A hundred different stories have told me about the sound of winter, how it's silent in a blanket of snow and blinding beneath the sunlight. And perhaps this is the first time, on the shoreline of peace instead of war, that I see the world for the bloated thing of liars that it is.
There are a million different sounds in the winter: snow falling on snow, ice crawling across the surface like roots, sunlight melting the snow in way that nothing alive can see. Perhaps to something else, something alive, it might seem like silence. But to me it seems only like the sound of cells, so loud that it is easier to call it silent instead of feeling like nothing more than another cell caught in a chamber of a heart. I do not mind the feeling of nothing.
Like a tiger with a belly full of blood, I languish in the silence bloated with sound and light refracted enough to be consuming. The snow looks like a sun beneath my hooves, another world in which there is only wolves, and unicorns, and predators with necks caught in their jaws. In that world I smile a look that unicorns and princesses should not know the shape of. And when I snarl it is just to fill silence with another heavy sound that the living will call nothing more than snow on snow, or ice on ice, or light on light.
Perhaps it's fitting then, that other unicorn that finds me in the winter quiet has wrath in the spiral of her horn and hunger in the corner of her eyes where another might hold a tear. The sight of her makes me smile with the echo of my aimless snarl still in the air between us like a broken bell-chime. I become not death tilting my eyes at a corpse but the bringer of it (the bearer of it as a sword is borne) watching the reaper hurry along in the wake of me. I know here is war in the curl of my neck as and in the angle of my horn as I tip it towards the point of the other unicorn's horn.
I am no shy wolf, no thing clinging to the shadows. I am as much as I am risen.
“Maybe I am dead and you have only forgotten how dead things should look.” My laughter rings in a way that seems more growl than amusement. Foras emerges from the shadows as nothing more than an winter wolf stained by the colors of the sea (or maybe it's the color of frostbite). His nose is colder than the air against my hock as he tucks his teeth away in the curtain of my tail because he is too hungry, too wanting, to hide his violence on his own.
When I step closer he follows, obedient as he had been on the killing-field (and just as full of rage as all dead-things are). “But perhaps, unicorn, you would like to tell me what else you think I should be.” And I wonder, as I keep my pointed teeth hidden in my pale lips, if she would taste like the forest in the winter or in the spring.
Is she root or rot, petal or vine?
Already I know, we know, that she will not taste like brine as I do.
@Isolt
