For millions of years he sat undisturbed. 
He uplifted and he eroded.

He lived in a spine, with his brothers, as long as the Great Blank Continent itself, splitting it into two, jagged halves. On one side he cast a mighty rain shadow and the lands to his lee were drier than to his windward, where the prevailing winds brought bounties of moisture.

He made lands grow lush; he made lands grow sparse.
He did so quietly and undisturbed, for millions of years.

Industrious rodents, mottle-feathered birds and quick-footed goats made homes on his shoulders. Men, too, lived there. They settled down and built their villages—brightly coloured homes of timber and the things they could trade with his brothers’ people. They made their families and they tamed the animals—they dug picks into his flesh and carved weapons from the harvest.

He did not love them or hate them.
He simply was and they simply were.

‘Move, Hoarfrost.’
He had no legs then, of course, so when he was summoned he could only quake.
Awaken!’
He shook and threw great sheets of snow down his slopes, ripping ancient trees from their roots; he shook loose the animals from their homes—eggs from their nests and woolen cats from their caves. (Innocent casualties—he feels sorry for them, now that he can.) The villages were buried in his avalanches—men, women and children, all. He moaned and cracked as his bones, those made of stone and ice, fractured and pulled apart from each other.

The agony stretched on for days. Weeks, perhaps.
His brothers watched silently and uncaring;
his brothers’ people celebrated or wept (depending) when they heard the news.

From the rubble and the snow, he emerged, scarred and heavy-hearted. Fleshed and blooded—his skin was wet (and he could feel it, too, down to his bones… those made of collagen) and his hair (black and rough) was long and dirty. “Why?” he asked, with his new voice. It sounded many-tongued—like a thousand voices whispered into a northern wind, captured and caught in his throat. Low, vaporous and sad.

‘Your people were trouble makers, Hoarfrost. They had been warned… But, you were so a part of them that you had to go, too. This is the body I have given you to live in, now.’ It did not sound sorry, the Great God. But it was, in a way.

He nodded, slow and solemn. For the first and last time, he looked upon his brothers.

How mighty they were.
****

Hoarfrost moves slowly, with the contemplative nature of a mountain. With long, drawn-out strides; it is as if each hoof is made of stone and each join is tight with ice. He is large—much larger than any horse. His ears pass over some young trees; those older guards, however, still tower over his square and crude head. He wears a long coat, shaggy and unkempt—it hangs long from his belly; great feathers swish and sway as he lifts and sinks each foot into the snow; on the underside of his head, from chin to jaw, a beard tangles and grabs onto evergreen arms, taking some with him as he goes. His coat is like winter, except it is overgrown and it never sheds and on each strand of hair, frost glistens and bunches in crystals.

The Great God had made him fit for his brothers’ peaks, but Hoarfrost had found he could not bear to stay there.

His righteye is dark, peeking from the thick flow of his forelock. His left is bright and strange—frosted over and frozen through. It had been irreparably damaged by his agonies. It had felt cold, at first, burning his eyelid every time he closed it over. But he has gotten used to its weight and blankness.

The ground thumps dully with each step, and his girth rustles the trees, dropping their gift of snow onto the ground as he moves from them and into the open. Like so many around him, he wanders. He has wandered for a long time, across continents and bodies of water, stringing together long, comforting periods of isolation with terrible and beautiful encounters. He moves as far away as he can from his brothers—and from the wreckage of his body. He had lingered for a few days, cried (a strange sensation) and yelled, but in the end, he found he could not will himself back into stone. He could not will his peak to rise or his animals to stir.

He felt, for the first time, the anguish of nothing. Not like the eternal nothing before it, but nothing where once there was something. Something important and beloved. His heart beats, slow and loud in his chest. (It can be heard in the quietest moments, even by the naked ear.) It is broken, mortals might say, as a turn of speech.

Each breath he takes sounds labored—his lungs are true and hardy, but still they seems to be made of stone, so his breath is like the whistle of air over rocky peaks. Not laboured, but reminiscent. Reminiscent of eons; a life that had no definitive beginning, but perhaps for the moment when the earth cracked two of its plates together, sending him and his brother forth in the fault. Millions of years of growing from that tremendous force; millions more spent eroding in the wind that battered his side and rain that drew shapes and fissures in his skin.

So to them, it might sound labored. 
To him, it is what he has always sounded like.

It would be easy not to notice the boy when he comes, swift and nimble, like that things that dug burrows in the soil that sat at his lower altitudes. He is just getting used to his sight, limited as it is; the nuance of sound; and the way smells receive in his nostrils—pleasant, like the smell of water from icy heights, and odious, like the first time he encountered flesh left too long in the sun. (He thought, of course, of the animals. And it made him sad—that uncomfortable and clinging embrace.) 

Besides, he is so small and the giant is obstinate about shaking loose the numbness he is so used to. But as his heart beats, slow and steady—pumping warm blood to his cold skin—so does he begin to know the creature callings of contact—he begins to understand the herd nature of his new, brute impulses. His ears flick and swerve on his head, capturing bits of conversations—there are words he does not yet understand. Language was not given to him freely by the Great God, but it builds as he wanders.

It would also have been easy to ignore the boy, as many might have anyway. But Hoarfrost is not accustomed to the unkind way old ones might treat their young, as if they haven’t much to say. He shifts, carefully, mindful of the way his hooves move like an uprooted boulder by the boy’s slight outline. He groans as he does, his company would test the patience of any youngster. Unhurried and deliberate, he drops his great head and turns to look at him with his working eye.

“Hmmmmmmmm,” it seems to hang on his tongue forever, contemplative and rumbling from deep in his core, “hello, small one. Fox.” Each word draws out and in between his lung heave like great bellows; his voice is old and complicated. He considers his words—knows he was once something much mightier; something much less feeling. “I am, just an animal. Like you. Small one. I am Hoarfrost.” This, strangely enough, has always been his name, for mountains have names, too.

This little animal is wise.

Hoarfrost had been formation—mouthless, eyeless, senseless; numb to the nature of hearts and souls, for his was hard and cold and it did not beat but sat still for an aeon, unresponsive—far, far longer than he has been animal. “Hmmmmmmmmmm,” he rumbles, again, blinking slowly, head nodding heavy and somber, “you are right... small Fox,” the giant considers his words, having never spoken of his former self because it had taken so long to begin to gain a concept of that separation for himself; because he hasn’t the words to describe it accurately, but fumbles as ponderously as he walks the earth now. 

“Not always,” the woolly horse says, reverberant and thoughtful, “but… now. Yes.”

The frost giant watches the boy move, to him it is as quick as a hawk descending for prey. To him, everyone moves in hyper-speed, passing by and around him, synapses firing of like lightening licking earth—as he rambles up beaten paths, considering all manner of flower and woven nests as he goes. His animation and awareness are nascent, so much like a newborn.

“More… impressive, I say, to be small.” He has found being large to be a great burden—social and practical—thus far. “I knock things over,” he frowns, shaking his roughly hewn head. “They look at me,” this hurts the most. The giant was made by a cruel but fair God—he was made into a social creature, when he could have been made bear or lynx; he was made frightening and strange to his fellow equines.

But not this little animal. He is brave.

When Fox remarks on his frost, he tilts his head, having not ever considered the feature. It has been a constancy to him. He has always been cold. At least at his peak, which had been perpetually snow-capped for as long as it was high enough to freeze. “Frost. Winter,” he repeats, a childish kind of mimicking—the boy may not realize it, but he is teaching the giant. 

He has experienced warmer climates in his wanderings. The frost would melt and drip from his hair, unnoticed by him. But it always reformed in a snap on his frigid skin. It did not effect the low temperature of his core, the slow and deliberate beating of his heart; it did not thaw out his glimmering, heavy eyeball. “Always cold. Always winter... see?” he moves to reach out and touch the boy, unaccustomed to the social boundaries unspoken, but he is stilled in his path.

He blinks at the sudden, renegade snow, not knowing to connect the magic to the boy.
Not knowing magic at all, but for the one that toppled him to the ground.

“Hmmmmmmmmm. Strange.”