Állaxe //HOO x m.oc\\ (ON HOLD)

26

Jace hated winter even more than before.

The snow kept getting stuck in his hair. His feet kept on sinking into the snow and getting into his ankles and then melting and making his ankles hurt. Gods, winter was terrible. His nose was runny and his steeks sung. His ears were pulsing with pain as the cold air kept on blowing at them.

Jason kept looking back behind them and Jace wondered if he'd seen anything following them. As they climbed the cliffs of the floating island, he kept looking back, and Jace didn't like not knowing why the guy was looking back.

The golden backpack of winds was strapped over Jason's shoulders and so far, they had been pretty calm and hadn't really given them any trouble which was good. The closer they got to Aeolus's palace, the more tired Jason seemed. The winds struggled, rumbling and bumping around. Jace fell in line to walk next to Jason at the back of the group.

"I can take the bag." He said and reached for the golden bag. Jason let him grab it without much struggle and Jace quietly slipped it onto his back. It was really heavy. Jace felt the straps of the bag pressing down on his shoulders— almost like it would cut through his skin. It was gold, and shouldn't gold be a hard and sharp material? The bag itself wasn't sharp but definitely hard and heavy.

The only one who seemed in a good mood was Coach Hedge. He kept bounding up the slippery staircase and trotting back down. "Come on, cupcakes! Only a few thousand more steps!" As they climbed, Leo, Jace and Piper left Jason in his silence. They guy wasn't happy and Jace didn't want any chance of the guy blowing up at them and accidentally shooting all of them off of the island. He didn't know Jason well enough to know how the boy got when angry.

Piper kept glancing back, worried, as if Jason were the one who'd almost died of hypothermia rather than she. Or maybe she was thinking about Thalia's idea. They'd told her what Thalia had said on the bridge—how they could save both her dad and Hera—but Jace didn't really understand how they were going to do that, and he wasn't sure if the possibility had made Piper more hopeful or just more anxious.

He wasn't sure what kind of sacrifices they'd have to make to save both of them, and he wasn't looking forward to it either. If they really could save both Piper's dad and Hera, there had to be a price to pay.

Finally they arrived at the top of the island. Bronze walls marched all the way around the fortress grounds, though Jace couldn't imagine who would possibly attack this place. Twenty Foot-high gates opened for them, and a road of polished purple stone led up to the main citadel—a white-columned rotunda, Greek style, like one of the monuments in Washington, D.C. —except for the cluster of satellite dishes and radio towers on the roof.

"That's bizarre," Piper said. "Guess you can't get cable on a floating island," Leo said.

"Dang, check this guy's front yard." The rotunda sat in the center of a quarter-mile circle. The grounds were amazing in a scary way. They were divided into four sections like big pizza slices, each one representing a season.

The section on their right was an icy waste, with bare trees and a frozen lake. Snowmen rolled across the landscape as the wind blew, and Jace didn't trust to go near them. Palace of the wind god? Aeolus could totally make alive snowman killer snowmen— or demigod killer snowmen.

To their left was an autumn park with gold and red trees. Mounds of leaves blew into patterns—gods, people, animals that ran after each other before scattering back into leaves. In the distance, it was gorgeous. Jace loved the redness of the autumn leaves. He loved the way they danced around in the breeze and formed different forms and shapes for them to look at.