Chapter 12: Halcyon Takes Tea with the Oracle

The Oracle's cave smelled, as it always had, of incense and old paint and something beneath both of those things that had no name in any language Rachel had ever studied. She'd stopped noticing it years ago. You stopped noticing most things about being the Oracle after the first several hundred prophecies, which was either a sign of healthy adaptation or a sign of something she thought about less and less.

She was working on a large canvas when Halcyon arrived, which meant she heard him before she saw him — the particular acoustics of the cave made footsteps arrive early, a half-second before their owner, so that guests always seemed to materialize from their own sound. She'd told Annabeth once that it was like living inside a premonition. Annabeth had said that was probably the point.

"Ms. Dare." Halcyon's voice had the quality of an instrument that had been very carefully tuned. Not too warm. Not too formal. Pitched at exactly the register that suggested a man who had thought about how to enter a room and settled on something that would not be remembered as an entrance. "I hope I haven't interrupted anything irreplaceable."