Morningside Cuesta unbound

<3
happens some time after this

From a distance, the field appeared to be a gentle, rising tide of white, a slope that promised to stretch endlessly into the bruised grey of the winter afternoon. But Astier knew better than to trust the horizon. He moved with a driven, singular focus, his tracks a straight, disciplined line in the snow, leaving the noise of the "bear" and the "queen" far behind him.

He had played his part, he had been the wall, the distraction, the wit. Now, the mask could slip. The wind rushing up the slope carried a contradiction, a scent that had no business existing in this frozen, inland silence. It was the scent of a coast he had left behind, salt-soaked timber and wild, resilient blooms. It hit him with the force of a physical blow, sharper than the ice, pulling him upward along the incline.

The wraith slowed only when the earth vanished beneath his paws. The cuesta did not announce itself. One moment, the ground was solid; the next, it fell away into a sheer, breathtaking void. Astier halted at the very lip of the precipice, his toes curling over the edge of the drop. Below him, the world opened up into a tapestry of snow-dusted ledges and treacherous, icy pitfalls, a jagged scar facing the East where the sun had long since abandoned its post.

Astier stood as a gargoyle against the flat light, his silver gaze sweeping the dizzying complex of ledges. He inhaled deeply, letting that phantom coastal scent fill his lungs, searching the shadows for the source. „I know you are here, @Siofra Hawthorne.” he spoke to the drop, his voice low and roughened by the cold. „I am done looking the other way.”

Everything was silver-- cold. The earth's perimeter blurred into the whiteness of the horizon. Siofra sat within the dip of the Cuesta, silent among the shadows. The ledges and ridges sprawled in many, and her stillness rendered her apart of the terrain. A treacherous location. Yet, for a woman born among the cliffside, the daunting depths felt akin to home. 
Her ears planed, listening. Against the whirling of breezes, a voice lingered-- husky, glacial. It called her name.
Slowly, Siofra’s lips curled into a grin; the look of one who was not caught in guess, but rather... expectancy. She did not need to turn head. Following a short pause, her voice sounded from the wintery abyss, rich with thinly veiled amusement. 
"...So you are?"
The words echoed into the pitfalls.
Only then did she brake her stillness. Rising onto lengthy limbs, the raveness departed from her pale throne and ascended the incline with fluid ease, her ghostly breath brushing past dark cheeks. Not once did her look dare to stray from the wraith's wintery form. She favored the warmth of sands...but his chill was among the acceptable.
Siofra landed upon the hill's edge with a feathery bound, dark mitts sinking softly into the pale earth. Her approach was silent, weighted. Like the rise of a tide. Then, with a hushed tone and the ghost of sarcasm, she spoke. "I was under the impression that I had become a stranger."
She scaled the ledge, her tracks halting a distance away. Olive irises searched the male's expression, as though comparing his details against memory. 
"You're a long way from the glaciers, Astier."

Astier watched her crest the ledge with the silent inevitability of water reclaiming a shore. She moved with a fluidity that made a mockery of the treacherous drop, a woman woven from the shadows of the cliffside. He did not step back to give her room, nor did he step forward to greet her. He simply stood his ground, a pale statue anchoring the wind-whipped edge, allowing her to close the distance he had so carefully maintained in the valley below.

Her scent washed over him again, driftwood and salt, a sharp, stinging reminder of a coast that felt a lifetime away. When she landed, silent and weighted, his silver gaze tracked the movement, dissecting the changes in her since the taiga. She was the same, and yet, sharper.

„Strangers are afforded the luxury of being ignored,” Astier corrected, his voice a low, dry rasp that cut through the wind. He tilted his head slightly toward the valley floor, where the faint echo of the Norseman likely still lingered. „If I had greeted you, you would be sharing this ledge with a loud giant who thinks he is a wolf. I assumed you preferred the silence over an audience.”

It was a tactical admission. He had made her a stranger to keep her safe from the noise. He met her olive gaze, holding it with a steady, unblinking intensity. Her comment on his displacement drew a faint, almost imperceptible shift in his stance; a relaxing of the shoulders, the only sign of comfort he would offer.

„The ice stands still,” he murmured, looking past her for a fleeting second to the drop she had just conquered. „I found I could not. And you, Siofra…” He let her name settle between them, heavy and familiar. „…Are a long way from the tide.”

The wraith's words earned a small grin from the fae, her irises continuing to skim.
He was taller...a touch wittier than her memory served. But still guarded by a restraint, cold and unyielding as winter itself. He did not react to her approach. The steel of his stillness-- it piqued her interest both then and now.
And, truth be told, his reason for departure mirrored her own-- to a degree.
The north was a place where whispers clung to glacial ruins, where chill sank into bone. If there was nothing to tether her to such lands, she would not linger in the midst of winter's wrath. Little was worth frostbite. 
Siofra started forth, her steps silent against snow.
"I heard rumors of a ghost in the valley," the woman murmured, her tone smooth as the winds racing over the cliffside. She paused at his shoulder, her gaze unreadable beneath obsidian lashes. "...I came to see if they held any truth."
Her look lingered upon his for a heartbeat. And then she brushed past.
There were things she wished to discuss-- things of the past and future. Yet if she lingered, the ice would surely reach from the earth to coil around her feet. Slightly, Siofra turned her head, breathing something that hovered between request and command:
"Walk with me."

Astier didn't offer a rebuttal, nor did he ask for a destination. The request, the command, was the only invitation he needed to break the icy stasis he had maintained since arriving at the cliff’s edge.

The Wraith turned with the mechanical precision of a soldier, his paws falling into the rhythm of her gait without a moment’s hesitation. He did not trail behind like a subordinate, nor did he lead. Instead, he paced her, closing the distance until the heat of his body was a silent radiator against the freezing afternoon air. He walked near enough that the tips of his pale fur nearly brushed her flank with every stride, a deliberate invasion of the space she had just claimed, yet he remained a razor-thin margin away from true contact.

It was a predatory sort of proximity, one that demanded she acknowledge his presence in every breath she drew. „Rumors are usually the desperate attempts of the bored to explain the unseen,” he murmured, his voice low and vibrating just beside her ear, carried on the slipstream of their movement. „If you were looking for a ghost, Siofra, you should have stayed in the bypass. I was quite invisible until the bear arrived.” A smirk stretched on his face then.

He didn't look at the path ahead. His silver gaze was fixed on the side of her face, tracking the way her breath misted in the cold. „But I am told ghosts don't leave tracks in the snow,” he added, his tone sharpening with a hint of that dry, familiar wit. „And I have been following yours for a quite some time."