She is not accustomed to others. There’d been family, in snippets – her mother’s a dream, mostly, dark-eyed and dead, but her father had visited more often. She did not particularly like him, he left her uneasy, dark magic cloaking him like a miasma. Thus, given what little company she knew, she preferred solitude.
Of course, in such an inhospitable place, solitude had been the default, perhaps, rather than the preference – she’d had no choice in the matter, as no animals ventured high enough for her to convene with them, no birds touched the thin-air skies.
So maybe she had no choice in this so-called preference.
Regardless, she is made uneasy by so many horses - throngs of them, bodies terribly warm, crowding and talking and never made uncomfortable by the autumn sunlight, not the way she was. Some had glanced at her, strange thing that she was – ice-white, or blue, maybe, in certain lights, eyes definitely blue, blazing strange from her paled countenance.
She is still in the river when the words drift out, and she turns, cracking the thin film of ice that had gathered around her. She sees the stallion, wings tucked at his side, lips curled in a smile. She doesn’t return the smile, but she watches him, deciding if the words were meant for her.
She supposes they were – no one else is nearby.
“Hi,” she says. She’s never talked much, before she was bit by wanderlust – the wind had a way of stealing anything uttered, so she’d taken on silence like a preference, though perhaps that, like solitude, was never much of a choice to be made at all.
“I’m Annapurna,” she says. There had been other names suggested for her – she thinks mother had had one – but in the end, she’d taken the mountain’s name, finding it the most fitting of them all.
tell me that girl is not a song of burning