and where you invest your love, you invest your life
The meadow is new for him.
It is warmer here then the Tundra, although both lands are technically locked in the embrace of winter. But that season manifests differently, he finds. Where the Tundra is barren and harsh with ice, somehow blossoming into the steel and cold he had always enjoyed, the meadow is softer. The cold does not reach into your bones. It is more delicate and arguably more beautiful, although he cannot say that his heart is touched by it. Instead he notes the differences in an almost clinical way, pale eyes taking in the new land with more apathy than anything.
The only thing that it stirred in him was discomfort, all of the bodies milling about causing him to shift and move to hide himself before he remembered that they could not see him. Invisibility paid off sometimes.
It wasn’t that he was anti-social…it was just that his mother had whispered tales into his head from a young age. Tales of fairies who gave him gifts, but not free gifts. He was gifted with wings—large, beautiful, strong—but then cursed with only functioning wing. The wing on his right was beautiful, but it was smaller, the muscles knotted and strength seeping from it. He would never leave the ground despite the feathery appendages embracing his sides.
Then there was his immortality. He liked to think that he could feel it sometimes. The way it simmered in his blood. When he was younger, it had seemed less important, but now he could not imagine life without it. He had grown for years, but then it was like he had taken root; instead of aging, he remained unchanged—as if carved from rock. He was eternally young, his body never weathering or showing the years as they passed beneath him.
But that was not given freely either.
His immortality was tied to his heart. It was anchored in his detachment. He would live forever, so long as he lived without love. When he had been young, he had not understood, but as he grew older, Tobiah began to understand. It even seemed poetic. He was given the gift of time, and he paid for it. What at first seemed a curse became a blessing to him. He would never need to worry about the pain of rejection or the pain of loving something that would in turn leave him. He was instead given a life that would unfold freely and eternally; a life to mold as he saw fit.
Still, it was a gift he had to guard, and he did not often make himself vulnerable to creating attachments. So you can imagine his surprise when the bird-mare crosses his path and he says “What are you?” before he stop himself. For a moment, he imagines himself just bleeding away (after all, he was still invisible) into the shadows—but the curiosity of the situation gets to him first. His slowly becomes visible, the shadows revealing him for what he is: tall, lean, so pale a gold that he becomes cream. His feathery wings wrap around his barrel and his steel eyes show nothing but an aloof, impartial curiosity. For a second, he thinks of apologizing for his bluntness, but he thinks better of it and just waits.