i found the shoreline, casimira

[savior]

tried to kiss the emptiness,
lost the line between sky and sea

It is a strange and wonderful thing, winter.
He strays from his home in Tephra so rarely, but he makes his yearly trek to the meadow for the snow. The biting cold. The howling wind. These things are not of the earth, the cold and the wind and the snow. They are from some other force, but he loves them all the same.

With some concentration, he covers himself in scales to offer some resistance to the frigid temperature. (He was not built for these temperatures, you see, he was built instead for the wet heat of Tephra and precious little beyond that.) He ducks his head against the wind and moves, as always, with a secret kind of smile. There is no telling what it means.

He glances up only occasionally. Blinking his eyes against the cold, letting them run with hot tears. And he delights in it! The misery of it. The way his teeth chatter and his limbs tremble.

And he is on the verge of returning his gaze to the snow-packed earth underfoot when their eyes catch. And he is drawn to her by forces he does not immediately understand. But he goes willingly, driven perhaps by the hope that he might siphon some heat from her.

“It’s awfully cold, isn’t it?” he observes by way of greeting. And then his smile is no longer something secret, but something to be shared as he studies her face. “Do you like the cold?”

savior

@[Casimira]