It covers him - covers him enough to make him feel almost dead, but he knows he truly isn’t. He is only numb with cold, muscles atrophying beneath frost and ice and snow that the slickness of his painted coat is not used to shielding him from. The snow itself isn’t what chills him - if anything it is the way the dampness of his skin seems to burn, reminding him of the volcano’s pulsing agitation he once viewed for himself, finding it ironically odd that a thing like cold could remind him so much of heat. The yearling attempts to keep moving within the uncomfortableness stiffness of his muscles, the particles and fractiles of snowflakes clinging to his eyelashes and whiskers, tumbling into the thick tangles of his growing mane.
He has come from the forest. He had spent long autumn nights in the darkness and the shadows of the shrouded trees, finding solace beneath their cold canopies and twisting, branched spines that shiver above him. But the fierceness of winter has driven him from the dampness of the sprouting pines, though it is not to home he returns to.
Home.
The boy thinks of the volcanic landscape, and though the memory of it is filled with warmth (with family, with adoration), it sours in his mouth. The remembrance is stained with red now - putrid and burnt in its color and smell, coughed up from the lungs of his father, splattered onto the thick, humid walls of his family’s grotto, smelling of death and decay and a cancerous thing that Warden could not get far enough away from.
His father had always been light to him - an eagle that soars in the sky above him, ever his guardian - but with the sickness that has crept into his father’s veins, Warden can only ever see darkness in his father’s eyes, and in every single memory there is a black stain that matches. So he cannot go home; it isn’t an option. Warden runs from the darkness.
Darkness would kill him, he knows.
It’s killing his father.
As the evening fades into deeper shadows, the expanse of frozen white now illuminated by sparkling stars and a harvest moon, the cerulean of his eyes glance upwards into the sky. His flesh cries out for the warmth of Tephra, but he remains standing in the snow, unable to even think about home (unable to admit that he most certainly is).
Suddenly, the young boy notices he is not alone.
His deep, intelligent eyes flicker to her (it appears he is not the only one who has been running), and he wonders how it is that both of them have found themselves standing beneath shadow and moon, shivering in the belly of winter’s breath. Perhaps she, like him, had no other options.
“Hello,” his voice comes without warning and the sound of it even startles him - the coldness of night has tightened his throat, creating a soft texture to the otherwise rich sound, even for a colt. The smoke of Tephra has aided him in such a thing, though soon it would wear off without the constant exposure. He feels as if he must say something else, should say something else, but falls as silent as the world around them.
-- warden
@[Glassheart]
