Chapter Text
The world is hazy. It is spinning and he is staring up at the clouds. He feels water vapor caressing his back as he falls from Olympus, the drops collecting in his hair then quickly being snatched by the wind. It is cold, he realizes. And I am going to die.
At first, he accepts this. This is what he had agreed to. Not entirely, but in the end this was what he had agreed to. To make a difference. To get his mother and all the other minor gods and goddesses up on Olympus. He had done his job well. He felt melancholy as he began to realize he would never be able to see the end result of it.
But what if he could? He began to think. His mind felt as though it was practically buzzing, and he could feel his heart beat deepen, and the shrapnel of blade stuck in his abdomen pulsed with pain in sync with his heart. If he was going to pray to anyone, he had to do it consciously.
"Boreas, Great God of the North Wind." Ethan thought it would be impossible to choke while falling, but he was proven wrong as a splatter of blood came from his lungs and escaped his body into the sky as he continued to plummet.
"I beg of you to save me. I will give anything you ask in return that is in my ability to give. Just let me live to see tomorrow." Ethan begged, and as the wind whistled in his ears, Ethan closed his eyes and drifted into a cold sleep. He was just barely awake when he felt his spine settle against something soft, unexpectedly.
+++
Ethan didn't really now how to describe his new situation. It was definitely preferred over being dead but not by much. Conscious thought rarely occurred to him, and the best way he could describe daily life was like this;
Open door. Close door. Don't let people in door. Stand.
He had agreed to become a soldier of ice in Boreas's palace in Quebec, and from there he got to witness many interesting things. Such as arguments among the family, angry mutters when someone stormed out of the throne room.
But it wasn't like Ethan remembered much. Something about the frost coating his semi-immortal skin felt odd. Wrong. Strange. Insert any other synonym for something that didn't feel right. It made his mind feel numb, and allowed him to move his limbs when he was instructed to do a task. He was rarely given orders aloud, most of them just from gut feelings but in his head.
He was content with this life. Or maybe content wasn't with the right connotation. Okay was a better word for it. He was fine doing this for however long he needed. The concept of bored never really struck him, and neither did the concept of time and its passing. Faces faded from memory over the course of however long he had been a soldier of frost. Names dwindled like candlelight in the evening, at first burning and searing their mark into the forefront of his mind and then beginning to fade and burn out as if never there in the first place.
It took another long while, but as the concept of time went on, he slowly began to forget what he was. For all tenses and purposes, he began to melt into the role he had been given. He didn't really remember things about why or when or how. But he was here. That was enough.
He never felt hunger or pain or fatigue. He was fine where he was. He didn't have to know who he was, or where he had come from or why he was here. He just knew that he was. And that was all.