Everything is numb, distant. Each breath is slow, shallow as the unconscious figure barely holds to the air around him. Each increment is a labor unto itself, each jagged jump in lung expansion is an effort of quiet concentration. One that can only be managed by the complex mechanisms inside of Dawn’s young body, finding it difficult to sustain this stupid creature, from flailing all together and crashing the entire network. He has tried often throughout the night to emerge from his slumber; instead he has been pierced by the intrigue of nightmares inhabiting his skull and reeled back, right into the world of monotone black and red. The angels have become demons, breaking his soul, through his skull and every single layer behind it. If there had ever been innocence to life, it had become ravaged in the hunger of those lucid dreams.

But his lungs were becoming irritated with the comatose creature. His physical brain struggled against the weather, against that accursed environment that continues to creep inside each muscle, blocking the tendrils of those nerves, and shooting the inevitable chilled bullet into Dawn’s core. Mere seconds perhaps, and hypothermia would set its benign course.

Dawn’s body refuses to slip, and it is rewarded by the semi-conscious groan that forms and dies inside his throat. The youth is far from familiar of the frigid snow surrounding him, let alone the condition of his body. He can’t feel whether the ground is really there, or if he should be floating in some non-descript space. There is a stream of dried and crusted blood that runs from the top of his forehead, across the lid of his eye and against his cheek. The fluid is frosty, it’s dark and thick. Matted pieces of his forelock stick, or dangle in the wicked air.

Dumbfounded and delirious, he lifts his head quickly from the cold ground. His lithe legs, tucked, allow him to jerk right and forwards. The motion makes his head dizzy as he stands; his grey sooty body is pulled forwards a few steps before gathering his balance. Once the world settles, as it stares with its bright, white eyes, the pain on his forehead and the frost at his legs finally kicks in. It doesn’t hurt though, it doesn’t rip through his conscious with an unpleasant hello.

Alive, he thinks. This is life, his eyes – dull – ponder.

And thus the odd boy with his curled ears tentatively moved forwards. The cold makes his movements sharp and ungraceful, ‘crawling’ out from the earth. There’s a hard set of eyes on his face that appear both distant and shielded. A disconnect that inserts itself quite well in his estranged youth. If it weren’t for the jagged, uneven edge jutting out of his head; he might have been able to pose as any other horse. But it was red and frank instead. The horn mutilated, once long appeared raw and clotted, only several inches now that trailed a dark, heavy red trail across his face.

He wanders towards the cover of pine trees. There’s only a throbbing sensation at his forehead, the pulse and heat that escapes from it doesn’t bother him however. It’s something else, something emotional that he can’t quite understand himself. What was he? He thought. He could find no sorrow for his situation, no sense of fear that he had travelled too far away, alone.

Dawn takes a moment to stop and lean against the rough bark. He lifts his head, brushing his cheek and neck until his eyes pierce through the arms of bark and into sky. There’s a bright blue, crisp, threatened by clouds that appear far, far away… nonetheless Dawn finds himself haunted by the snow, by its ivory. He notes its chill and its numbness that lingers on all four limbs. It sucks and steals his energy, it is fickle, but the feeling calms him. There should be a great sadness that breaks through him, it’s not there. He should seek to nurture his heart, but it’s not there. It’s only a memory, and it hangs on his tail. A thread of white that will, at some point, shed and fall.