09-09-2021, 06:48 PM
She makes no effort to hide the surprise that flickers across her face.
This is the Isle?
She turns her face from him then and studies the beach as it stretches toward the horizon. Barren. The only snow that exists here is the snow she has brought with her, the snow that collects along her spine and melts at her feet. The only ice that exists is her skin.
There is hope yet.
And she shifts her cool focus back to him, Nashua, when he speaks again. The other side of the Isle, is that where she will find her beloved winter? Is that where the ice beckons? She nods her understanding but does not ask the questions that immediately come to mind.
Instead, she glances at all the bare, open space that yawns outward away from them and asks, “what happened to it?”
The landscape, the ice, everything she had come to find.
He invites her to stay but she does not react. (Had she expected those in the North to be so welcoming? How could she have known to expect anything at all? She had not grown up with stories. No, she had grown up chasing the cold. She had left Tephra as early as she could to escape the oppressive heat there. She had returned only briefly to visit with her sisters, only to steal away again just as quickly as she had come.)
It’s almost as if she has not heard him at all.
(And maybe she hasn’t, distracted as she is by the way she mourns for the winter that must have existed here on this beach sometime ago. It could not have always looked like this. And the thought of snow melting, of ice shrinking, it bruises her heart far worse than anything else ever could.)
Finally, she draws her attention back to him and exhales another wintry sigh. “No, I suspect not,” she says and tilts her head, the cracks in the ice growing the same glacial blue as her eyes when she studies him. “Not everyone is built for the cold.”
This is the Isle?
She turns her face from him then and studies the beach as it stretches toward the horizon. Barren. The only snow that exists here is the snow she has brought with her, the snow that collects along her spine and melts at her feet. The only ice that exists is her skin.
There is hope yet.
And she shifts her cool focus back to him, Nashua, when he speaks again. The other side of the Isle, is that where she will find her beloved winter? Is that where the ice beckons? She nods her understanding but does not ask the questions that immediately come to mind.
Instead, she glances at all the bare, open space that yawns outward away from them and asks, “what happened to it?”
The landscape, the ice, everything she had come to find.
He invites her to stay but she does not react. (Had she expected those in the North to be so welcoming? How could she have known to expect anything at all? She had not grown up with stories. No, she had grown up chasing the cold. She had left Tephra as early as she could to escape the oppressive heat there. She had returned only briefly to visit with her sisters, only to steal away again just as quickly as she had come.)
It’s almost as if she has not heard him at all.
(And maybe she hasn’t, distracted as she is by the way she mourns for the winter that must have existed here on this beach sometime ago. It could not have always looked like this. And the thought of snow melting, of ice shrinking, it bruises her heart far worse than anything else ever could.)
Finally, she draws her attention back to him and exhales another wintry sigh. “No, I suspect not,” she says and tilts her head, the cracks in the ice growing the same glacial blue as her eyes when she studies him. “Not everyone is built for the cold.”