Rick Riordan Reflects on [SPOILERS] Tribute in Latest Percy Jackson Book (Exclusive)

Before the son of Poseidon gets a new lease on live-action life in December, Percy Jackson continued his novelized adventures this past September in Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Chalice of the Gods. This sixth installment in the original Percy Jackson franchise represents the first time that author Rick Riordan is writing from Percy’s first-person perspective since 2009, and it’s safe to say that a lot has changed since then. For Percy alone, he had his River Styx-induced invulnerability washed away, his mind erased and put back together again, an introduction to Camp Jupiter, a brief civil war with the Roman demigods, and a full-blown war with Mother Earth herself. 

Warning – The rest of this article contains spoilers from Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Chalice of the Gods.

That’s not to mention the chaos that went down in The Trials of Apollo, which Percy found himself entangled in on a couple of occasions. While Percy only made cameo appearances in those books, that pentalogy involved a number of franchise-altering events for the greater PJO universe, the biggest being the death of Jason Grace.

Rick Riordan Details Jason Grace Tribute in Percy Jackson 6

The son of Zeus’s spirit was felt in Percy Jackson’s latest adventure.

During his culminating battle with Old Age himself, Percy taps into a memory he had with Jason Grace to help him defeat the seemingly unbeatable entity. Percy recalled Jason sharing a dream he had about a future that never ending up coming to fruition, once which he grew old with his girlfriend and had a full family. That vision “made him feel like there was a way forward” when he needed it in a moment of crisis.

While Jason is canonically alive at the time of The Chalice of the Gods, he doesn’t make a physical appearance, but author Rick Riordan hopes that this memory serves as a moment of closure for the late demigod.

“I hope so. I think so,” Riordan told ComicBook.com. “Loss is part of life. It’s a terrible part of life, but it is something that we all go through. The loss of an important family member, an important character in the book is a way to make the stakes resonate that we really are playing for keeps here. As the old saying goes, none of us gets out of life alive. We’re all only here for a certain amount of time, and how we live is more important often than the amount of time that we have, because we don’t know how much time we have. We have to treat the time that we do have as important and to step up to whatever life throws at us and try to act like heroes.”

Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Chalice of the Gods is available in bookstores now.