns quickly," a voice murmured beside him. It was the Silent Cartographer, one of his Unknowns, his form a shifting map of possible paths. "Faster than the scribing anticipated. The anger… it focuses him."
"It's the perfect fuel," Nicholas replied, his gaze fixed on the thread. "Rage at injustice, when combined with knowledge, doesn't produce blind destruction. It produces revolution."
He watched as Percy's third summer at camp unfolded. The Labyrinth quest, the encounter with the Titan army stirring in its depths, these were no longer just adventures. Percy navigated them with a chilling, strategic calm. He used minor water spells to sense vibrations in stone, to create distracting fogs with precise control. He questioned Quintus's motives not with childish suspicion, but with a logical analysis of risk and benefit that unnerved even Annabeth. When he faced Antaeus in the arena, he didn't just fight; he exploited the ambient magic of the place, weakening the giant's connection to the earth with a targeted surge of pressurized authority that felt more like the trick of a master mage than a son of Poseidon's blast.
Each victory, each brush with the rising power of the Titans, didn't fill Percy with pride for Olympus. It confirmed his bleak thesis: the gods were absent landlords, and their tenants were revolting with an army the landlords themselves had imprisoned. The system was breaking, and Percy was no longer interested in fixing it for them. He was cataloging its weaknesses.
And deep below, in the abyssal prison of Tartarus, the Shaper felt the echoes. The Titan's rebellion was no longer a distant prophecy; it was a gathering quake. Kronos's essence, shattered and hateful, was coalescing with a speed that defied the old timelines. The collective mortal suffering of the war, the silent, seething betrayal of demigods like Luke and now the focused, icy wrath of Percy Jackson, it was all feeding the ancient rage.
The frozen mechanism of the Great Prophecy was groaning under internal pressure, not from Nicholas's direct manipulation, but from the natural consequences he had orchestrated.
On Olympus, the fear was curdling into panic. The Morai's loom showed conflicting, terrifying images: Percy's thread, grey and potent, weaving perilously close to the churning, golden chaos of the Titan's strands. The "hero" was looking less like a shield and more like a potential detonator. The scent of the prophecy, which they had believed safely contained, was in the air again, and it smelled of sea spray and cold fury.
They came for him not with a summons, but with an ambush.
Nicholas was sitting in the church on the moon, expecting their intrusion. When they came, it wasn't a polite dimensional fold. It was a violent rift, seared with lightning and the smell of ozone and salt. Through it stormed Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades, not in mortal guises, but in their full, terrifying divine aspects, compressed into the chamber but still radiating power that made the crystal bookshelves chime and crack.
Zeus was a contained storm, his beard crackling with miniature lightning, his eyes white-hot coals. Poseidon's form shifted like a raging tsunami barely held in human shape, the roar of the deep in his every breath. Hades was a pillar of absolute stillness and cold, the air around him leaching warmth and light, the whispers of the dead a silent chorus at his back.
"You," Zeus's voice was the first peal of the world-ending thunderclap. "Shaper. Trickster. Liar."
Nicholas did not rise from his seat of woven light. He merely set down the crystalline report he'd been holding. "An unexpected council," he said, his tone mild. "To what do I owe the… vigorous visit?"
"The prophecy!" Poseidon roared, a wave of phantom saltwater crashing against the room's inherent stability, held firm by the Warden's unseen influence. "It stirs! It gathers around my son! You swore it was frozen! You swore you had stopped it!"
Hades's voice was a sepulchral scrape. "You sold us a chain for our necks and called it a shield. The Titan's prison shakes. The thread of the half-blood aligns with the rising doom. Your bargain was ash."
Nicholas finally stood. His mortal avatar seemed to strain, then dissolve like mist. In its place, his true divine form began to manifest, threads of fate and magic and stars weaving upward, growing to meet their looming presence. The chamber expanded around them, the Luminous Court accommodating the sudden influx of titanic power.
"I sold you nothing," Nicholas's voice echoed now, layered with the sound of weaving looms and snapping threads. "I offered you a condition for a pause. A simple, clear, binary condition. Have the three Kings of Olympus had no more demigod children since our agreement?"
The silence was heavier than Hades's gloom.
Zeus's lightning flickered erratically. Poseidon's watery form stilled. Hades's shadow deepened.
"Mortal whims… ancient ties…" Zeus began, bluster struggling against guilty truth.
"SILENCE!" Nicholas's voice was not a shout. It was a command woven into the fabric of space itself. The very light in the room dimmed, pulsed, then blazed from the threads of his own form. He was fully manifested now, a kilometers-tall being of woven destiny and cosmic law, his eyes swirling galaxies of silver and gold. He loomed over the three Olympian kings, his size greater than theirs.
"You couldn't help yourselves, could you?" The laughter that boomed from him was not joyful. It was the sound of tectonic plates grating, of stars collapsing. It shook the foundations of the Court, causing the burning sea to slosh and the desert sands to storm. "The great gods, masters of the cosmos! Slaves to your own base impulses! I gave you the one key to save your crumbling dynasty: stop making soldiers for your enemy to recruit. And you, in your boundless arrogance and pathetic lack of control, couldn't even manage that!"
He leaned forward, and the weight of Fate itself pressed down on them. "You hid them. You stuffed them in time. You dampened their scent. You thought you could cheat the condition. You thought the rules were for mortals, not for you. Your pride, your reckless, selfish pride, has undone you."
Zeus gathered his lightning, a master bolt forming in his hand. "We will not be lectured by an upstart scribe! We will smite you and tear the truth from your realm!"
"Try," Nicholas said, and the word was a wall. The Warden's authority solidified the space around them into an unbreakable vice. The Cupbearer's essence flooded the chamber, not with vitality, but with the crushing weight of consequence. The Keeper's secrets became chains of immutable logic. The Witness showed them, in a fleeting, horrifying prismatic flash, the unbroken chain of their own actions leading to this exact moment.
"The prophecy isn't stirring; it is done! It is finalized," Nicholas declared, his voice now dropping into a terrible, rhythmic cadence. The threads of his form began to glow, etching words of light and shadow into the air itself, a spontaneous, devastating prophecy burning from his core authority over Fate. It was not the old prophecy. It was a new one, a verdict:
The Kings of Sky, Sea, and Stone,
In secret drawn, reaped what they'd sown.
Their hidden blood, in silence raised,
Shall see their fathers' glory razed.
Not by sixteen, but by wrath's cold fire,
And knowledge stolen from the spire,
The throne of gods shall split and crack,
On justice long-held, now turning back.
The son or daughter, with sight unsealed,
Shall wield the power they long concealed.
The web of fate, by pride undone,
Proclaims the fall of Sky and Sun.
Tartarus rises, not to trade the crown,
But to burn the golden city down.
The words hung in the air, shimmering with finality. They carried the weight of the war's dead, the bitterness of Medusa, the crushed life of a fly, and the cold, studying eyes of a boy by a campfire. It was a prophecy of cause and effect, of karma delivered not by mysterious Moirai, but by the incontrovertible laws of a universe sick of their chaos.
Zeus looked as if he'd been physically struck. The bolt in his hand guttered out. Poseidon seemed to shrink, the roar in him dying to a horrified whisper. Hades was a statue of grim acceptance.
Then his giant form began to collapse. Not fading, but compressing with impossible density. The light, the threads, the immense power, all pulled inward towards a single, infinitely small point. The Olympians recoiled as spacetime itself warped, screaming in protest.
"The game is over," Nicholas's voice echoed from the vanishing point, a final whisper that held the chill of the void between stars. "Your time of carelessness has reached its final, logical conclusion. Prepare for the audit."
With a soundless, light-absorbing implosion, the Shaper vanished. The chamber in the church was empty, save for three stunned gods and a prophecy burning in the air before them, a prophecy they had written with every hidden child, every broken promise, every act of casual divine cruelty. It was no longer a threat from outside. It was the bill, come due at last.
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