“It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild. ”
The mountain has always felt a little like home to all the parts of me this world has turned deadly. I remember walking these paths once before and imagining by body as nothing more than a sword of mist. Sometimes I still dream of exploring the thick trees and the edges of the rock trails where the sky seemed more like a kiss than a death. The darkness here, with the wind cooing a song of winter in my ears, reminds me what it felt like to wish for the abyss of the long sleep.
It reminds me of how to felt to become this brutal thing the world demanded of me.
So now I walk the paths with my nose tossed into the almost-winter wind like a wolf. My hooves do not run fleet-footed like a doe between the rocks as if the world below is something I must avoid at all cost. And my heart does not scream at me anymore that death is snapping at my heels hungry and waiting and wanting. I am death now as much as I am a queen. I can taste it on my tongue. Steel, even here, steel.
The slope up hardly seems like a slope now that my lungs have tasted the ocean wind and my heart has felt the thrill of flying. Part of me thinks I should come here more, work myself into the mountain with the ancient rocks that have always knows how to hold the weight of a god. Somewhere a snow gryphon is calling a war-song and a snow leopard is answering back with another call of battle and blood. My own lips tingle with the urge to howl before Fable answers back as she flies lazily between the clouds. His own cry sounds like hello instead of a war and I wonder at how horrible we have become that we only answer the screams of survival with hello.
I laugh and the forest echoes with it just as it echoes with the calls of hungry animals preparing for winter.
When the trail turns sharply towards the edge I hardly pause-- even when rocks skitter down the edge as I walk and the wind starts to make smoke out of my breath when it whips against me. And even if I thought about things like caution now, the glimpse of blue waving in the wind like a flag (like another hello) would have been enough to drive the thought from me.
A smile runs across my lips and for once my teeth don't ache beneath it. The earth feels sharp and hard beneath my hooves when I move to him. I relish in it. Can he feel it in the way I rest my head across his back as if the death kissing at the edge of us is of no concern to me?
“Tell me what you've written.” And I know I should have asked it of him instead of this sharp sound of demand that's falling from me into the crease of his spine. But I don't take it back. Instead I let the sound of it, the sharpness of it, float away into the open air towards my city half-asleep below us.
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