The Mark Of Athena

She lands in a shallow canal and worries briefly that it could be part of Daedalus’s labyrinth. She ties a piece of string to her rope ladder to stay connected to it and follows the burning Mark as it appears. Dropping into a lower chamber, she finds herself in an altar room whose walls are painted with banquet scenes. As she moves toward the altar, she steps through a rib cage. Empty moments before, the floor is now covered with bones. Old weapons, scraps of clothing—and bones, the remains of demigods who came before Annabeth—line the distance to the altar. Two voices whisper disapprovingly about female heroes, the hole she had come through disappears, and her string is cut, trapping Annabeth in the chamber.

Twelve Roman ghosts appear. Across the room, another, older-looking ghost, the “pater” standing by the altar, explains that Annabeth has entered the cavern of Mithras and cannot be permitted to live after seeing their sacred mysteries (303, italics in original). She announces herself as a child of Athena in search of the Mark, and the ghosts confer in Latin. They tell her to prepare to die. Surveying the room, she reads the images and, to stall for time, convinces the ghosts that she is “the big mother,” but the pater understands why she is there. He reveals that “the weaver” has paid them to kill any of Athena’s children who attempt to pass through their shrine (306). Noticing wall cracks and the fragility of the room’s infrastructure, Annabeth tells the pater that she can destroy the chamber with one strike of her dagger and does so. As the room collapses, she falls into darkness.

Annabeth falls into a cavern, breaking her ankle. Surveying the territory and detecting no immediate dangers, she eats some ambrosia stashed in her backpack and retrieves her dagger. After rinsing her scrapes, she fashions a makeshift splint using objects she finds in the cavern, then fashions a crutch from a piece of a broken railing. The Mark appears over an open doorway, and Annabeth follows it into the corridor beyond. 

She finds herself in a tunnel. From inside the walls, she can hear what sounds like “a million tiny voices” whispering (312). As she moves forward, they seem to be coming closer, and cobwebs filling the tunnel become thicker. She arrives at a doorway to a larger chamber. Tapestry remnants hand on the walls. Across the room, the Mark of Athena burns over a door, but a fifty-foot chasm lies between Annabeth and the door. Annabeth feels alone and afraid but determined. Spiders swarm toward her through the corridor, but using the matches in her backpack, she lights a torch and throws it into the corridor, incinerating the spiders.

Annabeth sees a loom and uses the string in her backpack to begin weaving a net she uses to cross to the door on the opposite side, then burns the net and beams to slow the next wave of spiders, but they do not follow. She wonders if she has passed a test. She continues down the next corridor into a large cavern coated in spiderwebs, its walls covered in stunningly life-like tapestries. In front of a shrine stands a forty-foot statue of Athena, the Athena Parthenos. Annabeth notices the floor is covered with cracks large enough to swallow her foot.

Arachne appears, thrilled that the death of Annabeth, Athena’s most talented child, will cause her mother pain. Annabeth announces her intention to remove the statue. Arachne laughs as she prepares to feast on her.