Skybound Curse
Subtitle: Malik Roman and the Titan’s War

Book Summary:

Fourteen-year-old Malik Roman thought he finally had a home.

He survived monsters, quests, and a childhood spent bounced between a grandmother who loved him and a father who walked away. He found Camp Half-Blood, a divine mother in Artemis, and a cursed, talking blade named Frostbite that somehow understood him better than most people did. For one brief year, Malik had something like stability.

Then his father kicks him out.

Accused by a spiteful stepmother and stepsister of bullying and “corrupting the family,” Malik gets thrown onto a New York sidewalk with a duffel bag, a sword no one else can hear, and the lesson hammered in once and for all: people leave. Gods, mortals, it does not matter. The only constant is survival.

When Percy Jackson calls, asking for help with a rescue mission at Westover Hall, Malik says yes, not because he is a hero, but because being needed is better than being invisible. At a lonely bus stop with Frostbite humming at his side, Malik steps into a night that will reshape his faith in gods, friends, and himself.

At Westover Hall, Malik meets Thalia Grace for the first time: daughter of Zeus, stormy eyes, sharp tongue, and a habit of staring at him a little too long. He senses something wrong about Dr. Thorn, the creepy vice principal who watches them like prey. A school dance, a missing satyr named Grover, and a hallway that reeks of monster later, Malik’s worst instincts prove right. Dr. Thorn transforms into a manticore, Percy and Annabeth vanish over a cliff, and Malik gets torn open under a winter sky he does not yet know he is destined to hold.

The Hunters of Artemis arrive in a blur of silver and immortal arrows. Annabeth is captured. A girl named Bianca Di Angelo looks at Malik like he hung the stars. Her brother Nico idolizes him after a single conversation. Artemis, eternally twelve, calls Malik into her tent and reveals herself as his divine mother. In seconds his identity solidifies and fractures at once. He is a son of the moon, claimed by a goddess who never keeps mortal males, and suddenly the Olympians are watching him a little too closely.

Back at Camp Half-Blood, in the dead of winter, Malik’s new reality hits harder than any monster. The Hunters occupy Artemis’s cabin, which should be his home. He is forced into the overcrowded Hermes cabin again. Thalia bristles, Percy argues with authority, and Nico follows Malik like a shadow. Malik uses sarcasm and half-jokes to keep the distance he needs, even as he shows Nico the stables and lets the kid chase the idea of heroism.

Then the Oracle speaks.

A haunting prophecy offers six demigods a death-scented road west to rescue a goddess in chains. Zoë Nightshade and the Hunters get official blessing. Malik and Percy get told to stay behind. Malik has heard that order before: stay out, stay unseen, stay unwanted.

So he ignores it.

With Percy and the pegasus Blackjack, Malik breaks the rules and shadows the quest. What starts as disobedience turns into a war march. They trail Zoë, Thalia, Bianca, and Grover through museums and frozen highways, watching the Titan Lord Kronos move his pieces. Malik fights the Nemean Lion under a winter sky, claws raking, steam rising off his shoulders as strange, icy power flickers at his fingertips. He walks away with a lion-tooth necklace and a new, unsettling awareness: something cold lives under his skin, and it answers the moon.

As the quest drags them across America, Malik and his friends steal rides on god-driven sun buses, cling to the back of car haulers barreling through the night, and try to sleep with skeleton warriors closing in. In a ski town that smells of burnt coffee and fear, Grover collapses with a prophecy of wild blessings. A colossal boar explodes from the trees, tossing Malik and his friends like toys, until Grover’s words turn the beast from executioner into unwilling taxi.

The deeper west they go, the worse it gets.

At the Junkyard of the Gods, Frostbite’s usual jokes die into a terrified whisper. The air tastes wrong. Abandoned machines loom like sleeping giants. Malik pushes forward anyway, ignoring every instinct that tells him to leave. When Bianca climbs into a bronze colossus to save the others, Malik watches a girl who admired him vanish in a burst of ruined metal and smoke. He walks out with the rest of the group, but something vital is missing. Frostbite is quiet. Malik’s jokes feel brittle. Survival has a new cost: faces he cannot save.

Hoover Dam breaks him in a different way.

Lost in a maze of concrete, Malik meets Rachel Elizabeth Dare, a mortal girl who actually sees through the Mist. She flirts. He stumbles. Frostbite reminds him he already has Roxanne waiting back in New York, the girl who makes his chest hurt in a way monsters never could. Malik gives Rachel his number anyway, caught between guilt, curiosity, and the absurdity of flirting on a national landmark while armed skeletons hunt him.

Minutes later, he fights those skeletons with civilians all around, terrified of hurting anyone human. Pushed off the Dam, gravity drags him into somewhere between death and myth. He wakes in Arizona, burned by sun and stripped of everything except stubbornness. In blistering desert heat, Malik bargains with empty air, offers his last food in sacrifice, and begs Artemis for a sign that he is not alone.

No sign comes.

So he walks.

Half-delirious, Malik hustles his way into a plane ticket from a stranger who sees an “orphan trying to get home.” On the flight to San Francisco, he stares out the window, thinking of Roxanne’s laugh, Rachel’s smirk, Thalia’s gaze, and the endless, cold distance of the gods. The thought that haunts him is simple and brutal: does anyone truly stay?

San Francisco reunites him with Thalia, Percy, and the battered remnants of the quest. Night falls. Mount Tamalpais rises ahead like a verdict. At its peak waits Mount Othrys, the Titan stronghold, a dragon that even the gods respect, and Atlas, the General, the Titan who holds up the sky.

Everything that follows carves itself into Malik’s bones.

He fights a dragon whose scales deflect celestial bronze, dodging fire and poison while Zoë’s arrows sing through the air. Frostbite sheds its usual humor and becomes a cold, precise voice in his ears, the older soldier who once fell in love with a goddess of clouds and died for it. Together, they carve a path, not through destiny, but through scaled armor and choking fear.

Then Malik sees Artemis, forced under the weight of the sky, and everything narrows to a point.

He takes the burden from her.

For one shattering minute, Malik holds up the firmament. Every bone screams. Every nerve sears. Time dilates into an eternity of pressure and pain. His thoughts crack, flicking between his grandmother’s kitchen, his father’s rejection, Roxanne’s smile, and the terrible knowledge that if he slips, the world rips open. His skin goes numb and pale. Frost creeps along his arms. Streaks of gray burn themselves into his dark curls. Somewhere in the howling cosmic weight, Malik realizes this is what it means to be chosen by a goddess and hated by Titans: not glory, not adoration, only agony and survival.

When Percy takes the sky from him, Malik collapses, half-frozen, half-broken, unwilling to admit how close he came to letting go.

Atlas rises. Artemis fights. Zoë falls to a father’s poison, and there is no sarcasm left in Malik at all. He watches another girl die for duty and loyalty, and even Frostbite’s voice carries a funeral hush. The Titan’s curse is not just a prophecy or a weight of stone. It is the knowledge that the gods play a long game and their pieces bleed.

They escape in a patched-up World War I plane with Annabeth and her mortal father, racing back to New York skies and a throne room that smells of power and old grudges. On Olympus, Malik sees the gods in all their terrible glory. They debate whether he and his friends should live. A minor goddess nearly bargains him into an accidental marriage. Athena tests his mind and loyalty, forcing him to confront who he fights for and why. Malik thinks of Roxanne on that shining mountain, of Rachel flirting at the Dam, of Thalia’s near-touch, and knows exactly who still owns his heart.

Artemis, no longer beneath the sky but radiant and cold, acknowledges what her son has done. She thanks him with words rarer than drachma and enchants his lion-tooth necklace, giving it a voice and a will of its own so he will never walk alone again. The goddess of the Hunt cannot love him the way a mortal mother might, but in her distant, divine way, she chooses him.

Thalia joins the Hunters to escape the weight of a prophecy. Percy wrestles with the looming war. Nico learns of Bianca’s death and shatters, running headlong into a darkness none of them fully understand. Malik returns to a lonely New York apartment, freshly scarred, subtly colder, streaked with gray, and carrying the weight of a sky that has never fully left his shoulders.

Waiting on his table is a single letter.

The return address reads: Princess Andromeda.

Kronos is not finished. The war has only begun. Malik Roman has survived gods, Titans, and the sky itself, but survival is not the same as peace. As he stares at the letter, still smelling desert sun and Titan poison, Malik understands one thing with terrible clarity.

They are coming for him again.