The Winds Of Heaven (Annabeth Chase x Male Reader)

42. A Storm Of Ice

Flying, Y/N had always felt powerful, in control—far above the trouble of a demigod's daily life, over the limits of his body. He watched over the ground, a hundred feet below, and couldn't wait to charge into battle.

He flew through icy straits, past blue fjords and cliffs with waterfalls spilling into the sea. A humpback whale breached and he kept gliding, glancing at a pack of seals on an iceberg.

For hours it went on before he zipped into a narrow bay. The water turned to the consistency of shaved ice in blue sticky syrup. He set down on a frozen turquoise slab.

A half a mile away stood Hubbard Glacier. Y/N couldn't quite process what he 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.

Y/N shivered. 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.

At first, gazing at the clouds above the glacier, he thought a storm was on its way. Then he realized he was hearing the sound of ice cracking and shifting. Millions of tons of ice breaking. 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 him—a BOOM as jarring as an aircraft hitting the sound barrier.

Could he get close to that thing? Was it truly where he would find Thanatos? It would be dangerous, of that he had no doubt. He expected a giant at the top. That didn't scare him. He felt anxious, though. This was it. He would fly up there, fight off whatever Gaea launched against him—hopefully—and make Thanatos get Ethan back. He had to.

Shaking off cold-induced torpor, Y/N willed the winds to protect him, if ever so slightly, against the cold. He extended his wings, and took off toward the glacier.

The air grew colder. The crackling of ice grew louder. As Y/N closed the distance, the glacier loomed so large that he almost got vertigo just trying to take it all in. The side was riddled with crevices and caves, spiked with jagged ridges like axe blades. Pieces were constantly crumbling off—some no larger than snowballs, some the size of houses.

When he was about fifty yards from the base, a thunderclap rattled his bones, and a curtain of ice that would have covered Camp Half-Blood calved away and fell toward him.

In a burst of speed, he zigzagged through the debris, twisting over chunks of ice and soaring up along the face of the glacier. Somehow he managed not to crash into one of the blocks of ice. It was like falling down a mountain in reverse.

Then it was over. He shot out at the top of a ridge of ice that loomed over the void. The sea was now three hundred feet below him.

Transforming back into a human, Y/N took a second to glance back as the roar of the avalanche echoed off the mountains.

Then he turned, and he saw it.

Ahead of him stood a frozen village—or rather, a military camp—like a giant-sized replica brought back from the Ancient times. The trenches bristled with ice spikes. The snow-brick ramparts glared blinding white. Hanging from the guard towers, banners of frozen blue cloth shimmered in the arctic sun.

There was no sign of life. The gates stood wide open. No sentries walked the walls. Still, Y/N had an uneasy feeling in his gut.

He took some tentative steps. The ice seemed stable, covered with a fine carpet of snow so that it wasn't too slippery.