His steps are heavy with effort as he moves through the snow, through the cold that has become a part of you, remained a stranger to him. You only watch as he struggles now, having found him when his scent had only been but a breath that set your blood on fire, your memories as painful now as they had been years before. It is the hatred, the distrust, that you have bore for him since that day that makes you slow to realize his situation, to come to the conclusion of just how serious his injuries must be. Even from when you had first spied him moments before, a dark dot lost within the waves of white, he has become noticeably weaker, his movements more sluggish than ever before.
As it sinks in, permeates your skin, your first reaction is to turn and leave, to let him succumb to the fate that he has no doubt chosen for himself, to let him rot as you have wanted (had you not?) to do countless times before, as you have believed for too long would be the right thing to happen to the treacherous man. But instead of returning to your mountains, to the boys of your heart, of sand and deep blues, you find yourself moving towards the despicable creature, numb but unwilling to cave into the temptation to just leave, to forsake your true nature, for someone like him.
You pause as he looks to you, a flicker of recognition hidden within the lines of his face, within the sun-shimmer of his eyes. ‘Mother? Is that you?’ He fumbles to his knees and you lift your head higher, pushing away the feeling of needing to do something, clutching to your memories of anger so that you may not acknowledge the pity seeing him this way evokes. His broad chest bears the wounds of the last time you had seen him, hovering close, so terribly close, to your infant son, having already snuck into the Basin within the shadows, threatening your tiny circle of family.
“No,” you answer finally, narrowing your eyes as they move from his chest to his neck, his shoulders and all of the cuts that lay bleeding there, to the emptiness laying underneath the shadow of the small mountain. Beneath a tree with flowers that bloom white and smell of the sweetest nectar is where she lays along with pieces of your heart, with all of the hopes, all of the dreams, the sweet wishes that had died with her.
“Do you remember what happened here?”
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