No one notices at first.

Annabeth doesn’t make a scene when she leaves. No goodbye speeches, no dramatic storm. Just a quiet absence that settles in her bunk like dust. At camp, people assume she’s thinking somewhere. Planning. Cooling off.

Then her name stops echoing when Percy calls it. That’s when Grover feels it. Not a death. Not exactly. Just a distance—like a string pulled too far underground, humming wrong. Ancient. Contract-deep. Grover follows the feeling the way satyrs follow lost gods, and Percy follows Grover because he always does.

The stories line up too easily. A place beneath the world where people trade freedom for relief. Where work never ends and names slowly blur. A place you don’t stumble into by accident—you sign your way in.

Hadestown.

They don’t ask permission. They don’t tell Chiron. Percy packs light, jaw set, the kind of quiet he gets when he’s already decided he’s not leaving without someone. Grover’s hooves shake the closer they get, because this isn’t the Underworld he knows. This is older. Hungrier. Built on keeping what it’s given.

The entrance isn’t dramatic. Just a drop in the world where the air turns hot and rhythmic, where the ground hums like it’s breathing. Lamps glow low and gold. Shadows move with purpose. The sound of metal on metal never stops.

Percy steps in first. His shirt is damp with sweat already, sword heavy at his side. Grover follows, eyes wide, ears twitching at every sound. Workers pass them without looking up, faces blank, hands moving like they’ve forgotten why they started.

Percy scans the crowd, heart pounding—not with fear, but with that familiar, awful certainty.

She’s here.

Somewhere in the heat and the noise and the rules that don’t bend, Annabeth is moving in time with a place that was never meant to let her go. And Percy Jackson has just walked into it anyway.