08-22-2021, 12:58 PM
she looks like sleep to the freezing
Winter precedes her.
This is how you will know she is near:
frost will gather on the broad side of the blades of grass and then the breath will turn to vapor as soon as it leaves your mouth, ice will collect on your eyelashes and in the tangles of your mane the closer she gets, but the snow flurries are the last to come because they stick close to her.
So this is how she arrives, safe from the heat that lingers well into autumn. Insulated by her personal winter, the thick layer of ice, though she bleeds glacial blue beneath the surface.
It has been quiet in the Isle. She has lived there an entire year now and has not met another soul since she arrived on the barren beach and blanketed it in a layer of snow. (It is a weakness, she thinks, to long for a permanent place to call home. But it must stem from the glow of Tephra, the contentment she had felt there with her sisters, their parents. Even if the heat had been unbearable.) It had been lonely, though, bitterly so.
And so she returns to the meadow and she brings the winter with her and feels no remorse for doing so. (Though her sisters had not loved the cold the same way she always has and she knows that others likely do not crave it as she does.)
But she does not apologize when she and her cold come to rest beside him, the nearest solitary creature. (It is possible that he could not want company, she thinks, but then why would he be here?)
“You seem to have come a long way,” she says, studying him with a single glacial blue eye. Can she smell it on him? Is it obvious in the way he holds himself? Her magic is confined to winter. She cannot read his mind, cannot delve into his memory. Perhaps she is merely observant.
This is how you will know she is near:
frost will gather on the broad side of the blades of grass and then the breath will turn to vapor as soon as it leaves your mouth, ice will collect on your eyelashes and in the tangles of your mane the closer she gets, but the snow flurries are the last to come because they stick close to her.
So this is how she arrives, safe from the heat that lingers well into autumn. Insulated by her personal winter, the thick layer of ice, though she bleeds glacial blue beneath the surface.
It has been quiet in the Isle. She has lived there an entire year now and has not met another soul since she arrived on the barren beach and blanketed it in a layer of snow. (It is a weakness, she thinks, to long for a permanent place to call home. But it must stem from the glow of Tephra, the contentment she had felt there with her sisters, their parents. Even if the heat had been unbearable.) It had been lonely, though, bitterly so.
And so she returns to the meadow and she brings the winter with her and feels no remorse for doing so. (Though her sisters had not loved the cold the same way she always has and she knows that others likely do not crave it as she does.)
But she does not apologize when she and her cold come to rest beside him, the nearest solitary creature. (It is possible that he could not want company, she thinks, but then why would he be here?)
“You seem to have come a long way,” she says, studying him with a single glacial blue eye. Can she smell it on him? Is it obvious in the way he holds himself? Her magic is confined to winter. She cannot read his mind, cannot delve into his memory. Perhaps she is merely observant.
camellia
@firion