i am the mace, the map, the fall and the high
The snow arrives first. As his bone-capped ribs heave, he eyes it with a banked curiosity, wondering just when the mist and fog had given way to snow. Then she arrives, the center of her own small blizzard. Snow begins to accumulate around them, clinging to the peaks of his glowing bone even as it does to her ice-encapsulated skin. He eyes her with an undisguised inquisitiveness, wondering at this creature of snow and ice who had taken such an unexpected interest in him.
For a while, she does not speak. The only evidence of their mutual lives are the sounds of their breathing and the plumes that rise from each exhale. Reave does not feel the need to fill the silence, instead watching her as she does him. As the large raptor does from Reave’s hip, predatory gaze fixed, the feathers of his ruff raised in interest.
When she finally does speak, her words almost startle him. For a time, he thought they might simply stare at one another in silence, until either one grew tired or they froze that way for eternity. ‘Does it hurt?’ she asks, and for a moment, the bone-clad stallion struggles to place her meaning. But when her nose touches the glowing bone, he shifts, dried blood cracking as he recalls his gruesome appearance.
A slow smile begins to grow on his lips then.
“Yes,” he replies with simple honesty, vibrant blue gaze fixed on her. “But so do many things in life.” He tilts his head then, eyeing her with a matching evaluation, almost impersonal in nature. “I could ask the same of you.”
reave
@[camellia]