They flock to the darkest reaches of the Forest, those that fancy themselves as bottomless and twisted as his shadows. Some of them try to control it, his darkness, tugging at his shadows with obnoxious insistence of a petulant child. When his favored haunts grow too populated for his tastes, he moves on, and it is sometime near the witching hour that he sets out south. Ramsey slinks at his heels, head slung low. She grumbles deep in her chest – a creature of the underworld, she is not entirely comfortable with her topside existence, but she is tethered to him as he is to her. Snow sizzles beneath their brimstone feet as they move in companionable silence, the drifts growing deeper as they leave the close confines of the northern Forest, then more hard-packed as they reach the shores of the River.

The grey of winter dawn has given way to the dull hues of a winter afternoon by the time they’re free of the Forest. Here the water moves quietly, wending through the monochromatic landscape. It’s not cold enough to ice the free-flowing water over, but still his breath curls from his nostrils in a thin vapor. How he despises the cold of winter. His lanky, nearly skeletal frame never one to grow a proper coat, he pulls the darkness around him like a thick cloak. Ramsey laps her fill from the frigid waters and roams further south, disappearing out of immediate sight just as a distant shout fills the hollow silence. It’s too far away for him to discern the words, so he stares in the general direction with narrowed, pupil-less eyes.

It is only a minute or two later before the youth emerges from the shelter of the Forest, vivacious and carefree. She skitters to a halt, marveling at the water as it trips and tumbles over the rock-bed, blissfully ignorant of the nearly-invisible demon watching her. She glances up and around, excitement and zest for life dancing in her wide eyes. The urge to taint that zest, to drag it from her and sup on it like the warped creature he is, spurs him to drop his cloak of shadows when she’s looking in his direction. A wide smile tugs at dry lips, his eyes now an inviting blue, stark against his dull, black coat. “What is a little sprite like you doing out here on your own?” he asks with a crocodile smile. He knows she isn’t alone, of course, the shout earlier did not belong to her, but still he asks …