He is but a memory, the echo of a presence, finally buried in life as he is in his soul—laid out beneath a blanket of pure snow in a tomb of glacial ice.

He could remain there, forever, in his false death. He doesn't know anymore, so he cannot mind; can only lie in the depths of not-quite-sleep, unaware of everything but something that feels only like the slow rocking of an ocean. (It's his heart—)

The narrow strip of sky and sun he once saw is gone. The glacier floor is cast into shadow once more, and had he had the strength of mind to see anything it would've been nothing but the odd gray underside of snow. It takes on a particular, strange kind of color when lit by the sun from above, drab and dreary yet pinpricked with light all the same. Melting and cooling and building little lattice bridges it has covered up the scene of the crime, lips closing as the secret goes down the gullet—there's no sign of what transpired anymore, just unbroken snow, a world of his own down below.

Mauja is all white, down there, the black spots swallowed up by the undisturbed snow. And he's dead, as dead as you can get while your heart still beats. The faint clouds of white smoking from his snow-covered muzzle come with so long between them they might not even be real, nothing but the imagination of the hopeful.

More brittle than the dead horse are the owls bundled in its mane, tucked into folds of long and pale silken hairs. They're covered in snow, too, heads turned back and resting on their shoulders—asleep, so deeply asleep, so snug and warm in their souls because they trust so much that had Mauja been awake, it would've hurt, the deepest kind of ache. He had never let them down before. He had thought about it, had nearly let himself be killed, had nearly lost Irma to the wrath of a foreign god, had thought so many bad things but in the end, he'd always saved himself and them and he'd do so again and again and again so they were fine, everything was fine, because Mauja was there—

(He wished he could share their trust.)

“LEE, LEE?!” The name echoes far above, rolls like distant thunder and erratic lightning across an unbroken landscape of white; it falls together with a small scatter of snowflakes onto his ears, sinks into his mind but does not register.

Nothing moves.

He's just a dead horse with starlight in his veins and shadows in his lungs.