Something is wrong.

        The sky is doing it again! Hard rain – Caneo skirts beneath the rugged pines in futile effort to avoid this plague. His hooves crunch over frosted soil and frozen mud, slipping every now and then. After a particularly clever patch of ice bends the silver boy in an impromptu bow, he stalls.

        The cold sings in his joints, in the agitated trembling of fine silver skin. It nestles down into his muscles like an ache, unending, and he shudders now without movement to warm his blood. He has never known cold like this. Confused, he thinks back to sudden torrents of rain, the warm stinging wet, the flooded gullies – not the same. He peers up at the fleecy sky and frowns, distaste pulling his narrow features taut. He is a creature built of glass and knives; warmth flees his skin as if it never belonged.

        While he stands, the strange rain drifts down through the trees and lands in delicate patterns over his bony hips, over the long shape of his spine. It feels weightless at first, but it burns as it begins to melt, and Caneo surges on. His eyes skip heavenward now and again, watching and measuring, certain Helovia is filled with sickness and unhappy secrets. Roland never warned him about this, this days-long deathly cold, and now he shakes even in the daylight, and the rain falls in clouds and eddies, whirling between the trees, flickering into his eyes.

        With a snort, Caneo puts his head down, hunches his shoulders forward, and bulls on.

        He knows his destination, this time. It is a place from before, a place visited often. He cannot call it home but he feels comfort in the play of color and the gleam of tinted glass. He tracks the rotunda’s place uncertainly, his path a wandering track under snow-heavy boughs. Meanwhile, the storm falls silently around him, menacing in its pale beauty, slowly skimming every inch of weight from the narrow boy’s bones.

        He is glad to find the stained glass empty, today, even if its colors dull under a roof of white. Caneo dives under its protection gladly, without even a glance back and forth to check for approaching company. Once there, with the worst of the threat diminished, his twists his body in a clattering shake, as if determined to removed every ounce of the bitter, awful stuff. Indignant, he peers back out at the storm with narrow eyes and cold ears pinned against his crown.

        “What the hell is this?”

        Unusually frank today, wet, and shivering still, Caneo sighs and waits for the wind to stop, and the snow to give up. He is resolved to claim this spot until one or the other, or his muscles freeze.

        He almost misses the sun.