Beyond the putrid stench of death which soured the palate, there was beauty in this place - an odd, corrupt inception of beauty, though it lingered in the air, none the less. Breath after breath poured like steam from the dove's nostrils as she gazed out across the necropolis, eyes of dulcet cyan beholding the arrant melancholia that imbrued each follicle of breathable air. Shards of frigidity threatened to burrow beneath her skin with each hastened whip of the wind, and she held her massive pinions tightly against the fattened contours of her sleek figure.
Ah, frostfall, she whispered, how unsure I feel of thee. As with all things, there existed two polarities to the season of stillness, of travesty, of unparalleled beauty, of nonpareil danger. Beneath a veil of allure and enticement there existed a stratum of fermenting peril: bone-rattling cold, famish. Some years it was considerably more vehement than others; some years it was gently and soothing - this, was not one of those years. With each action, there is an equal and opposite reaction; she couldn't help but feel this was some sort of recoil from the intensity of the summer - doubtlessly, that was the case.
There is balance in all things, even in the endlessly orbiting ritual of the seasons. With a harsh winter, there is a frail certitude that spring will come to whisk away the snow and the staleness, and in its wake all living things will be reborn. Without the cruelty of winter, the true majesty of spring could never be veritably cherished.
Pale feathers whispered softly against the gentle tug of the wind as she made her way through the marsh by way of flight. She daren't look down. She needn't see the dead to know they occupied these pools. She was focused on something more specific, something deep within the Spectral Marsh. The quest which had been presented to her by the Goddess of the Moon had not escaped her memory. She still desired to achieve the gift of healing, before she had not been able to. She thrived on the knowledge that her daughters were home in the warmth of their desert, spared from the overt callosity of frostfall.
Where, precisely, she was required to search had not been specified to her - the only knowledge of her intended item of retrieval was a name and dim coordinates. "Deep within the marshes," spoke the Goddess, and so that is where she would look. Hesitantly, the astral dame descended from her aerial position.
From her atmospheric viewpoint she would have trouble finding this 'moon stone,' and so she reigned her wings into a resistant arc and allowed gravity to return her to the earth. She met the murky depths with a stab of icy chill which encompassed her aft legs first, then her forelegs. She pothered her wings for only a moment, ridding the fledged conformations of frost which had caught on the plumes, then swiftly furled them atop her back. Without a glimmer of directive terminus, she furtively commenced her search.
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