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The war ground on, a monstrous, churning engine of suffering. Nicholas observed its progress with the focused, simmering intensity of a strategist watching a rival's most devastating weapon being forged before his eyes.
He sat within the silent observatory of the Witness's highest pyramid, the Prism scattering the light of time into a panorama of global agony. Each flickering scene, a city in flames, a trench filled with frozen dead, a child's hollow eyes in a bombed-out cellar, was a data point in a horrific equation.
For years, he had watched the faith generated. It was potent, yes, a dark and heady brew of terror, desperation, and fleeting hope that strengthened his enemies. But he began to sense something else within that torrent, a secondary current, a deeper vibration within the Fate Authority.
A raw, metaphysical sense of wrongness, of lives shattered not by chaotic chance or even mortal evil, but by the deliberate, callous design of higher powers. This feeling, this collective human recoil against a rigged universe, did not flow to the gods. It pooled. It festered. It infected the very target of its rage: Fate itself.
He felt it first as a subtle tension in the threads, a faint, discordant hum beneath the symphony of destiny. As the massacres escalated, as the scale of the engineered tragedy became truly planetary, the hum grew into a resonance, a deep, angry vibration that traveled along the strands of destiny.
This resonance was a weapon in potential, a spear of collective mortal outrage being slowly, unconsciously hammered out on the anvil of cosmic suffering. Its target was not a nation or an army, but the very authors of the suffering, the ones Fate held to be responsible, the gods of Olympus.
The Great Prophecy.
The realization clicked into place with the cold, final revelation. It wasn't a mysterious decree from the cosmos. It was a reaction. It was humanity's immune response to a parasitic pantheon, a psychic antibody made from the raw anger and forged in the fires of boundless grief. The Titans would rise because, on a level deeper than conscious thought, humanity willed for justice to scour away the current, cruel order.
Percy Jackson's eventual choice to spare Olympus was a quirk of character, a personal loyalty that overrode the prophetic imperative. The prophecy itself was not on Olympus's side; it was the universe's bill coming due.
And Nicholas saw it now, clearly in its arc, far earlier than the three withered sisters ever could. With his forty percent share of the authority, a share that included the creative, generative aspect of destiny he had woven himself, he perceived the nascent shape of the future.
He saw the cracks in the dungeon of Tartarus, stirred by the distant echoes of dying screams. He felt the ancient, slumbering hatred of the Titans begin to resonate with the modern, seething hatred of mankind. It was already too late to truly stop it; the momentum was built into the fabric of reality. In mere years, maybe a decade, even the Morai would be forced to see the monstrous prophecy taking form in their loom.
A slow, icy smile, devoid of any warmth, spread across Nicholas's immaterial face. Stop it? Why would he do that? This was not a crisis; it was the perfect storm. The old gods were so busy gorging themselves on the faith of war, they were blind to the backlash coiling in the substrate of their power. He would not halt it. He would hide it. He would nurture it.
His first act was one of concealment. Using his superior authority over Fate, he wove a cloak of benign static around the growing disturbance. To the Morai, the threads concerning the Titan imprisonment would continue to look dormant, stable, their inevitable fraying hidden beneath a layer of fabricated calm. They would see only what they expected to see, until the rupture was upon them.
His second act was one of deliberate amplification. He turned his attention to the Shore of the Unseen, to the silent sea where the souls of his slain believers emerged from the collective unconscious. These were not just soldiers; they were civilians, children, victims of the god-fueled war.
He gave them a purpose, a final mission. In the dreams of the living, the grieving families, the traumatized survivors, the angry youth across the globe, these souls would appear. They would not speak of heaven or the Atrium.
They would be conduits of pure, undiluted emotion. They would show flashes of their deaths, not to terrify, but to impart the crushing sense of futility, the burning question of why. They would whisper in their dreams, stoking the innate human rebellion against a cruel and uncaring destiny. They guided dreamers towards rage, not at their fellow man, but at the invisible architects of their misery.
Year after brutal year, he tended this hidden garden of wrath. The war provided endless fertilizer. The resonance in Fate grew stronger, darker, and more focused. It was no longer just a spear; it was a tidal wave of retribution being gathered in the metaphysical deep, fed by every bombed hospital, every executed prisoner, every act of divinely-sanctioned barbarism.
Finally, after years of this silent cultivation, the moment of saturation arrived. The collective human spirit, poisoned by unimaginable loss and directed by Nicholas's subtle guidance, had poured through the lens of his fate authority and facilitated their destruction. The energy was there, a critical mass of anti-Olympian sentiment woven directly into destiny.
Now was the time to give it form. To make it finally visible.
From his throne at the heart of the Luminous Court, Nicholas, the Shaper, reached out. He did not grasp the threads of the emerging prophecy; he became the loom. He channeled that vast, coiled power of humanity's betrayed hope, the anger, the despair, the desperate need for the slate to be wiped clean, and he focused it.
He gave the inchoate resonance a voice, a specific, chilling cadence. He condensed three years of hidden work and centuries of latent resentment into a set of immutable lines, a decree written not in stars, but in the screaming hearts of a billion people.
He forged The Great Prophecy.
It snapped into existence within the realm of Fate with the force of a divine law. It was no longer a vague tendency or a possible future; it was a certainty, a locked event now integrated into the timeline. The words themselves were secondary, a poetic container for the inevitable truth: the Titans would rise. Olympus would fall. A half-blood of the eldest gods would reach sixteen against all odds and make a choice that would preserve or raze the pantheon.
If Nicholas didn't exist, the Olympians might have been able to prevent or lessen the impact of the inevitable prophecy, and perhaps that was what they did to survive it in the novel, but now that was no longer possible, he made the prophecy much more severe.
The final, masterful touch was the masking. He left the prophecy visible; it was too powerful to fully hide now, but he wrapped its origins in obscurity. To any divine scrutiny, even that of the Fates, it would appear as a spontaneous convergence of human hatred, a situation that was still salvageable.
There would be no trace of his hand, no scent of the Atrium's manipulations. It would simply be, as if it had always been waiting, a storm they had foolishly believed would never come.
As the newly solidified prophecy vibrated through the foundations of every pantheon, Nicholas leaned back. The cold smile returned. The old gods were now trapped in a paradox of their own making.
The very war they stoked for power had birthed the instrument of their potential destruction. And they had no idea he held the conductor's baton for the coming symphony of chaos. Percy Jackson might still make his choice. But the context was forever altered, and his ultimate choice changed.
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