In the winter, with diamond-dust frost on her lashes and whiteness stretching out miles in all directions, the meadow feels like home. Her hooves creak though the snow and ice and her tail drags silent wounds through the ends of her shadow. The white, endless nothingness, makes her eyes ache when the snow reflects off it like fire. Thana blinks back the pain even as something inside her, that terrible something, screams at her to look.
And look.
She opens her eyes because she must, because all the white is calling home to each glacier sliding through her soul. A breeze whispers through her mane and she shivers when it cuts against the lighting marks running jagged beneath her gnarled horn. If she could smile at all, if she knew the way to curl her lips like a young girl looking a the stars, she would have smiled for the moaning wind reminding her that the leaves will sing again come the spring. But it's another one of the things Thana does not know (like the sound of unfinished poem) and so she only walks on, and on, and on through the snow with a wolfish hunger gnawing.
At first when she spots him he looks like a spot of life in the home wasteland. She remembers his crown of bone and the way each inch of him moved in the island jungle, all sinew and jewels and feathers. There had been this same ache in her chest to look at him then. It feels like the wind, like snow falling on pines, like spring is never going to come.
It feels like yearning, like she could pull the secret of how to not be a wanting thing from the spaces between his feathers.
He does not notice as she approaches, but no one ever does, not until she's lowing at them like a wolf at moonlight. Thana does not nicker at him, or low, or do anything but trace her nose across the lowest of his tines. “I remember you.” She breathes the words against a jewel, wondering briefly as it swings like her voice is the winter wind instead of language.
When she pulls away it is only to turn her head towards the gray sky, and the fat clouds dissolving into the bleakness. The glance lasts a moment, no more than another blink of her aching, burning eyes. Look, that terrible thing says, look. “I remember the flowers too.” Thana glances back at him and the frost on her lashes makes the edges of him shine like a moon.
Her tail never stops dragging wounds through the snow, and ice, and home.
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