She has never liked the springtime.
All around her, they celebrate – an end to the cold, to the bone-deep chill, to the pervasive darkness. Light and flowers and new beginning, all around, the earth damp and sprouting green in its fecundity, new life all around. New seasons.
Yet Annapurna had not grown up with seasons.
She had grown up with only the cold, on some wild mountaintop where she was the only thing to exist. It was an impossible existence, for most, but with a god for a father many impossible things were made possible. She was made for winter, or made of winter, depending on how one wanted to categorize her. Was she a horse, even, or something other, some entity bred for cold and emptiness?
She certainly looks like winter made manifest, bespeaking snow and ice. There’s a coldness to her, too, the air around her cooler. She often freezes what she touches, finding comfort in it, and frost crackles at her hooves as she moves. Ice, too, crackles over her skin, a thin layer of it that she wears like useless armor.
She likes the river, in the warmer months, because it is easy to change. She wades at its edge, ice spreading out like ripples. Her eyes, a sharp blue, look out. She isn’t sure what she’s looking for. She never is. She has not totally adapted, is still a stranger in a strange land, with ice around her ankles and frost on her breath, an anomaly in the springtime.
tell me that girl is not a song of burning