He is alone and his eyes burn with light.

The day in the Hidden Falls is painfully bright, the water around him thundering onto thin sheets of ice, shattering them, and casting stars of reflection in the air around him. The frost that covers the ground sends chills up the hunter's legs with every step. Every breeze brings a bite of Frostfall that Knox can neither abide or ignore. This is not his season.

When the earth is white, though, the blood will show. Every hurt breath will stain the air in perfect billows of pain. Every instance of harm will be highlighted, contrast will be king. The hunter may not like it, but in this cold light he will shine--shine as his coat does now, soaking with the sweat of potential. He has prepared for this moment, paced this scene to walk off the demons that haunt him. Whoever sees him now has only one question to ask: who is this shadow, standing alone before a frozen fall? Why does he shiver, is it with rage or the cold? Why, above all things, has he come here?

The answers are not long withheld. More verbose than usual, at the order of the one stallion whose word he will follow, Knox lets his voice ring throughout the Hidden Falls.

"SOREN!" It is an imperative, an unforgiving and soured exclamation. "Come out from your sister's shadow and face me. No longer will you subsist on the reputation of your forebears. For your absence at the herd meeting and your failure to watch even over the smallest of things, I call upon your insolent skin," he says with a lifting of his foreleg and a pawing at a glittering on the ground.

Locked in the jaws of the frozen earth, the dagger is at first unassuming. It is Knox's words that highlight its danger. "Answer my call and see what can be done with the prize you failed to guard; fail to heed it, and you'll be gifting it to me as a coward."

With that the sleuth dips his majestic, scarred face to the ground and lets his jaw hang loose. His lips tease the butt of the dagger's handle for a moment before his teeth close over the vine covered grip and wrench it from the ground, spraying frost in its wake. He is thankful for something to silence his tongue and mute the practiced words that he feels the Dauntless has fed him. These are not his thefts, his crafts, his gifts, his battles. He is here in the Falls for his son and the grave of his one love, for the moral code being a part of a herd forces him to follow. Still though Knox walks empty, laying his strings on the earth and begging his brother to be his puppeteer, if only so he need not have the chance to think for himself. For what would he do with the length of their rope but tie it around his neck and take the whole world with him?

Why are you doing this? she whispers into the quiet holes of his heart. The sweat on his coat slowly chills, filling his thick winter coat with tiny, slow moving droplets. His sides heave, and the memories of just barely healed wounds from his spar with Amaris plague him. Her ghost is right to question him; he isn't ready for this, and this isn't his fight. Why has he fallen to the position of a lapdog, following his brother's every word?

The hunter holds a dagger in his mouth between silver scarred lips, his every flaw revealed in the light. Never when she lived did he find himself on the battlefield, it is only in his bonded's absence that he takes comfort in the prospect of being in such mortal pain.

Have you ever thought about killing someone?

This voice is one that he can barely recognize, speaking words in whispers so soft that they disguise the identity of their source. He thinks, maybe, it is still hers.

You must know that I have. You must know that for years it was all I understood.

Have you thought about what it is like to die?

A pause as the vowels come together, a moment as the words take form. Maybe. Never with the expectation that I would.

Put them together, love. What about that?

Were he speaking, he would maintain his silence. In the annals of his minds, though, no thoughts can be hidden from his own machinations and ghosts. He stands almost dumbstruck, struggling to keep a grip on the dagger as he waits for a challenge he has no passion for.

It's all I can think about anymore.

He is alone and his eyes burn with tears.

""