Stasis.

The depths of the consciousness—not a place of rest, but a place of turmoil. A wildfire turning to a pyre to a candle's small flame, until finally the roaring blaze has become nothing but an ember struggling to stay warm in a snowstorm. (The wind breathes, a hush like the sigh before a battle, when it will howl and keen.) And the ember flickers, the struggle of something inanimate born of greatness but reduced to but a mere memory of what it had been.

In the depths of the glacier, his mind struggles: it strains against the confines of its mortal cage, a futile fight against a hypothermic lethargy as every last bit of energy is drained from his undying body.

The heart which should've stopped beating keeps going, going, going.

His body runs on nothing, for there is nothing left to burn; his sides are sunken, ribs and hips too prominent, and if he hadn't been so numb—his thoughts so slow—he would've noticed how uncomfortable it was to lay with so much weight pinned on the jutting point of his hip.

But his body sleeps, too weak to do more than breathe and beat, the nerve endings lost in the distance of chill and disuse, muscles atrophied, thin and fragile; he is more asleep than awake, covered in a fine blanket of snow, wedged in a crack so narrow that if his life had depended on it, perhaps he could've, very awkwardly, climbed higher in it by bracing against its steadfast sides.

(White breath smokes by his muzzle; his breathing is slow but steady, moist where it should not have existed at all. He should've been a desiccated husk, preserved in the belly of the glacier which swallowed him, but by the grace of the moon and stars a thin whisper of life surges through his veins.)

And even more fragile than the perhaps comatose stallion are the birds nestled in the long locks of his flowing mane. Their bodies sleep as deeply as their minds, small hearts beating with the gentle flow of life from one body into the next.

Sometimes, he thinks that he is awake; sometimes, the thoughts moving sedately across his mind seem more like thoughts and less like snowdrifts. And each time his mind struggles to the surface, a flicker of an ember in the whiteout world, he notices how deeply the owls sleep. He remembers when he walked in a world which was not this world, and how Irma had gone silent then—how there had been nothing where she had been, just a blue-eyed owl, and a torrent of silence when he had cast his heart into the void.

This is different.

They are there, souls intertwined with his.

They do not dream; they do not feel; they do not think. The silence of their presence has a sound to it.

Once, the eye facing the sky slips open. Snowflakes flutter on his lashes. He doesn't know what he sees. He doesn't know that he sees. His breath puffs out again, the rime ice on his whiskers trembling. Defying every rule of the universe, his sides expand again, so slightly, so slowly, filling his lungs up with air he should be too tired to breathe. Something flickers in front of his vision; the snow disturbed by the minuscule movement of his eyelid.

The moment passes.

The eye closes again.