He moved with the elegance of a dancer, all never-ending lines that curve and sweep, with eyes of charming earth gazing always forward, never back, tracing the lines of the silver mountains that interrupt the bleached horizon of ivory blue. Each step is confident, chilled calm, having composed himself into utter perfection- as near as you can come anyways- flicking out his cloven hooves and carrying himself with the pride of a prince appointed regent king, sculpted chocolate pillars steady beneath him. But behind the blank façade of silence is a wild soul, fraying around the rims, growing a little more desperate with each step; awaiting with bitter patience the arrival of his new ‘home’. Will he be heralded as a newcomer, name shouted out brazenly to the heavens, and will all his microscopic faults noted and recorded? Will the elvish boy be considered one of them, the otherlings, who wear crowns on their foreheads? Do they have the silken tails of him and his savior, who stole him for the coniferous forests and whisked him away at her blue hip?

Carnesîr let a sigh ease from his chest, fluttering from his lips and disappearing, leaving trails of smoke behind it. For a moment he imagines the tension seeping from his pores, oozing out and caking the thick layers of crusted snow in the black and piss-yellow of his fears, until he is bathed in clean white, no other colors to taint his purity of heart. Yet for all his dreaming, he is stained, and no amount of washing could clean away his sins.

His eyes drifted to Huyana guiding him with a patience he could not dream to match, and wonders at her age. She has a beauty to her that makes her immortal, all rainy flanks and stormy eyes, her horn smooth onyx and her eyes the gray of the thunderheads. That he likes about her, the way she is a reflection of the raindrops and the pools and puddles that form from a storm. Carnesîr wonders, also, how she grew up to look like the elves when she did not speak his language, Their language. Was she derived of some long-lost line? A few dwarves, he knew, had disappeared into the east and west, but he could not recall elves of all wondrous beings. Maybe he could teach her…

The path is winding and narrow, the loudness of their quiet ringing in his ears. Pebbles clatter and crack beneath his hooves, rock wet with the melt of snow. Each step dislodges the gravel, and Carnesîr can almost imagine them rolling away down the cliffs, tumbling and rumbling until they are chased by a horde of boulders. Then he imagines himself, fallen with the stone, a tumble of blurred legs and fractured bones, cut spinal cord and red blood drying on his soft muzzle, turning rusted brown on his thin beard, a beard of a boy trying to be a man. In his eyes his legs are splayed out, hooves crumbling at the edges, and the banner of his leonine tail pools in an extravagant puddle of white hair, hanging off the lip of a flat rock. Do the mice come to nibble away at him, or is it the mountain eagles that rip and tear at his corpse's flesh? Beaks, yellow and gray, plunge and steal, plundering from his cadaver. Would anyone stay with him to chase away the vultures, grieve for his short end?

He didn't think so.

The mountain trails narrows abruptly, tapering to a thin point that could be guarded by a single man. Beyond that, clouds of white cloak the crisp air, thick curls of gray steam. What has created the steam, he wonders. And then, as he follows Huyana through the gates bathed in the moonlight of the night that has unerringly remained unended, the metaphorical threshold to a new world built on stone and hot springs and a network of caves, he stutters to a halt, eyes reflecting the moon in awe at the valley hidden by jagged peaks.

There he stands, silhouetted in the cold light of the half-moon, a shadow trailing the rain, waiting for the arrival of some interferer to break the ice.