The Tower of Nero (The Trials of Apollo #5) - Rick Riordan Page 0,119
the Meliai still in our wake. She showed me the trailer where Herophile the Sibyl now lived when she wasn’t working in town as a Tarot card reader and crystal healer. Meg boasted that the former Oracle was bringing in enough cash to cover all of Aeithales’s expenses.
Our dryad friends Joshua and Aloe Vera were pleased to see me. They told me about their work traveling across Southern California, planting new dryads and doing their best to heal the damage from the droughts and wildfires. They had lots of work still to do, but things were looking up. Aloe followed us around for a while, lathering Meg’s sunburnt shoulders with goo and chiding her.
Finally, we arrived in the house’s main room, where Luguselwa was putting together a rocking chair. She’d been fitted with new mechanical hands, compliments, Meg told me, of the Hephaestus cabin at Camp Half-Blood.
“Hey, cellmate!” Lu grinned. She made a hand gesture that was usually not associated with friendly greeting. Then she cursed and shook her metal fingers until they opened into a proper wave. “Sorry about that. These hands haven’t quite been programmed right. Got a few kinks to work out.”
She got up and wrapped me in a bear hug. Her fingers splayed and started tickling me between the shoulder blades, but I decided this must be unintentional, as Lu didn’t strike me as the tickle type.
“You look well,” I said, pulling away.
Lu laughed. “I’ve got my Sapling here. I’ve got a home. I’m a regular old mortal again, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
I stopped myself from saying Me, too. The thought made me melancholy. It would have been inconceivable to the old Apollo, but the idea of aging in this lovely desert tree house, watching Meg grow into a strong and powerful woman…that didn’t sound bad at all.
Lu must have picked up on my sadness. She gestured back to the rocking chair. “Well, I’ll let you two get on with the tour. Assembling this IKEA furniture is the toughest quest I’ve had in years.”
Meg took me out to the terrace as the afternoon sun sank behind the San Jacinto Mountains. My sun chariot would just now be heading toward home, the horses getting excited as they sensed the end of their journey. I would be joining them soon…reuniting with my other self, back at the Palace of the Sun.
I looked over at Meg, who was wiping a tear from her eye. “You can’t stay, I guess,” she said.
I took her hand. “Dear Meg.”
We remained like that in silence for a while, watching the demigods work in the gardens below.
“Meg, you’ve done so much for me. For all of us. I…I promised to reward you when I became a god again.”
She started to speak, but I interrupted.
“No, wait,” I said. “I understand that would cheapen our friendship. I cannot solve mortal problems with a snap of my fingers. I see that you don’t want a reward. But you will always be my friend. And if you ever need me, even just to talk, I will be here.”
Her mouth twitched. “Thanks. That’s good. But…actually, I would be okay with a unicorn.”
She had done it again. She could still surprise me. I laughed, snapped my fingers, and a unicorn appeared on the hillside below us, whinnying and scratching the ground with its gold-and-pearl hooves.
She threw her arms around me. “Thanks. You’ll still be my friend, too, right?”
“As long as you’ll still be mine,” I said.
She thought about this. “Yeah. I can do that.”
I don’t recall what else we talked about. The piano lessons I had promised her. Different varieties of succulents. The care and feeding of unicorns. I was just happy to be with her.
At last, as the sun went down, Meg seemed to understand it was time for me to leave.
“You’ll come back?” she asked.
“Always,” I promised. “The sun always comes back.”
So, dear reader, we have come to the end of my trials. You have followed me through five volumes of adventures and six months of pain and suffering. By my reckoning, you have read two hundred and ten of my haiku. Like Meg, you surely deserve a reward.
What would you accept? I am fresh out of unicorns. However, anytime you take aim and prepare to fire your best shot, anytime you seek to put your emotions into a song or poem, know that I am smiling on you. We are friends now.