Hazel
Riding Arion, Hazel felt powerful, unstoppable, absolutely in control—a perfect combination of horse and human. She wondered if this was what it was like to be a centaur.
The boat captains in Seward had warned her it was three hundred nautical miles to the Hubbard Glacier, a hard, dangerous journey, but Arion had no trouble. He raced over the water at the speed of sound, heating the air around them so that Hazel didn’t even feel the cold. On foot, she never would have felt so brave. On horseback, she couldn’t wait to charge into battle.
Frank and Percy didn’t look so happy. When Hazel glanced back, their teeth were clenched and their eyeballs were bouncing around in their heads. Frank’s cheeks jiggled from the g-force. Percy sat in back, hanging on tight, desperately trying not to slip off the horse’s rear and Hazel sincerely hoped that didn’t happen. The way Arion was moving, she might not notice he was gone for fifty or sixty miles.
They raced through icy straits, past blue fjords and cliffs with waterfalls spilling into the sea. Arion jumped over a breaching humpback whale and kept galloping, startling a pack of seals off an iceberg.
It seemed like only minutes before they zipped into a narrow bay. The water turned the consistency of shaved ice in blue sticky syrup. Arion came to a halt on a frozen turquoise slab.
A half a mile away stood Hubbard Glacier. Even Hazel, who’d seen glaciers before, couldn’t quite process what she was looking at. Purple snowcapped mountains marched off in either direction, with clouds floating around their middles like fluffy belts. In a massive valley between two of the largest peaks, a ragged wall of ice rose out of the sea, filling the entire gorge. The glacier was blue and white with streaks of black, so that it looked like a hedge of dirty snow left behind on a sidewalk after a snowplow had gone by, only four million times as large.
As soon as Arion stopped, Hazel felt the temperature drop. All that ice was sending off waves of cold, turning the bay into the world’s largest refrigerator. The eeriest thing was a sound like thunder that rolled across the water.
“What is that?” Frank gazed at the clouds above the glacier. “A storm?”
“No,” Hazel said. “Ice cracking and shifting. Millions of tons of ice.”
“You mean that thing is breaking up?” Frank asked.
As if on cue, a sheet of ice silently calved off the side of the glacier and crashed into the sea, spraying water and frozen shrapnel several stories high. A millisecond later the sound hit them—a BOOM almost as jarring as Arion hitting the sound barrier.
“We can’t get close to that thing!” Frank said.
“We have to,” Percy said. “The giant is at the top.”
Arion nickered.
“Jeez, Hazel,” Percy said, “tell your horse to watch his language.”
Hazel tried not to laugh. “What did he say?”
“With the cussing removed? He said he can get us to the top.”
Frank looked incredulous. “I thought the horse couldn’t fly!”
This time Arion whinnied so angrily, even Hazel could guess he was cursing.
“Dude,” Percy told the horse, “I’ve gotten suspended for saying less than that. Hazel, he promises you’ll see what he can do as soon as you give the word.”
“Um, hold on, then, you guys,” Hazel said nervously. “Arion, giddyup!”
Arion shot toward the glacier like a runaway rocket, barreling straight across the slush like he wanted to play chicken with the mountain of ice.
YOU ARE READING
Of Greeks And Romans (Leo Valdez x Reader)
Фанфик*Complete* 160,000+ words ~Book 2~ There was one thing I knew for fact. I was summoned to this world somehow, and now the only person that can send me back is the person who sent me here. And unfortunately, that just happened to be my worst enemy. N...
