en natt så kall och månen den var klar

Wolf mother, where you been? You look so worn, so thin
Wolf father, at the door, you don't smile anymore

But he was the fortress, the perfection of a glacier in its prime, its cold, barely beating heart—not the sun-slick edges shearing off and falling into the ocean, spilling all its secrets in the warmth of life. His mind was a bastion, a crystalline maze, a place of clarity and blood-spattered walls.

It almost seemed artful.

"I could ask you the same thing, Ironclad."

That was the beauty of a well-guarded secret, of eyes that were nothing but ice, as brilliant as the sun refracted through a snowflake but just as empty of meaning. Because in his frigidity, in his stoicism, there was beauty, trapped and carved in the fractured marble of his body—beauty as lifeless as that of a statue. Because for all the hot blood rushing through his veins, and all the pain and love he carried in his heart, Mauja's skin was as cold as his name. Shallow beauty.

He waited, because waiting was the only thing he knew how to do. He was an expert at waiting.

He waited so long that every moment passed him by.

He could've waited forever, for the answer that perhaps no one else would've given him—he was not the only one who hoarded his secrets as jealously as a dragon guards its trove, would've expected the conversation to fall through the hourglass like the last grains of sand, until nothing remained but the silence. But he waited, because something in him wanted an answer, the key to solve the mystery, the last piece of the puzzle: he waited, because perhaps her words would fill the silence left by his.

She began, as chaotic and unstructured as fire itself. Began, by closing herself off, by denying him understand, by deciding that she would remain alone, misunderstood, and special. She began by telling him he would not understand, and he sighed so softly, so quietly, it was barely perceptible. He could understand, but only if she'd let him. If she'd believe in him.

If she'd believe in herself.

Words spilled out of her mouth, out of her soul, and black-rimmed ears raptly drank it in. He said nothing, but his mouth quirked a time or two, while his heavy heart wondered why these things always happened to everyone. Was there not a shred of goodness left in this world? A scrap to feed the faith?

His ears fell back slowly. You helped put out some of the flame. She spoke of a sense of abandonment, loss, of being lost, of herds and wraiths and companions, of drunken near-rape and gods and love—

Oh, he'd heard it spelled out in her voice, tasted it in the unsaid words, but he'd tried not to believe it, because why would she love him? Why would she love a stranger whom she knew nothing about?

Shallow beauty.

He was beautiful, but he was dead.

Silence claimed them for a moment, Mauja's mind still reeling from the onslaught of information, of a broken, scattered back-story, and everything he wanted to say was taken from his lips by another string of words: "Your turn."

His eyes hardened. His heart hardened. And he remembered, fire flickering in the dripping caves of a mountain, look-out windows and rampaging colts and fillies, the pristine smell of snow and the cold wheeling, reeling stars strewn like silver dust over a pitch-black sky, aurora lights shimmering and dancing, the metallic taste of blood and the scent of frozen death—

Screams and thundering hearts, hot blood and conviction, justification, purification. The Purge.

His distant gaze sharpened, landed on her. Aurelia. So young, so innocent, so heavily burdened by this cruel world. His jaw was set. You do not want to know what I have done.

What I have been.

What I am.

"I came to Helovia when I was six," he said into the cold space between them, his voice a steady, rough thing. "And before I came, I was many things." And since then, I've been even more. Did she understand, that with all the long years he'd endured, anything he would tell her would just be a fraction of the truth? That if he was to bare himself, it would take hours and hours?

"Perhaps you are more like me than you think, Aurelia—a creature so burdened by its past it cannot see the future." A bitter, cynical edge to his voice, and a bitter, cynical twinge of his dark lips.

"I've driven dark plots forward, held my horn towards fluttering throats in the shadows while smiling in the light—I laid the foundations of an empire, but saw it murdered in its cradle. I've bled and I've lost, and I've been lost, in another dimension; I've gone back in time to fetch one of my owls, and witnessed the Sun scorch the land with his reckless fury. I've been burned and I've been broken, I've made mistakes and I've ruined lives, and somewhere along the road, I stopped believing in that which had driven me when I first came here. I've tried to love and realized it is not a thing I have a say in, and I've fallen in love with what should've been my greatest enemy; I lost my faith in the Gods and set even more nefarious plots in motion. What should've been murder was not, and I've seen the Gods leave us and strand us in absolute darkness, and I find myself hunted, haunted; I left, to defend the place I came from, and to run from the wrath of the hypocritical, dumb Dragonwhore." He spat her name out like the poison it was, not at all sure where the vehemence came from. "I returned but I lost myself, and the wraiths nearly ended me—I woke up sick and angry, and everything's still a broken, shattered mess."

Was that even what she'd wanted from him? A quick re-cap of his past? He'd said nothing. All these words and he'd said absolutely nothing.

"Right now I think about you. About how easy it is to get hurt, and how much it hurts and aches.. and about how easy it is to judge yourself from what you've been through, and how hard it is to let go of all that drags you down."

His gaze slid to the sky.

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