Chapter 21: Poseidon's Ocean Remembers Something Older Than Poseidon

The cyclops had a name.

Percy found this out in the second hour of sitting cross-legged in the grass in front of it, working through the archaic Greek syllable by syllable with the patience of someone who had spent two weeks watching Edmund treat impossible things as problems of sufficient methodology. The name was something like Bremos, though the cyclops indicated through a lowered brow and a specific tightening around its single pale eye that this was a compression — that the actual designation was longer and older and contained sounds that Percy's throat was not configured to produce. Percy wrote Bremos in his notebook with a parenthetical that said approximately and moved on.

What Bremos had said during the breach, the thing Percy had written down and brought to Edmund, had taken forty minutes to parse between the two of them and a Homeric lexicon from the camp library that turned out to be almost entirely useless for the relevant vocabulary. The word the cyclops had used — the one Edmund had identified as predating Homeric Greek by approximately three millennia — sat at the bottom of Percy's notebook page with two asterisks beside it, which was Percy's notation for things he was not going to think about until he absolutely had to.