Summer was not kind to her.
She was not made for warmth – had not even known such a thing as it, really, not until she’d begun her descent from the mountaintop. She knew nothing of seasons, and when she learned of them, she found them odd, too fast changing. She tried to stretch the winter out, keep the air around her cold, but summer fights its way in, the heat a viscous thing, covering her body like syrup.
It seems especially bad, today – humid, the air thick enough to drink, and oh, she despises it. She tries to beckon snow, but it melts almost immediately. She knows of her power – they’d told her – but has never had cause to use it, on the mountaintop it was always winter, there was no need to call forth snow and cold, such things were near-constant states.
It seems the power is weak, then, atrophied from disuse, and almost useless to her. She’ll have to practice – that, or flee back, which seems ever more tempting.
She comes from strange places, Annapurna – a vicious mountaintop, near impossible to summit. It had been her namesake, when her father brought her there, and left her not long after. She should hurt from this – she should be is, is what she should be – but the mountaintop had been home.
Why had she left, then?
Because she woke one day with wanderlust gnawing a hole inside her, a sudden and irrevocable desire to know a world that wasn’t white and cold.
In the summer’s haze, that desire still exists, which is why she has not turned back.
She finds the river first, a rushing thing, and steps into it. The water is cool, but not cold, though when she stands still and concentrates the water around her grows colder, a fringe of ice between herself and the water. This, too, doesn’t last, the ice turns translucent and melts away, carried by the warm current, and she sighs, and tries again to beckon forth the ice and cold.
tell me that girl is not a song of burning