That evening it began to snow with only a heartbeat’s warning- the temperature suddenly dropped just before the first flake fell. It came thick and fast, in fat flakes that clumped on eyelashes and whiskers. She watched it fall, all night and into the morning. It reminded her of the stars and mirrors and islands. It reminds her of herself because there are universes inside her, black and speckled with stars and comets and black holes.

All the white of winter is calling home to each glacier sliding through her soul. A breeze whispers through her mane and she shivers when it cuts against the shadow of her skin. She whispers a lament and her lungs feel ice cold and the air feels like not enough to fill those icy organs.

She can feel her heart beating inside of her chest, as steady as it is slow, and oh, it feels wrong, wrong, wrong. Each beat echoes inside of an empty chest, each thrum of her pulse in her ears makes her feel like she’s caught somewhere between waking up and falling asleep, always stuck in that endless in-between world where there is no light, and no soul, to cast shadows.

She breathes in. The air is so cold it scrapes down her throat like solid ice. Her lungs feel like so many flowers struggling to bloom, roots freezing in the ground, leaves turning to follow the sun, pores opening to the air.

Today the need to break up the frozen silence weighs on her heart like a stone. She finds him. Elliana looks small and bright next to him, like a flower, or a faraway star. But she is no spring blossom or summer night.

Elliana wants to ask him what he's waiting for. She wants to ask him how he can stand so still when every inch of her is screaming to run, run, run until she finds the end of winter and the beginnings of spring. She exhales and tries so very hard not to make it sound like a sigh, like she's pulling one of her sharp pieces loose. “What are you doing?” The words come out like a sigh anyway. Like the sigh on the winter wind hanging to a snow-coated pine. She should stop speaking to strangers because she is not her mother’s daughter, and yet she is, for all that she doesn’t know. She should stop speaking to strangers. But this is cold as ice and something in it sparks ice-fire in her blood. It feels like freedom.

find her with the flowers. the roses, the marigolds. find her telling stories that she’s never before told