The wind picked up and it bore with it a voice he knew. His name sounded eerie in the wind - almost like Snö had become a ghost, but the illusion vanished as he caught sight of his sister coming towards him. She looked like she didn’t have a care in the world and like she felt as safe here on the hazardous glacier as she did on flat ground.

He would never admit it, but he was glad to see her and glad that she looked so confident. It lulled him into a more or less false sense of safely - but he felt safe nonetheless.

When she reached him he smiled at her and met her blue gaze. "Snö! I am so happy to see you. You know when I was a kid I didn’t think you liked me, I mean I have no memory from my birth, but people said you weren’t there and we never played or something. But I guess with the invasion and everything that happened there wasn’t much time for us to be foals you know and-"

”Are you brave Tamlin?”

He was cut short by her question and his sense of safety was drained from his body like he was a wet piece of cloth someone twisted and squeezed the water from. It was something in the way she said it. Her smile was normal enough, but he thought he heard a sinister undertone in her voice.

He watched her varnished body as she came closer and suddenly her pale frame wasn’t so heartwarmingly familiar. The way she moved had him regret him even coming here and when she continued speaking and moving like a snake ready to strike Tamlin even shivered a bit. Her words were uttered calmly and with ease, but her whole demeanor scared the dark yearling something terrible. It must have been because he wasn’t prepared to feel threatened by someone he considered family and maybe because the prospect of betrayal was something that he feared deeply.

Unknowingly he’d leaned away as she came closer, but even though fear was gripping at his mind he still heard a voice saying that this was his sister and that she loved him and wouldn’t want to hurt him. But she can if she want. She is bigger and stronger - she is almost fully grown. the fear in him insisted. Still Tamlin didn’t want to believe that Snö really was trying to get him in trouble and then the only possible explanation was that her words were just a simple, terrifying truth - that he had to prove himself as a son of Mauja. Snö was older than him so she should know, right? He could trust her words, couldn’t he?

The confusion held him frozen in place and in his eyes his feelings were clearly visible. There was no trace of the spoiled, confident brat in Tamlin’s dark face - it was only the face of a young boy in doubt, unease and confusion.

"But Snö," he said in a weak voice. "what if I do fall?"