Hadie's Arc

Chapter 5 of 6

Hadie stepped back through the portal with the crystal sample clutched in his hand. The medbay lights hit his eyes after the Underworld's darkness, and he blinked hard as he crossed to where Harold lay on the examination table. The grey had spread to Harold's neck now, creeping toward his jaw. Pegi looked up from the monitors, her expression tight with hope she was trying not to show. Ace stood near the door, arms crossed, watching Hadie with the same intensity he'd had since the photo fell out of Hadie's jacket. Hadie held up the crystal. "I found proof," he said. "The curse can be extracted." But proving something could be done wasn't the same as knowing how to do it. Hadie stood in the ancient library on the floating island, surrounded by scrolls his father had mentioned once—records of divine healers and ritual procedures from before the Olympians ruled. The purified crystal sat on the marble table between him and the others, catching the blue glow from the celestial panels overhead. "We need equipment that can isolate curse energy from living tissue," Hadie said, reading from a scroll that described a process used on minor gods centuries ago. "And someone who knows how to perform the extraction without killing the patient." Pegi scanned another scroll, her finger tracing the ancient text. "This says the healer needs to channel divine energy through a sanctified vessel while the patient is in a consecrated space. We don't have any of that." Ace tapped the table. "We don't even have a healer. Your father might know how this works, but he's stone." Hadie looked at the crystal again, then at the scrolls describing procedures none of them understood. He'd brought back proof that Harold could be saved, but the gap between knowing it was possible and actually doing it felt wider than the distance to the Underworld. He pulled out his communicator and ran through the scenarios one more time: contact the other Rangers teams across Greece and hope one of them had access to a healer, search for surviving gods who might remember the old ways, or try to reverse-engineer the process themselves with equipment they'd have to build from descriptions in thousand-year-old texts. Every option ended with Harold running out of time. Then Pegi stopped on a scroll near the bottom of the pile. "Wait. This one mentions a sanctuary—a place where Demeter performed healing rituals for mortals during the first Titan war. It says the ground itself was blessed to draw out corruption." Hadie looked at the description: an outdoor sanctuary overgrown with plants that had absorbed divine energy for millennia, creating a natural filter like the hydra's lair. "Where?" "Two miles from headquarters," Ace said, reading over Pegi's shoulder. "If it still exists." They found the sanctuary an hour later, hidden behind a wall of moss and flowering vines that had grown over the ancient columns. The stone structure pulsed with a faint green glow where the plants had filled every crack, drawing power from the earth below. Hadie stood at the entrance and understood what he had to do: bring Harold here, place the purified crystal as a template for what the curse should become, and trust that the sanctuary's natural filtering would do what none of them knew how to accomplish manually. It wasn't the controlled extraction described in the scrolls. It was improvisation built on hope and a pattern he'd seen work once before. Pegi met his eyes across the sanctuary floor. "You really think this will work?" Hadie looked at the crystal in his hand, then at the ancient sanctuary that had survived since mortals and gods last fought together. "I think we're proving that impossible things happen when we stop trying to do them alone," he said. "Let's bring Harold home."