After decades underwater, Icicle Isle rose again from the sea, bringing her liquified atoms to the surface. Some froze in mounds of snow, others were layered in ice – but seasons are wont to change, and all too soon the thaw began.
Drip, drip, drip.
Slowly, her atoms find one another in small rivulets that stream into one.
They come together again.
She is remade – an ice sculpture in reverse.
When she blinks, the memories return in a flood, and suddenly all signs of spring vanish from the vicinity. She unleashes the winter that had been entombed within her divided atoms, atoms that had been suspended in the ocean for all this time. Catharsis. She had once been scared, and meek, and soft beneath the ice that armors her gold-and-white frame. Perhaps that had been who she was – but that was before.
She would never be weak again.
The storm of sleet and wind creates dark twists about her, blotting out the skies, dropping the temperatures dangerously low for any warm-blooded creature that might happen to be nearby. But her blood? It wasn’t warm. While she yet walked this earth, her blood would never be warm again.
Not only had she spent the past decades suspended in water – she had been suspended in time. Thus, she looks exactly as she did before she had melted away. Slowly, her bones recall movement – and she moves away from the shoreline of her resurrection.
She doesn’t look back.
Eventually, there came a meadow. Prior to her arrival, it had been in the throes of spring; but when she steps into the clearing, the dark winter storm follows in her wake. Had she not seen the form lying in a drift of snow, she might have killed him with the cold – but when she glances over, her light blue eyes glimpse the body; was he asleep? For a moment, she considers simply moving past him.
Was this fate?
Absent-minded curiosity drives her to approach the stilled figure. As she nears, she inhales sharply. Dad? But no – this stallion had wings, and Riagan was dead. Stupid. Her nostrils flare as she exhales slowly, her breath rising in a cloud of frost about her as she processes the shock of half-recognition. Closer.
She comes to stand over him. Was she imagining her father’s coloring on him? She lowers her dished head, closer still. Wasn’t that her mother’s starry brow? The blonde of his mane and tail are encrusted by ice. Had she done that? But the ice remains even when she lets the biting cold subside. She inspects him with crisp blue eyes a moment longer before pushing him, hard, in the ribs. “Who are you?” She demands.
But as his kind brown eyes flutter open, suddenly –
She knew.
“Leander?”
kora
vanished winterchild of riagan and rayelle
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