It snowed again during the night while her small family had huddled close and comfortably in a shallow alcove carved into the side of small, knotted hill. She had slept without worry with her parents standing over her and their noses pressing the ghosts of warm breath into the blue of her skin. Even here, buried in the deepest parts of the forest, where trees grew tall and tangled and as wide around as she was long, winter had still found them. It settled white along the tops of bare branches, gathered in clumps where the wood knotted and the bark grew rough. It sagged in the pine trees, dragging their branches low enough for Luster to touch and wander beneath, disappearing in and out of the snowy landscape like a dusted blue ghost.

In the way that only a child knows how to be, she gentle and fearless, unconcerned as she finds and follows a stream that has somehow remained unfrozen. It doesn’t take long before it has led her to a small clearing with a hill on one side and thick brush and undergrowth that acts as a natural barrier on the other. Above she can see the steel grey belly of a sky still full of snow. It’s the kind of grey that is indecipherable. No sun, no clouds, no open sky beyond – and yet she knows it’s all still there, hidden somewhere beneath that cloak of flat silver.

There is a sound to her left and she turns, but this small den carved from winter and snow and the deep forest is still empty but for her. She waits for a long moment, curious and soft with small blue ears pressed forward through the tangles of her dark corn-silk forelock, but when nothing changes her attention is turned instead toward the stream. The water is as smooth as glass where it bubbles over the rocks and the thick wedges of ice on either side of it. She steps forward cautiously, carefully, dropping her lips to the surface without drinking, pulling away only when her skin began to hurt from the bitter frozenness. There was something about this scent, of water surrendered to winter, of frost and snow – of being able to smell cold that she had quickly grown to love.

But the sound comes again, the soft whoosh of disturbed snow and the rustle when it falls free from a bed of pine needles and the branch snaps back into place. She turns her back to the stream now, peering into the nearest shadows with quiet dark eyes set against the dirty blue of her dark face. Taking a step forward and cocking her head, she calls out in a quiet voice, a voice like bells and birdsong. “Hello,” a pause, a heartbeat, “is someone there?”