[ thank you <3 ]

She moved in the darkness, a shadow within shadows, but compact enough that his eye caught her – sort of like the sound you only realized you had heard when it stopped. He blinked, and shifted his gaze, tracing the outline of her body. The arch of her back was unbroken by wings, the flat bridge of her face bearing no horn; equine, he deduced, and a dark one at that. It did not exactly settle him, nor did it unsettle him, but he wished that everyone was as light as he. Even in this unlit night he was easier to see than most others, always bearing the faint glow of faraway lantern trees, but she only seemed to suck the light in and swallow it, rendering it blacker than before. And as if he was light, so he, too, was drawn closer, prowling forward a few steps to better see her – as if the paleness of his own coat could reflect upon hers.

She stared at him through the dark, her barely seen eyes piercing. Her voice was many things at once, both hard and beautiful, enchanting and distancing, the words flowing like something from a poem, and not simply everyday speech. Black-rimmed ears flicked forward, blue gaze fastening on her paler face, again tracing the lines, the subtle shift between dark and not-as-dark. And her words went from their impending doom to his own physical shell, and Mauja found a small smile curling his lips in the darkness. Winter; winter embodied, the Ice King, Frostheart. She was not alone in her observations, but he couldn't deny them, even if the scorching sun of the Throat sometimes tried to convince him otherwise.

He was born of winter, and his blood would always run cold.

"Skullface," he said into the darkness, that smile remaining small and soft, but with the sharp edge of frost to it all the same. Would she even see the nuances of his eyes, of his expressions, in this smothering blackness? The nickname was in the language she would know, and not the one he usually used, and for the simple reason that it would be too much of a mouthful otherwise. Haus-andlit? Or something. His eyes twinkled in the darkness. "Perhaps all the stars fell to lie within the trees now." He said it with amusement, turning his head to stare at the nearest shining tree – still, it was quite a ways off, and he turned his eyes back to her. "I wonder how long we, and the trees, can survive without the light," he murmured quietly, mostly to himself, listening to the quiet whisper of the icy river.

[ FOR THE NIGHT IS DARK AND FULL OF TERRIERSTERROR ]