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The land seemed to stretch on forever. Nico was thankful that Nemesis had given him some guidance, because if he hadn’t kept himself to the left of the River Phlegethon, he would’ve had no idea where to go. After hours of walking on the strange marshy ground, Nico was exhausted. Hungry. His feet ached, and his lungs burned from the sooty air.

Something else was happening to him, too.

The world around him … It seemed to be shifting. That was the only way he could describe it. He’d be staring into the distance, where mist clung to a dark expanse of forest, and for the briefest of moments the horizon would leap backwards like a mirage. The landscape before him took on sharper edges, with colours so terrifyingly intense that they hurt his eyes. The land itself seemed to be rising and falling, as if it were breathing. Or was Nico imagining that?

He had no one to compare notes with, so he kept walking. Theriver flowed smoothly past him, and if it hadn’t been made of pure fire, he would’ve wished for a boat – anything that could keep him moving towards the bottom of Tartarus and closer to his goal.

Sometimes he heard cries in the distance: definitely not human, full of rage and defiance. Perhaps they were creatures awakening in the darkness, crawling from their regeneration pits, ready to head back to the world above, or to join Gaia’s army. He remembered what Nemesis had said:All of them desirenothingbut retribution.

He forced himself to keep walking. The fate of the whole world depended on him finding and closing the Doors of Death.

As the forest grew closer, the temperature dropped. Nico zipped up his leather jacket and kept his hands in his pockets, but soon he was shivering. This shouldn’t have been possible with a flaming river literally right next to him, but somehow the closeness of the Phlegethon didn’t cut through the cold. If anything, it made things worse. A part of Nico’s mind begged him to jump in, to experience the warmth it would provide for a few seconds before he burned up.

‘Stop that,’ he told himself out loud. ‘Don’t let this place break you down.’

But itwas, wasn’t it? The deeper Nico went into Tartarus, the more it sanded off the edges of his sanity. He was now convinced he was full-on hallucinating. The ground beneath him was definitely breathing, albeit very slowly, and those dark regenerating blisters were now spread so thickly in his path that he had to squeeze between them in order to keep moving. He felt like a mite crawling across a giant’s stubbly face. Once, he heard the sickeningpopas a blister burst open somewhere nearby. He stopped, his sword glowing gently at his side, but whatever monster had emerged he heard it scampering away, heading upriver.

Nico’s throat was so dry that his tongue was stuck to the roof ofhis mouth. He had to reach in with a finger to prise it off, which only caused him to break out in a deep cough.

And meanwhile the River Phlegethon just kept rolling along.

Itmovedlike water. To Nico’s delirious mind, it had even started to look like water. But … it was fire. Right?

Nico searched his memories for information about the Phlegethon. For the first time in years, he thought about his old Mythomagic cards. Was there any lore in that game about what would happen if a mortal drank from the River of Fire?

He couldn’t remember. He couldn’t believe he was even considering it.

Then Tartarusshuddered. The ground shifted sideways, throwing Nico off his feet.

He tumbled to the bank of the Phlegethon, his hands digging into the fine sand. Ash and cinders swirled around him, making him cough up sour mucus. Huh. The Phlegm-a-thon, he thought. Bet I’m the first person to think of that.

Up close, the sound of the river was less like roaring fire and more like gentle babbling. It seemed to call out to him, as if begging him to drink.

No. No, he couldn’t. He hauled himself upright. When he turned again towards the dark forest, it wasmuchcloser, no more than a stone’s throw away. And in the green fog, between the twisted dark branches of the trees, thousands upon thousands of tiny, glowing eyes stared back at him.

He couldn’t have cried out if he wanted to. His throat was too parched. He blinked away the soot and, when he looked up again, the forest’s eyes had vanished. The ground beneath him, though, was still heaving restlessly. Like it was alive.

He froze.

Oh.

Oh, Hades.

He tried to gulp down his fear. He knelt and put his hand on the ground, his fingers sinking into the fine sand. Underneath was a layer of … not soil, exactly. Not marsh. More likehide.It all came to him suddenly – Tartarus was not just a place. Tartarus was a livingbeing– the sleeping body of a primordial god, and here Nico sat, right on top of its skin.

He sobbed, overwhelmed by how far he was from home. The thought made him cry harder because he wasn’t even sure where homewas. Camp Half-Blood? Camp Jupiter? At this point, he would take either one, because they were both better than this.

High above him, a dark shape soared through the poison clouds, heading north. Its wingspan had to be ten or fifteen metres. More creatures followed it, like colossal geese in formation, and Nico assumed they were going to join up with Gaia’s forces.

What had Nico beenthinking? Why had he come down here alone? No one even knew that he’d ventured into Tartarus, and even if someone did, they couldn’t help him. Tartarus wasn’t the kind of place you just strolled into.

He was going to die down here, wasn’t he? What happened to a demigod who died in Tartarus? Could they even reach the afterlife, or would they be trapped here forever, maybe drowning in one of those covered goo pits, unable to break free?

The ground rose again, shuddering, as if the entire landscape was tossing and turning in its sleep. Nico was so thirsty … He stared at the burning water. He wanted to drink so badly …

For some reason, his mind went back to Dante’sDivine Comedy, which his mom had read to him when he was younger. Being Italian, she’d insisted that Nico learn at least some Dante by heart. She’d read those poems to him at bedtime – stories about descendinginto the Inferno and clawing your way up again into the light of Purgatory. Almost like she’d been preparing him to know the truth about his father, or preparing him for this journey …

Somewhere in those cantos, there’d been a moment when Dante faced a wall of fire. His guide Virgil had convinced him to walk through it, despite his fears:Qui può esser tormento, ma non morte.Here you can be tormented, but not die.