Yseulte opened her eyes and the world came back to her in a blast of cold air. A biting winter wind swept through her wild blonde hair and curling strands trembled in thin, swirling lines across her young face.
For the first time in her life, Yseulte felt strangely at ease. Her heart no longer plagued her mind, and her mind was at peace. The battle within herself ceased. Perhaps it was the frozen woods, filled with hollow silence and stillness. Only the distant sounds of tinkling icicles and falling mounds of snow from upper boughs shattered the silence. It was a precarious balance, this winter wonderland. Much like herself, in fact. One moment, she is at peace with the world and it with her. And the next...
She wasn’t surprised to hear a quiet murmur of hoof steps padding through the morning, sounding cold and hollow on frozen ice webbed across the ground like broken shards of glass. Her mind had been drifting, as it often did these short, wintry days.
She supposed it was the winter; it reminded her of him, of his pale skin and cold eyes.
As the winged-mare drew to a stop near her, the serenity Yseulte tolerated like warm, comfortable rain vanished. Melted like the snowflakes that touched her hot skin. Yseulte found that she couldn't tear her eyes away from the massive, powerful wings folded elegantly at the mare's shoulders. A nameless emotion flashed across her face, envy perhaps, before it was gone. She had never met a Pegasus before; her father forbade it. But Daddy dearest wasn't here anymore, was he? The mare greeted her with gentle concern, and Yseulte felt something bordering amusement prick at the corners of her cold lips.
"I'm a damsel, but contrary to the popular belief, I am not in distress." The tone of her voice was drawling and bored, as if this wasn't the first time somebody had assumed she had just undergone some life-rendering tragedy.
It was a curse, her father's beauty. The bright eyes that were pools of mystery and allure (even when, in reality, she might be thinking about taking a piss in somebody's drinking stream), the wild blonde hair, the silvery sheen of her skin. She was a shining star against a vast, black sky. All Yseulte wished to be was a rock. A big, ugly rock, at that. She yearned for her mother's modest plainness, and to be rid of this cursed femininity.
"You don't say," Yseulte muttered under her breath when the stranger mentioned that she rarely had company. Drawing herself up and blinking in a somewhat serene, polite manner, as she imagined her mother might do, Yseulte forced herself to remain still and silent while the white mare finished her eloquent speech of loneliness, comradeship, and safety.
"That's all very kind, but I'm quite capable of goring a stallion in the belly all by myself, thank you." Yseulte sighed, eager to be out of these woods by nightfall. She wasn't fond of closed spaces. Giving the winged-mare a curt nod, she began wading through the snow powder once more, intending to keep the conversation short and sweet. She trudged along a few paces, sighed again, then called over her shoulder. "Oh, come on then. Better two than one, if you can keep up."
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