[open] swallowed the sickness

[camellia]

she looks like sleep to the freezing

A current of electricity (adrenaline, certainly, effervescent as it pollutes her bloodstream) snakes through her as the sharp crack echoes, as his ice reaches and then retreats just as suddenly. She does not pursue him, she does not push, she only watches. 

She has never craved warmth, Camellia, not in the weather and certainly not in others. She can feel the blade in his voice through her frozen flesh, she can feel it as it cuts clean into the muscle. She smiles and there is something knowing in the glint of it.

(Is he warring with something, she wonders. Not with the cold, but with something deeper? She does not ask, only watches. Only watches and listens when he speaks and there is nothing warm in it but she does not shy from it. She has never craved warmth. It has always been the cold that has called to her.)

It is a foreign concept to her, the notion of being more than one thing. Because she has always been this: Winter. Even before it had become her. Before it had swallowed her whole. She cannot fathom the thought that there might be anything more than this.

There is a pulsing silence that follows while she considers him, head still canted. And then: an offering. A name, regardless of how grudgingly he seems to share it. And perhaps she should give him hers, as she is not completely without manners, but she does not. Not yet.

“Brigade,” she echoes and with the name she exhales a soft, blizzared breath. Snow swirls between them, melting before it ever reaches the forest floor. “What else are you, then?” She asks, as if to say, what else is there? What else matters?

— camellia