that day even the sun was afraid of you and the weight you carried
Firion has perceived only pain for as long as he can remember. He has breathed it in and let it rearrange his very cells, turning him into something he had not been destined to be. It was only through luck and fate and sheer willpower that he had inflicted his own will upon that pain, molding it into something new instead. Making it a weapon he could wield. A shield he could leverage. A barrier he could erect.
Anything but the crushing vulnerability he knows it is at its heart.
A spear thrown true straight to the core of him.
But such things are beyond him now, his mind still not fully his own yet, his body distracted with the weight of snow on his back and the coming bitter cold. He focuses instead on the woman of winter by his side, the ice that builds on her skin and underneath it. “It’s all relative,” he agrees and with a breath of cold that plumes in front of his face, he disappears. He collapses on himself like a dying star, turning into the wind that begins to howl around her, the snow that begins to fall with more fervor.
Firion becomes the winter that she summons, that she embodies, that she commands.
He writes it on his cells and races past her before circling back and causing the snow to spiral up by her side. “I was both alone and not,” the wind whistles in her ear. He is everywhere at once. He is the snow beneath her. The water that freezes in the air. The clouds that look down upon her.
He is it all.
And he is not cold anymore, he thinks.
Perception indeed.
“I was alone as you are now,” this said only in her head, whispered between her thoughts.
so you saluted every ghost you've ever prayed to and then buried it where bones are buried
