The earth shook in her wake. A hand caked in dirt shot out of the ground, clawing savagely in search of purchase. The gnarled fingers curled around the crag of a rock embedded into the soil and a second hand broke free like the undead escaping the confines of the grave.

Fingernails as hard as stone dug into the ground, tearing out bits of grass and dirt that merged with the goddess' flesh as they were pulled free, and left behind a trail of deep gouge marks. The soil sunk into a vacuum somewhere beneath the ground, leaving only a humanoid mass of earth to crawl free of the sinkhole.

Her hair was a mess of roots and blades of grass, her body--covered with a dress of moss--built from clumps of dirt and stone. Her eyes, however, remained closed.

Gaea, freed from her grave, let the slit in her face, where her mouth should have been, fall open. Her voice was heavy with grogginess and pitched with the deep tones of an alto. It echoed throughout the valley with a strength far greater than her size, bouncing off the mountains on either side of her. "My darlings... Mother needs your assistance. Come."

The mountains seemed to roar in reply, sending a tumult of rocks toward the goddess. The boulders rolled to a stop just before crashing into Gaea, but her mud-stained lips only twitched up in a smile to reveal polished pebble teeth.

Each stone loomed over the half asleep goddess at nearly fifteen feet in height. There were ten in total, evenly spaced around Gaea to form a perfect circle. One by one, the rocks crumbled to pieces. Dust and fragments of the stone whirled around the rocks, stacking them on top of one other as if animated by an invisible force. Gravity stepped aside, granting permission for the fragments to take on a humanoid figure whose arms hung unsecured without plummeting back to the ground.

Where ten boulders had been, ten stone giants stretched out their sleep-heavy limbs. Each beast was made up primarily of a type of rock, but the similarities ended there. While some had the cold countenance of granite and ice spikes in place of hair, others looked as though molten lava had just begun the cooling process and the heat radiating from their skin cast a mirage that seemed to bend the very air. Gaea's third born; mountain deities known as the ourea.

"The demigods..." Gaea said, "are interfering... they must be stopped... in case they fail to destroy each other... take out the camps. Destroy them."

Her words hung in the air, slowly seeping into the cracks in the monsters' rockhard skin like water trickling through the ground to wet a plant's parched roots. Then, in sync the creatures nodded and began their march to Camp Half Blood.

Satisfied, the sinkhole opened once again and swallowed up the goddess, returning Mother Earth to her domain.