och jag växte upp snabbt, från min barndom var det allt—jag föddes redan slagen

då tänker du tyst och skriker högt, memorerar hela jävla monologen som skrevs för din inre röst,

He wasn't sure what he was doing there.

It was far from home. It had taken days. He had trekked across the face of the earth, felt the early mornings' cold kisses, the silent promises of a winter to come—and for the first time in his life, Mauja dreaded it. His thin body shivered already with the dropping temperatures, insulated by nothing more than his skin and some flimsy, ropy muscles very, very slowly growing thicker. He looked less like death, and more like something that might be death.

But there was another reason he dreaded the coming winter: he didn't know if it would end.

He had heard stories, about gods falling, empires being cursed, overrun, anything, solar eclipses and flares—some of the stories had ended in a scorched and ravaged wasteland, some had ended in a world snowed over, buried beneath hundreds of feet of ice and snow. A cold, dead world, where not even a unicorn bred for cold would survive.

Where nothing could survive.

With each passing day of the Gods' absence, he began to lose faith—not in them, but in the world. He had never put much stock in the divine, but this was, after all, their world.. and if Kaos somehow trapped them, or beat them, what would happen to Helovia? Would it come apart in a thousand tiny pieces, each individual torn asunder, and the land left like a shadowy veil on the face of the earth—as dead as the Marsh? Or would it simply die?

Or would nothing happen? Were they so firmly rooted in the land, that it could live without the Gods? It had been around a long, long time. Mauja had seen it, when forests had grown in the Dragon's Throat, and the steppe had not been a barren bit of permafrost tundra. He had seen the world as it had been, as it might've been, as it could've been.

He thought, idly, that the reason he sought the churning heart was to find some sort of comfort in the constant flames. They roared on the horizon, spat sparks.

As long as it burned, the Gods lived, or at least, that was what he thought. It was the heart after all, the soul of the land. How could it burn if they died? Or would it keep burning, and the lands would live?

It wasn't intentionally that he entered the Caves; he wasn't looking where he was going, though he knew he was skirting close to the entrance. Years of use had worn the sloping path, and the edge he passed by was loose. It shifted underneath his slow, cautious gait, and he stumbled.

And he was too weak to catch himself.

His knee folded and he pitched forward, striking the path with his shoulder and a scream. It had been softer once, he thought, but countless hooves had worn the soft dirt and gravel from the rock face, leaving nothing but a punishingly hard surface to break his fall. He slid a little ways down the slope before stopping. He was lightweight these days, after all.

He was only about halfway down, but his back lay in the direction of descent, and his heart was hammering uselessly. He was winded and in pain, weak from too long in a bloody ocean, malnourished despite eating all he came across—and so feeble. His body trembled. He thought he might be able to kick off and roll over, get his legs facing down so he had a shot at getting up, but not now. Not right now. He needed a couple of minutes, at least.

Up on the rim to the Heart Caves, the two owls sat next to each other. Their gazes went from each other to Mauja and back again. He wasn't sure if they were concerned, or just exasperated.

He rolled his eyes and waited for his body to recover.