[open] swallowed the sickness

[camellia]

she looks like sleep to the freezing

This is her siren song: the sudden cold at the heart of the forest, the groaning of tree limbs as they succumb to ice, the quiet protest of the earth as it freezes underfoot. Winter. Winter at the height of summer. (She is dizzy with the thrill of it, this creature crafted of the cold.)

(If not for the way the eyes glow pale, glacial blue, you might see a flicker of jealousy if you looked closely enough. But there is nothing at all to see there in that gaze save for the reflection of Winter, the heart of it. She does not own it, the cold, but it belongs to her all the same.)

And what does she expect to find there?
Someone like her, perhaps.
A thing of Winter.

And he is, almost certainly. She can see it in the frost that gathers heavy at his feet, the way it snakes across his skin.

The only perceptible difference between them is that her own skin has cracked beneath the pressure of it, revealing gaping, glowing crevasses. She wonders what he might look like fractured.

Snow gathers on her shoulders and her breath, too, plumes in the cold.

She studies him a long moment, stone silent and stock still. Not even her cold betrays her because he’s got cold of his own. 

And, finally, she sends a tendril of ice across the forest floor between them, pools it at his feet. 

“You’re a cold thing, too,” she muses, head tilted just so.

— camellia