It had spread by degrees.
Slowly at first and then all at once.

It had spread like disease, exponentially. Until the ice did not live only in the cracks of his skin but in the skin itself. If there had been anyone around to ask him, he might have told him that it happened over the course of several days. He’d woken one morning to find his pasterns stiff, cold. And then, days later, his knees. And then.

And then, well.
Perhaps some part of him understands that this was the fate that had always awaited him. And so he does not ask from where it has come, this ice. He understands that it has always been a part of him. From the earliest days of that wretched darkness into which he and Este had been born into, it had festered. He’d felt it in his chest often, the strong heart stifled by it.

He hopes that soon the heart will turn to ice, too.
So that it will no longer ache for the things he has lost.
So that, perhaps, he might close his eyes and sleep.

Today he doesn’t try. Today he wanders, as he is wont to do. A homeless, aimless thing. And eventually he stills and he turns his nose to his own shoulder, testing. It comes away cold.

And in this there is some relief.
Relief to think that no one will touch him now.

How the sound of her voice would have thrilled him once!
How it would have flushed him with warmth!

Because it had been a lifeline, once, as he’d hugged the border of Hyaline and prepared to flee. Prepared to be cast out for what he was (or, in that case, what he was not, which was a shifter in a land of shifters). They’d been friends then, she’d insisted. And she’d called him Sela, allowed him to call her Maze, and they’d been friends.

As always, she brings with her the stench of each of her deaths, the sharp throb of the one he should have been able to prevent but did not. As always, he is reminded of all of the ways he failed her. But she’s smiling at him and she is Maze.

Mazikeen, he wants to say, because he doesn’t know that they are friends now. She addresses him as one, but when was the last time they saw each other? As the twins had played in the distance and she’d told him that she was happy? Had it been him who’d maintained the distance after that? Or had it been her? The family she’d built? The happiness she’d found?

“Maze,” he says, not because it feels natural but because it feels appropriate. And he glances down at his own shoulder again, the way it glints when the light catches it. “It would seem so,” he muses. He does not move to embrace her as an old friend might, he does not need to be reminded of the things he’d never had.

“How have you been?” he asks where she hadn’t.