10-02-2021, 08:16 PM
He does not speak and she does not either as he turns from her and she is prepared to trek across the mountains, through them if that is what it takes, but he delivers them to something else entirely.
A portal there on the beach and she can almost smell the bitter frost as they approach. It excites something in the cold, cold heart. The glacial blue cracks in her skin glow. (Is this love? Certainly it is allegiance, ice calling to ice, and she is of and for the cold, so it only makes sense that she should be pulled toward it as if by magnets.)
This is easier, certainly, than trudging across the range. And she does not hesitate, bats no eye at the portal because she is the daughter of a magician. She does not cower in the face of magic, power, she never has.
The cold hits her all at once, an arctic blast as they step through into a world of stark, angry white. And she smiles. And this smile is something altogether different than the small things she has offered him. It is unbridled mirth, a kind of breathless wonder, as the Winter welcomes her home. Oh, she could weep with the relief she feels as the wind whips past her, around her, through her.
She sucks in a sharp breath, reveling in the way the cold burns all the way down. She closes her pale eyes briefly, savoring the cold of the snow that collects along her spine.
When she opens her eyes again, she looks steadily at him and tilts her head. “Have you ever been homesick for a place you’ve never been to?” she asks, flakes catching in her frostbitten eyelashes.
A portal there on the beach and she can almost smell the bitter frost as they approach. It excites something in the cold, cold heart. The glacial blue cracks in her skin glow. (Is this love? Certainly it is allegiance, ice calling to ice, and she is of and for the cold, so it only makes sense that she should be pulled toward it as if by magnets.)
This is easier, certainly, than trudging across the range. And she does not hesitate, bats no eye at the portal because she is the daughter of a magician. She does not cower in the face of magic, power, she never has.
The cold hits her all at once, an arctic blast as they step through into a world of stark, angry white. And she smiles. And this smile is something altogether different than the small things she has offered him. It is unbridled mirth, a kind of breathless wonder, as the Winter welcomes her home. Oh, she could weep with the relief she feels as the wind whips past her, around her, through her.
She sucks in a sharp breath, reveling in the way the cold burns all the way down. She closes her pale eyes briefly, savoring the cold of the snow that collects along her spine.
When she opens her eyes again, she looks steadily at him and tilts her head. “Have you ever been homesick for a place you’ve never been to?” she asks, flakes catching in her frostbitten eyelashes.
@Nashua