[private] Waxing Gibbous

[Ehko]

This night was just like any other clear night on Icicle Isle. Perhaps it was a little bit colder than usual, with the rutting season soon passing and true winter on its way. Otherwise it was cold and strangely beautiful. The heavens were clear of any cloud cover, free and naked to show off their stars with a clarity unseen anywhere else in Beqanna. The northern lights floated through them like a trail of magical light, in colors only capable of being replicated - never reproduced. Far below them were the snowdrifts of the northern isle, and in their midst was a skinny, unkempt pegasus mare who stood beside a large ice sphere and sang to herself.

The melody was upbeat. Nothing like the actual lyrics, themselves dark and puzzling as a myth could be. Resonate and soothing, the notes floated on the frigid winds before dying out and then they stopped altogether when the song had finished. An eerie silence took their place.

The pegasus turned back to face the ice sphere, struggling to see past the tangled knots of her forelock in the wind, and that’s when she heard it: a cracking sound. The sound of ice fissuring. A threatening sound, dangerous to those who trekked the northern snowdrifts or the risky few who explored glaciers. But the pegasus didn’t run. She stood dead still and waited, until another sharp crack (this one louder than the first) broke the silence, and then she stepped closer to the frozen sphere.

It popped again, and then once more, and then the crackling grew louder - the chain reaction of a thousand tiny fissures breaking apart the sphere from within, spider webbing their way across the glassy surface in a frenzy. Instinctively sensing danger, the buckskin pegasus lifted a wing to shield herself and the exact same moment a loud CRACK rang out from the sphere. As expected, it shattered. The final crack forced the mosaic pieces apart, flinging shards of deadly ice in every direction. They cut through the frozen feather’s of the pegasus’s wing and some even embedded themselves into her skin, gouging her with marks that quickly began to bleed, but she seemed not to care.

She lowered the wing now riddled with holes and stared with a bloody face at the place once occupied by the giant sphere of ice, dazed by what had just happened.

There, lying on her side under a crumpled, leathery wing of her own, was the pegasus’s daughter. Two years had come and gone, and every second of them had kept Ehko encased in ice. Now that she was free, it was obvious as to why.

Her wounds had healed. Her skin was as fresh and new as it’d been three years ago when she’d been born. She’d only been a yearling when the seamare had tried to eat her, but nothing of that horrible encounter in Islandres remained on the now somewhat-mature horse. Her perfectly blue eyes opened in shock and she gasped her first breath of painful air in over two years, exhaling with a raspy, moaning cry. The pain of her rebirth was all she could feel.

Leaving bloody marks in the snow around her, Ehko’s mother walked slowly toward her daughter. She watched the form in the snow shiver and writhe, trying to remember the sensation of being alive again after living more than half of her life suspended from it, and said nothing. It was clear from her expression that she was astonished. She came to stand over the body covered in frozen scales, glinting blue like the ice they’d been encased in, and breathed hot plumes of her own air down upon the nearly-grown child.

“Ehko?” She asked.

Her daughter whimpered. Slowly, her gold-and-white patterned head lifted from the snow to gaze up at the blood-flecked face of her mother, and the torture reflected in her eyes belied how she was feeling despite how she currently looked.

“Mother?” Ehko responded. “Where are we?”