THE DEAD MATURE; WITH THEM, MY HEART.
Since she can first remember, Bexley has never been so cold as this.
In Greer-Briar, clenched tight in the pale fist of Una’s magic, the weather never quite changed: seasons were marked not by a difference in whether but by which flowers bloomed. And she has not spent a winter outside of Solterra’s comfortable warm climate since she first arrived in Novus.
Now that is no longer an option.
As she trudges across the frosty plains, her heartbeat slows and slows and slows: her blood seems to crystallize: her skin shudders against the too-intense bite of frozen wind howling its way over the fields, and every breath comes spiraling from her icy mouth in a plume of white pseudo-smoke. Her muscles clench. The previously right, metallic gold of her coat has turned to a dusty yellow facsimile from weeks of under-nourishment, chill, grief. Her bright-white hair is snarled in a mat of curls,
And yet for the first time since Acton’s death, her eyes are bright. It might be cold - it might be panic - but it is alive, nonetheless.
Because of the way her head is tucked to her chest, she does not see him at first. And even when she looks up, batting thick lashes against the little flurries of new snow, Bexley finds it hard to believe that the shape she sees is a real person and not a mirage, made for her own wanton desire. His edges blur into the snow, fading away like so many ripples of water. The swirls of wind and ice make an even thicker veil. But - she narrows her eyes and a soft slough of red appears against the white, like a tear. In another spot thinly-lined like a lattice.
That is not natural.
Bexley screws her eyes up against the blinding snow and quickens her step. Puffs of ice go flying up from the places where her hooves scrape against the ground. Morning, she calls out -
Though it could be morning or midnight, and still she would feel this knot of grief in her chest.
