❛ I had a feeling so peculiar, this pain
wouldn't be for 𝒆𝒗𝒆𝒓𝒎𝒐𝒓𝒆. ❜
⎯⎯ ⠀ㅤִㅤ ୨⠀♡⠀୧ ㅤִ⠀⠀ ⎯⎯
𝓗wang eunji, who also goes by iana, felt her world stop. it stopped the day she le...
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↳ chapter nineteen ₊˚.༄ [# i am not insane]
SILENCE FELL AMONG THE GROUP AS THEY CONTINUED THEIR JOURNEY UPWARD. Everyone could sense Jason's bad mood and collectively decided to leave him with his thoughts. Iana worried about him, wondering if she should try to comfort him or stay quiet. After all, he had lost his sister again.
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!"
Piper kept glancing back at Jason, worried, as if he were the one who'd almost died of hypothermia. Or maybe she was thinking about Thalia's idea. They'd told them about what Thalia had said on the bridge— how they could save both her dad and Hera— but Iana didn't really understand how they were going to do that, and she wasn't sure if the possibility had made Piper more hopeful or just more anxious.
Leo kept swatting his own legs, checking for signs that his pants were on fire. He wasn't steaming anymore, but the incident on the ice bridge had really troubled her. Leo could call her overbearing all he wanted but Iana didn't want to act like a near death situation wasn't something she should worry about.
Finally they arrived at the top of the island. Bronze walls marched all the way around the fortress grounds, though it was hard to imagine anyone who'd have the guts to 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, 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, so she wasn't sure if they were decorations or alive.
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, Iana could make out two more areas behind the rotunda. One looked like a green pasture with sheep made out of clouds. The last section was a desert where tumbleweeds scratched strange patterns in the sand like Greek letters, smiley faces, and a huge advertisement that read: watch aeolus nightly!
"One section for each of the four wind gods," Jason guessed. "Four cardinal directions."
"I'm loving that pasture." Coach Hedge licked his lips. "You guys mind—"
