The thing he had been following has stopped. He wasn’t keen on it having travelled so far north, but he also wasn’t too thrilled about the notion that this mare was clearly dead – dead and still walking. He had seen her some ways back and paused to look upon the trail of withered earth that was born behind her, lowering a charcoal dipped nose to smell the rancorous soil with a cringe. He had decided then, that no matter the dangers, he would follow the strange incarnation; he wore his plain pine branch that gracious tree had given him in his tail. Unsure of its uses, he had some pressing idea in the back of his mind that it would protect him from trials bleak and disastrous, though just how a stick could do that, he was even less sure.

He trailed along behind her well out of visible distance. Bound to the earth, the being that had once been a unicorn was easy to follow if he kept to the trail of death her black cloud left behind, but now that she had stopped in the middle of the vast, icy tundra, he was unsure what to do next. He stared at her for a good long while, the way her heart pulsed against the cold air, her eyes void of any signs of life aside from their occasional blinks and the movements of her muscles.

But then she spoke.

His ears rose to catch her words with a curiosity as she reached about to display several feathers in the cold air. Intrigued, he stepped forward out of his cover to get a better look. The golden feather, in particular, seemed familiar – it reminded him of a similar object behind tied into the short mane of a mare named Roskuld, given to her by the woman who wore the wings from which it had been born. Slowly, he approaches nearer the beast, distrustful despite her promise that this was not to be a violent encounter; she has no wings. The only way to have obtained them was through violence.

"What do you need, walking death?" he asks with overly deep vocals, his man’s voice coming into full fledged depth now that he is reaching the proper age for such things. His fear does not show on his exterior; he learned from the encounter with the earth toned flying bitch that such displays incited wrath in those of warrior mindsets, even if the fear was not directed towards her. Brighid had not been the source of his fear, that day, rather than the repercussions that would come to her if she did not leave.

Today, he feared for himself.

But his curiosity was stronger.

Especially now that he was relatively sure those were Ranjiri's feathers clutched in the dead things mouth.