i pretend i'm burning bright; spindlewinter

[spindlewinter]

come on in, we haven't slept for weeks;
drink some of this, it'll put colour in your cheeks

Winter is a sharp season – the sound the snow makes under her feet as they crush it, the vibrant scent of pine on the air, the stab of cold as the wind picks up. Winter is her namesake, her birthright, and she cuts a sharp outline against white ground and the black trees. This Winter is grey all over – darker towards her extremities, the muzzle and the feet and the tail, but never quite an absolute black or white. She is a shadow of either, a shade of both, as she explores the Forest for the first time.

If the colours paint a bleak picture, her mood is anything but. Beqanna was her parents’ home, she knows that much – and very little more. Her mother raised her elsewhere and told her snippets, short stories, brief, inconsequential memories; the rest is a quest of her own making, a source of excitement as she explores the land. Little does she know that her new home has been remade overnight, just days before she arrived. That particular brand of newness is lost on her, washed away by the broad-brush strokes of curiosity and revelation she brings with her.

Sounds carry easily in the sharp, cold woodlands and she hears a horse approaching from ahead. Bizarrely, Spindlewinter has always been more nervous in busy situations – the danger of meeting a lone stranger in an empty forest is somewhat lost on her. She winds through the trees with renewed interest, first getting a glimpse of her companion’s passing between trunks and then suddenly the whole picture.

Wings?

Wings are not something horses have, in her experience, and she can’t help but gasp. “Oh…!” she starts, wide-eyed with innocent amazement. “Oh, those are incredible. Were you born with them? Or… did they grow?” Questions chase through her head – are birds born with their wings, and if not, does it hurt when they sprout like an insect’s do? Or was this child not a horse at all but a legend walking the earth? She would ask them all, but manages to hold her tongue for fear of getting no answers at all.

Spindlewinter