Helovia’s Threshold was blanketed in snow the morning that Achaius forged across its boundary. Thick and white and undisturbed it lay before him in puritan paradise, an oasis of northerly beauty, which, with a stranger’s eye he admired and at the same time dreaded. Dawn, not immediately perceptible, broke upon him then; everywhere life, subtly and in its own isolated fashion, was blossoming. The tender cry of a single bird on the still air announced the daybreak, while on the ground the trees shook off their dark mantles and wreathed themselves instead in glassy, picturesque cloths of ice. Though there was no brightness, no golden sun, the morning yet announced itself.  Thick stratus clouds were unthreatening in the heavens, a pale and foggy gray – a weary colour, spent. Though they passed relentless through the skies they would not (and most decidedly could not) snow any more. And the sunlight which was diffused without shadow across the fields and through the groves of this strange and unfolding country was gloomy and without conviction as it bent itself to the earth. The world below, in its crystalline and ageless splendour, lapsed frigid and bland in the half-hearted and lightless day as it took shape. 

The bay tones in his skin were not uncommon ones, were not extraordinary – they did not flaunt him in the failed sunlight, or hide him in the gray unfolding dawn – and were tailored as elegantly to the contour of his body as they should be.  As he walked the winding trails through the trees winter’s breath swept through the trunks and branches, dredging up the sweet sharp taste of pine with it. These things disguised his own scent, wrapped themselves about the particularities of his aroma and altered them, ingrained themselves in his ideal. 

He moved comfortably over the frozen earth, unchallenged by the snow deepening beneath his feet as the trees thinned, or the chill which hounded his bones. The world through which he passed was one that had more than its share of nature’s beauty. In his eyes, in the gaze he casts askance to the more and more frequent intrusion of the living within his sight, there was apprehension and purpose. He casts about him with eyes quietly satisfied, tempted, a little hungry. The faintest hints of power resided in the smoked glass of his iris - not his own, but compelled upon him by some other force. He was too young, really, to claim it. 

No blackbird croaked his entrance as he wended through the trees lethargically, purposefully moving toward the distant pulse of people and nations and, perhaps, pieces of himself. As he drew upon the edge of the wood his steps slowed and slurred, gradually becoming languid and reluctant. He was instinctively disinclined to press the boundary of isolation the woods had offered, to escape the tangle and mystery of the interwoven branches into one of those lands beyond, unsure where to wander next. 

Out loud he said; “Now what?” and waited, knowing that time would show him how to decide.