It wasn’t long before the snow came after I left my father, snow unlike any I had ever seen before in all my life.  Actually, it seemed almost like I had managed to make it to my mother’s moss draped cave to dwell in the memories I would find there, just in time to watch the world become a vast nothingness of white, occasionally darkened by a powerful gust of wind which tossed the falling flakes, some floating like Goliaths among fine ivory powder, in millions of directions, all of them but down.

It seemed a bad omen.  I quickly darted into the cave after the first bought of frigid mountain air and snow accosted me upon approach, quickly leaving with my burlap satchel (which my father had made for me some long while ago, and which I had cleverly stashed in my mother’s den) out towards the forest to the north and west, where Erebos, Aithniel, and I had often played, and which I knew to be lined with caverns along the mountain face, caverns that would not summon insatiable storms of white.

I had planned to journey out in the morning, to try and find my snowy, gold kissed sister, surely fully fledged into a pair of graceful white wings by now, but leaving in the morning is likely going to be impossible; that she doesn’t live here anymore makes me feel nothing but glad for her, mostly because it means that, by some fleeting hope, she has found a place where she is happy and where others are kind to her.  That I will have to find her is of no consequence – it’s my fault, anyway.

I find the same bittersweet smile upon my face as I often do when I think of her, even with the seeming apocalypse outside the stone frame of the cave I’m hiding in.  The smile falters as I wonder if she will accept the Gods I have brought home to her, or if she will even care now that she’s not trapped in this winter land. 

I shake my head, though no one is here to see it.

I shouldn’t doubt so much; Vaelenne would be disappointed.

As if she hears my thoughts and can manipulate the wind so far from her home, a chilly tendril of the white embellished breeze penetrates the slim cover of the cavern’s opening, accosting me with its frigid (yet strangely refreshing) touch.  The powder of snow clings to my black lashes and tangled forelock, joining the collection I had gathered on the journey over in the slow melt and drip to the floor below.

I shiver.

Perhaps I should shake the snow away, I think to myself, and do so, but it is too late to really be of much immediate effect.  My skin is already wet, and it prickles and tightens almost painfully.
Looking out into the damp pine wood that skirts the open valley of the Basin, I occasionally spy the flicker of orange through the rough, dark trunks (when the snow is gusted aside), and though I cannot see it, I can visualize the steam rising from the warmth of the springs.  All of these things would make me much warmer than I am now, but I can also, unfortunately, see the faces of others around each of these objects.

I think I’m quite alright, thank you.  My head is just too full of all the small changes to this seemingly unchanged place to really have room for their names or chatter at this moment.

‘Negativity seems to be your thing,’ playfully prodded Xynia once, ‘maybe you should try being young once in a while.’

I smile, despite the chill besieging me.  Even this far away from the firefly forest of her people, she is offering me advice… or perhaps only haunting me with her memory, her absence my punishment for abandoning those I had loved here, in Helovia.  Either way, I’m better off moving than standing still as stone and just as cold.

Turning about to examine the cavern I have found rather than the falling snow, and trying to chase the negative thoughts from myself, I find it relatively roomy, with the damp, cool smell of not having been used in a long time, its ceilings some ten feet above me and the room itself nearly as deep, widest at some eight feet; it is triangular, and most narrow near the entrance.  The floor slopes into the far left corner of the room, which holds a smooth ring of water in the round stone dip, which has frozen over.  During the summer, I can imagine it thawed and cool, and wonder if it is most often stale or fresh.

Avoiding the slick, frozen puddle, I walk into the cave and find that, despite the sloping right corner, it is relatively flat, and that the edges of the room are packed with fine sand, worn from the stone of the cavern itself.  My bag, sitting towards the front, catches my eye, and gives me an idea for when the thaw approaches, and the shores of the lake are lined again with beaches instead of thick, frozen rings of combined water and sun softened snow, but for now, I have a more immediate idea to pass the time.

Stepping out into the blizzard with a quick step, thanking the dense branches of the pines for the not so deep snow beneath their overhanging boughs, and hoping they held their burdens for long enough for me to pass, I search for some sort of fallen tree branch or similar something, finding a partially rotted trunk of a small tree not many yards from the cavern I’d been taking shelter in.
Grabbing one of the many knots left from its shorn branches in between my teeth, I proceed to fight the shallow (in comparison to the towering drifts elsewhere) layer of snow to drag the thing back to the cavern.  Again shaking myself once there, I tug the large chunk of wood to the far right corner, spending some while propping it up and assuring that it is stable and stuck where I want it.

With a roguish grin that occasionally steals my features when I think of fighting, I threateningly lower my crown at the trunk and take a wide legged stance, my tail curling for balance behind me.  Lunging forward, my golden hooves clicking pleasantly on the stone floor, I swing my head right and then left, so that the length of my horn strikes along the left side of the trunk, the blunt force rupturing the decaying bark into splinters.  Quickly I withdraw, the cold and whatever miseries cling to me forgotten in the increased pace of my heart, my chin tucked low to shield my throat, I shuffle back before suddenly leaping forward again, this time striking the right of the trunk, and then swiftly the left, the crack and click of hooves and horn filling the cavern (and likely the quiet night wood outside) with their staccato rhythm, the stone floor slowly dusted with shards of tree bark.


[ ooc: For Ashamin! ]