The waiting stretches into a long while, and Gwyn grows bored. At first, she tries to not be, and focuses upon the spikes, and the mist, but, before long, her hooves begin to fidget beneath her, and her pale eyes start to wander across the world around, rather than the one that allegedly hid her grandfather. With a bored sigh, she looks over to her mommy, a question of when is too long to wait lingering on her lips, just as a noise draws her attention back into the woodland.
She looks out with excitement, her heart picking up pace, her eyes widening to drink in the sight of her legendary grandfather: the Frostheart, the Frozen Light, she had heard stories of him enough to envision someone much more handsome and gallant than the frightening man which actually appears.
Stumbling, the skeletal creature collapses to the ground, and Gwyn’s anxious heart leaps in time with her hooves, a girlish scream of fear filling the air as she scurries back behind her dam. This was terrible! She thinks, her sides heaving with terror, the unknown before her drawing wells of sympathy and fear alike to the surface.
Even the owls drifting on silent wings down to the pile of snow and spots do little to ease the trepidation suddenly grasping the child’s heart, at the sight of one so piteously ill. It’s not until the heap of bones and flesh whispers, and her mother responds, that Gwyn comes to understand at all, and her wide eyes at last soften in understanding, from where they fretfully watched it all in the distance. As her mother’s body lowers to the ground alongside him, Gwyn understands, and the realization replaces her fear with … pity? Sorrow? Trepidation?
She is too small to know, she cannot name it, but it courses through her veins regardless.
Her… her grandfather?
Slowly, she comes closer, her ears lifted, blue eyes questioning. Why? How? Was this really him?
But he was twice a King!
This was not how I saw it, inside, what I wanted…
“Hello, grandfather,” the princess says softly, when introduced, her nose bobbing hello, but her pale eyes alive with concern, with questions, and, as children are apt, she asks the difficult ones, not truly understanding what death actually is. Her experiences, thus far, had been finding the bodies of butterflies, which were beautiful, and the distant, fetid carcass of an elk her father had not allowed her to approach. So, the concept of death was quite similar to her: a beautiful shell, and a very strong smell. She had not yet come to understand that it meant a being would share nothing else, ever again. She does not know the word she wields is a blunt tool, which might knock her dam straight in the teeth. “Mommy, is he dying?”
’cause you’ve got teeth like a wolf
but you cry like a sheep
|
.svg/2000px-Google_Chrome_icon_(2011).svg.png){kind=icon}
