The snow is endless, as far as the eye can see. Volterra pushes his way through it, some of the drifts reaching up to his massive chest. He can feel the moisture sucking at his stout limbs, making him work to move, burning his muscles and sharpening his breaths. Good, he thinks. Training without meaning to. Mother will be proud, if he ever sees her again. His nostrils hang wide, inhaling and ejecting deep blasts of frigid air, and the chilly early-spring wind pushes his ears flat against his skull and tosses his mane into a frenzy. Determination creases the hard lines of his face, a face that loses any remnance of boyishness with every passing day and sharpens into the royal features of a man.

Every so often, another blast of cold air shoots past him, one that's even frostier than the wind itself. He doesn't have to look to know it is his red dragon practicing his ice-breathing abilities, something he hasn't stopped doing since he discovered the power that lay dormant within him. Vérzés freezes anything he can lay his paws on, including Volterra himself if the leviathan doesn't get out of the way fast enough. There is an acute pain that comes with being touched by his dragon's breath, a burning that isn't. Where his father's shoulders had been scarred by fire, Volterra's are chafed by frost, and silver patches of healing skin stand out livid against his jet black pelt. He has had his dragon try to freeze off some of the boils that have plagued him since the fight with the God, but nothing happens. The great welts are painful and persistent, and far more of an annoyance than the bruise on his side, which has already begun to fade.

He halts, and Vérzés swoops down to land on his withers. The ruby beast has caught a lemming and happily devours the carcass, squirting blood up the back of the yearling's neck. He shrivels his nose in disgust and shakes his mane to rid it of snowflakes and blood alike, stretching his thick neck to ease the aches that come with walking through snow. He has no real purpose here, and simply stands with one idly cocked leg, listening to his dragon's voracious chewing. He is tempted to roll in the snow to try and see if that will ease the boils, but assumes it will be just as ineffective as the red's breath. ""