hold high in the lowlands; woolf

[Kora]

Adorned in ice, her delicate head tilts ever so slightly as their gazes collide. She might have deflected his musings, but something in his voice speaks to a deeper part of her, stirring reveries of her own. “I was nothing,” she starts, her murmured words trickling like silvery liquid into the quiet dimness that surrounds them. “In the water, there is only wave, after wave, after wave. That’s all there ever was – all there could be.” Perhaps the sea hadn’t spit her out. Perhaps it had set her free. Something flickers in the cool glow of her blue eyes as the snow begins swirling upward, faintly surprised that it was done at another’s behest rather than her own. She angles her gaze and watches him turn the once-fallen flecks to snowdust, watches his eyes change to become an enhancement of the cosmos that is now suspended and shimmering about him. A vague sense is roused within her – though whether this was avarice or desire remains indeterminate, veiled by the sudden defiance that flares through icy veins. She will not be overshadowed. As he speaks, the suspended particles begin to pinwheel. Collections of frost twist and turn in seamless patterns to create orbits of white dust. He and she are the planets, unmoving even as the interplay of their conceptualization becomes a swirling vortex that encompasses them both. Surrounded by galaxies of ice, she meets his ever-changing eyes and exhales softly, lips parted. “You must know what it’s like, then?” Her breath is a smoky vapour that does not fade. Instead, it rises over their heads – a rippling mist that undulates above them, wavelike. “To be endless?” kora vanished winterchild of riagan and rayelle