Running from the heat.

(Running from the heart.)

Pristine vistas, white with a purity defying the use of the word 'bleached'—for bleached are bones, massive constructs washed up on dark gravel shores and left to grow brittle in the sun. Bleached was the state of having been something else. Bleached was tinted ugly yellow, somehow.

His blue eyes opened; wind blurred over the jagged horizon and ran down to touch him with playful hands, tugging at long hair as pale as the snow he did not watch. Instead, his gaze was trained on where he had come from—a nearly endless expanse of tundra grasses dried by a relentless sun. From here, it seemed to be all of the world: a vast, lifeless plain, arcing to the horizon and beyond. He sighed. Only by being sentient he knew what lay beyond, had a map of the world in his head. It stretched from here, the northern rim of Helovia's lands, down, across the isthmus, fanning out and covering every nook from east to west, north to south...

South.

Where the sun beat mercilessly, where the wind was but a dry sigh; the Edge, where the trees trapped the moisture off the sea and hung in unbearable veils of humid fog.

Slowly, he turned his head to look ahead again. He had climbed the foothills of a dark-lipped mountain range, hungry for the touch of snow upon his fetlocks, to sink into its cold, pristine embrace—longing for the time when shadows were cast in blue and the winds icy, frigid.

(Like me, except I'm not, and yet I am.)

And now that he stood with his hooves buried in the snow perched on top of a glacier he felt no release, no soothing of the fervent need burning in his mind; it was not enough. He couldn't take it with him back to the Edge. He couldn't do anything about the oppressive, sweltering heat.

He couldn't do anything about the tangled skeins attempting (and failing) to become a fine-patterned spiderweb. He—or could he?

Thrust into a position he had wanted, he now found himself loathing it; abandoned in a life he had never wanted, he found himself forever trapped in it.

His gaze strayed the jagged peaks.

He had gone over it a thousand times—every dream, every loss, every lie, spoken only as silence where truth should've been. Was there any point in thinking about it, again? In touching all the threads of his fates, woven together, and tracing them to their origins..? He glanced over his shoulder again. The noon sun beat down upon him. There were so many things beyond that horizon... So many dreams and hopes buried in dark earth tasting of ashes.

Would he ever get used to this?

He tracked further up the glacier, stepping carefully through the thin layer of summer snow and touching the hard ice beneath.

Until—

(He's done this before; fallen through the floor of the world, and into darkness.)

Then, it was a dream, edged in gold; he fell hunted by his demons, away from the glow of red roses up above.

(Away from Ophelia, and that was another tragic story, another bit of glass lodged in his heart.)

Now—it was a moment of freezing panic as his forehoof met with nothing, gut tightening into a coil as his everlasting heart picked up the pace.

Mauja had been born and raised on glaciers. He should've known better than to trust newly fallen snow.

The world erupted in snowflakes and ice and darkness, a soul-sickening plunge down a chute of ever-darkening ice as the light stayed above—

Was it the light abandoning him, or him abandoning the light? Was it—

(Thud.)

Immortality was no cure for the fear of death. Two owls flapped haphazardly, regaining control of themselves as the shock wore off; Mauja lay stunned on his side, a few limbs tucked awkwardly beneath him. The air in his lungs was cold, dry, old somehow, as if it had been trapped down here for a long, long time.

Slowly, he pulled his white head off the hard and uneven ice floor. The world spun around him; the sky was a distant bright scar rent in the glacier. The crevasse he lay in was narrow, the edges tapering off a few yards ahead and behind of him—too narrow for him to squeeze through anyway.

He laid his head down again. Shuffled against the floor until he could stretch his legs out.

He peered down the length of his long legs. Watched the long hairs of his fetlocks, how they fell across his striped hooves; how they did not move at all, for there was no wind this deep in the belly of the glacier.

Talons dug into the edge of the hard ice; four eyes peered down but saw nothing but darkness. Everywhere was too far for them to go without him.

(He tried; he did, honest. But with creatures made of flesh and bone and feathers and hearts and devotion and language developed only as a tool to amplify the emotional feedback of a bond, there is not much reasoning. Go, he said, no, they said—their hearts said, like magnets too strongly attracted to him.)

He couldn't blame them for that. He couldn't reassure them, either. He couldn't do anything—he couldn't even die.

(.. no, that's not right, he can die, if he wants to—but he doesn't.)

White air billowed from his nose in a sigh. The fact that he hadn't broken anything as he slid down here did little to lift his spirits. He couldn't do anything but wait, and he was sick of it already after five minutes.

Mauja closes his blue, blue eyes.

[ I need a breather due to life, so what better thing to do than dump him down a glacier to explain why I am not joining any new threads? ;D The owls can occasionally be seen circling overhead for a few days, but as Mauja weakens due to lack of food they go down the crack to hibernate with him. ]