[private] hello darkling my old friend

[elio]

elio

some say I should learn to cry but I only learned how to fight
and I know everything must die but nothing fades like the light

Elio doesn't mind the winter. In fact, he is beginning to wonder if he should head back to Taiga, to see if the snowfall at the river is as beautiful among those tall, foggy trees. Beneath a canopy of a tight copse of trees he would lay down, curled as tightly as possible, and watch the little white flecks fall around him.

The water rushing is loud and unsettling, a whooshing noise that makes his ears flicker just a little bit nervously. Elio can't hear much over the din, and he doesn't like that his back is to the trees.

He is right to be suspicious, as he normally is. When the shadow snake spirals around his limb, he starts - but not like the first time he had encountered the creature. It is exactly like the darkness the boy in Loess had created. The boy that made Lio wonder if there had to be a reason for everything. He cranes his neck to peer at the serpent, at first not saying anything in response to its whispered greeting.

Snow, ice, and mud crunches beneath Elio as he turns away from the River to peer into the shadowed trees. He smiles a bit, not paying attention to the snake but wondering if it still lingers, then calls -

"Won't you come here, friend?" he calls, voice lilting in an almost flirtatious way. Elio found after his first encounter with Darkling that he liked the strange boy and his sudden whims.

He was unlike anything he had met before.

"And can you conjure something other than a snake?"

@[Darkling] elio is trying to say he loves bad boys and he wants darkling to put on a shadow leather jacket