but somewhere here in between the city walls of dyin' dreams

And nothing's wrong but nothing's true—

The flakes fell in ever-shifting patterns, trailing down from the belly of a gray sky. There was no straight path to their origin, no easy way up through the snowfall, and yet his eyes kept on chasing the glimpses of heaven. Somewhere, far away from mortality and dreams and snow and clouds, laid the stars—cold and harsh, indifferent and distant. Somewhere, far beyond the reach of the sun. And to fly...

”Well fuck me,” she finally said after a moment, her head turning in his direction. Something, an itch of some kind, made him want to look down from the sky, and at her now that she did—but nothing happened. His heart beat in a hollow chest, steadfast, and his gaze kept jumping between the white. It was... It was, it was—

It was a pressure building behind his eyes, at the back of his throat, an avalanche threatening to burst his little bubble of tranquility (numb), a rattle in his breathing as he listened—”.. I can be a shell with you .. isolated ...”—and why the fuck did everything end up like this? So broken, so tattered, a doll left in the careless hands of divine children and then flung aside, down to earth. No longer fun. No longer important. They didn't matter. They were just small and broken, insignificant and brief.

”Why did you tell me that?”

It was the sort of thing you only told your closest friends, right? Not something you told a stranger and potential rival—not something you just said. Because life was giant fucking social dance, and when someone asked how are you? they wanted nothing more than a short, polite answer. Social correctness. Well, fuck that—when Mauja asked, he meant it. So when others asked... Honesty, Sarazheha whispered in the back of his mind. Honesty. Live with honesty.

But honesty was hard. Honesty hurt. Honesty was confusing, and still he looked up through the snowfall, black-rimmed ears tipped forward.

(He looked like something old and lost, as if he had wandered out of a story—giant and white and gazing up with ancient eyes that had seen much—)

After a while her words seemed to have run out, biting laugh and all falling into a moment of a dead silence. Still Mauja stared up, and he couldn't even have told himself why. There was nothing for him to find there, anyway—nothing but more sharp-edged dreams and blinding truths. It just seemed easier to space out.

”But why do you feel so cold?”

Because all is dead.

He was a frozen wasteland. Slowly, his gaze slid sideways, down from the mysterious sky and onto the mare sharing the odd moment with him. She was looking at him, truly at him, and he couldn't quite place it—she seemed.. confused, or doubtful, or something.

Had he even known she was half-blind? Had he ever paid attention to her eyes before? (You never pay attention to anything.)

".. I froze over a long time ago," he finally said, his voice quiet. "Life is long. You love and you lose and you never forget." Snowy shoulders rose in a shrug. What else was there to say? He had strangled his emotions while still young, and each time their crippled remains had come hobbling out of the shadows he'd shoved them back. He was the cause of something terrible, and had gone on to do even more terrible things, and somewhere—

"Regret."

[ Aww, don't apologize! @Elsa ]

man, I ain't changed, but I know I ain't the same