She had been waiting, like winter waits for spring. Or, more accurately, like a warm body waits for the cold to kill it. There had been hope, just a spark of it, and she had been poised to let it die. She had been braced for that hope to flicker and fail, so much so that she had almost blown it out herself, just so she didn’t have to carry it around any longer.
But no, there it was, a scent on the wind. He had come.
Wayra closed her eyes, and she felt a shiver race down her spine. With that shiver the cold, the cold she no longer felt, came creeping in, so much so that for a moment she felt warm. She welcomed it, she welcomed anything if it meant she wasn’t numb.
Initially, the little blue girl had thought it was him. She had both expected and not expected him. This scent, however, was not a scenario she had prepared for. They were both him and not him. Family then. The understanding, the realization of family hit her like a brick, and Wayra closed her eyes. In her world of ice and snow there was occasionally light. There was the occasional flicker of something that wasn’t cold, of something alive. When the purple boy had said family something inside her had stirred, had opened its eyes in the dark. It hurt her, to stand near something so warm, but she had done so anyways, and her icy heart had cracked, bits had turned to slush.
Slowly, very slowly, she began to search for them. She moved through the Gate’s like a ghost, like a cold front that left ice crystals clinging to the grass. It didn’t take long to find them, for they blazed like fire. Wayra’s expression, usually frozen, cracked a little. Kirin was like that too, like fire. She watched them from a ways off, and sighed, a tiny, wistful sound, a sound she hadn’t made in a while, like something half forgotten and from a dream.
She meant to keep her distance. She didn’t want her cold to touch them. She wanted to let their fire burn. But, like a trapped moth, she drifted closer, and closer still. Finally, when she was close enough to see the whites of their eyes, Wayra tilted her head, like a mechanical puppet come alive. She opened her mouth to speak, and her breath was an icy rush to the spring night.
“Kirin’s family.” She said it no one in particular, and to all of them at once. That was all she said, but more important than the words she said, was the expression she wore.
She was smiling.
Wayra
the glass candles are burning