He adores winter. The frigid temperatures, the unpredictable weather, the blanket of white that covers the land and turns it into a colourless version of itself - he loves it all. Whereas he spends the summer sweating and heaving, thirsty and fly-ridden and disgusting, he spends the winter in high spirits, with his flesh stung pleasantly with the chill and his muscles thrumming with unspent energy.

Frostfall is his favourite time to fight. When the cold air stings his lungs and the snow lashes against his skin, he's in his element. After almost two years of constant fighting, Volterra feels like he is well on the way to becoming the war machine he always dreamed of. His muscles are hardened from dozens of battles, his limbs stocky and powerful, his stamina heightened and his strength formidable. When he is on the battlefield, he is the Indomitable. But there's always more. He can always become stronger, faster, better. There is no excuse for him to ever rest on his laurels, to grow fat and lazy and satisfied with what he is. He will never settle when he can become greater.

It's early evening when the leviathan comes to the Steppe. Thick snow blankets the area and each step is arduous, but Volterra gets a grim satisfaction from the aching tug on his legs and the sharp shock of cold air in his chest. The dragons love the snow too, and their spirits are high as they dive into deep white drifts with childlike squeals of joy. Sometimes they emerge with lemmings in their mouths, pulled from hibernation by the swift jaws of death.

It isn't long before the stallion halts in an unremarkable section of white wasteland, sunk up to his hocks in snow. In front of him, Vadir gives a joyous scream and uses her fire breath to blast away a roughly circular thirty foot patch of snow, exposing the brown ground beneath like an open wound. Curiously Volterra steps forwards, and almost immediately his foot slips ominously on the black ice that hides beneath. With a grim nod, he decides that this will be his battlefield; the slippery ice will make for an interesting challenge, and the snow that circles his makeshift arena will act as a buffer should one of the combatants stray outside it.

Volterra lifts his mammoth head and screams for an opponent, lashing his tail excitedly against his flanks as he waits.

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Teaching spar for @Toulouse ! Set in the Frostbreath Steppe in a gentle snowstorm. Vadir has cleared a section of snow with her fire for them to fight on, but there's some lingering black ice on the dirt. Feel free to have the first attack! :D

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