While spring started from the bottom and worked its way up, autumn began in the sky and slowly descended to the soil, rendering the distant trees bare save for the towering, lurching conifers, and turning the once golden, pastel-green array of prairie grasses a dull copper.
Spring and autumn had similarities, as well, namely in their brevity. Passing by in a blink, a grasshopper jump, both were now a distant memory as winter and her wolven fangs sunk deep into Denoctian flesh.
It was mid-morning, and the sleepy brumal sun was not quite a third of the way up in the sky. Honey rays of light oozed haphazardly over the blanketed landscape, pressed against a silvery film of fog. Directly above, the sky was still dark, the late-falling stars hidden by thick steel clouds. Kas lifted her nose into the bitingly cold air and sniffed. There was no scent of snow on the wind-- for the moment, at least. Trapped in the palm of the Almas, the weather was as fickle as a feather in a thunderstorm.
Kas was cold, but she had been colder. The temperatures would rise with the rising sun. She plowed through snow deepened to her mid-knee, fetlocks heavy with chunks of ice. Her coat had grown long and shaggy, her white hair thickened and chaotic like some wild thing. She much preferred winter’s chill to a summer’s sweat (perhaps it had some to do with almost dying in a desert, once) and her Sideralis sabbatical was a refreshing chance to clear her mind, even though the tips of her ears were windburnt.
Slightly more miserable, with sore feet and a tail encrusted in snow, Oculos padded behind her, turning this way and that to make sure his larger companion took the brunt force of the wind. The two of them were on a bit of a hair-brained hunt looking for a flower that was not such a rarity during the warmer months but, during winter, became somewhat of a myth: Lily-of-the-Valley, a gentle, alabaster, bell-shaped bloom which could survive, nay, thrive, during the frozen deluge of snow and ice brought on by a Denoctian winter.
Oculos almost ran straight into the back of Kas’ hocks as she stopped to sniff at a likely patch of ground, but it was only the desiccated top of a dormant andropogon, crisp, brown, and frost-coated. Kas snorted cloud-breath into the snow and carried on, quite, determined, but more at peace than she had been for quite a while.
Bitter in his throat, Oculos swallowed a complaint with a swipe of his tongue. He was happy to see his best friend finally coming out of her funk-- even if she was leading them on this fools errand of looking for a white flower in a snow-covered field.
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