Bianca knew both biblical and mythical descriptions of hell, but the only thing that had ever come close to correct was the Tartarus she had seen through her dreams, Percy’s stories and Nico’s eyes. The worst nightmares she had ever had were memories for Nico, she realized. Even then, what she felt secondhand was only a fraction of Tartarus’ horror.
With every movement, a new blister would form and burst on her skin. She would drink fire to heal, and in mere minutes she would be bleeding again. Blessedly, she only saw the earthy façade of Tartarus – not the veins and breath she had dreamed through Nico.
Bianca’s eye, which had spent years sightless, reactivated as she moved deeper. Whilst in her left eye she saw broken glass, fire, and her own blood, her right eye was focused on a lush green pomegranate tree. She would have excused it as a pleasant hallucination if she hadn’t hated the fruit so much – and if the skyline in the distance of the vision wasn’t so bloody and familiar.
A god, or possibly Nico himself, had offered her a goal. With the tree in mind, the fire in her throat seemed to blister a little less.
…
She finds the tree at the apex of a cold, dark oasis near the heart of Tartarus itself. The vision in her broken eye shifts to match the other. Both visions show Bianca that neither the tree nor the figure underneath it had the warmth of something alive.
Bianca was frozen at a distance not only by the freezing cold, but by fear. Nico, who had aged years before she had ever been born again, whom she had left alone long before death took her away, Nico who was once her brother, lay as real as she had dreamed at the foot of the gnarly tree. He was no longer a dream, or a story hero, or an imaginary friend. He was her little brother and responsibility.
Bianca was an older sister again.
Every step she took was driven by a different memory: various birthdays where he’d either destroy the cake or eat it by himself, the time he cried for their dying pet before it was ever sick, the time – approximately several real months into their internment at the Lotus – where he asked her if it was okay to be there so long and he trusted her when she said yes.