and he keeps waking up
but it's not to the sound of birds
but it's not to the sound of birds
Winter’s bite is all too familiar to Grey. He wears it on his skin and in his blood like a half-dead man, frosted and blue. It brushes its fingers over his curves and nips fiercely at his heels, but it doesn’t bother him. He wanders down the quiet, early morning streets like a spectre. The few equines that pass by are cloaked in heavy fabrics to ward off the chill, but he bares the subtle sparkling crystals on his skin to the sun.
They all look at him like he is crazy.
Perhaps he is. Perhaps, whatever sanity he’d had was left on that mountain in the winter.
His hooves scrape against the stones underfoot like a waning cry, carried away by the wind. His breath does not make clouds in the hair before him, his sides rise and fall slowly. Oh, he might be alive, but some days he does not feel it.
Somewhere, he hears a coughing. Perhaps some child, come down with a cold. Grey begins to think that the only kind he could ever love is a god, because he would probably make anyone else, anyone mortal, sick. This is his curse in life, to have the capacity for love but be unable to give it away. So he shields his heart beneath layers of ice and frozen skin.
To any passerby he might just look like a spectre, but perhaps he truly is one.
@Lasairian quick starter!
