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."

She had no particular destination in mind, only a desire to move forward. The wraith fell into place alongside her, but the scent that had once been an echo among the treeline now seemed almost...suffocating.
His proximity was provoking. Deliberate. A thread of tension was stretched within her, pulled taut by the daring intimacy. But she did not crack. The composure she wore was not a mask; it was engraved. And while she otherwise would have reestablished distance, his presence brought a warmth-- one that she would not deny. 
"Chasing the tracks of a nameless," Siofra chuffed, her brow lifting as her voice dropped to a hush. "Your pastimes amuse me. Perhaps the 'bear' would have led you to food. Water."
The chill of silvered eyes upon her was felt, but she did not meet them. Her look remained fixed on the haze beyond, lost in thought. "...But you seem to favor the shadows and solitude. I wonder, Astier..."
Only then did the woman's gaze shift to him. Sharp from the corner of her vision, but not cold. Curious.
"...What it is that you seek."
The vagueness to her words was calculated. A probe at his motives, but not meant to ensnare. Whether they entangled her, or something greater...she awaited his interpretation with a ghostly silence.

I got carried away oops <3

A cold ripple of amusement stirred inside; a rare, flickering light in the grey landscape of his mind. She spoke of food and water as if he were a common scavenger driven by the base needs of the gut, rather than a man who had spent months refining his hunger into a singular, sharp-edged pursuit.

He liked that she poked at him. He liked that she didn't settle for the easy silence. The wraith didn't pull away from the provocative heat of her shoulder. Instead, he leaned into that daring intimacy, his gait remaining mechanical and steady even as his inner thoughts sharpened with a dark, appreciative wit.

„The bear had nothing more to tell me,” he murmured, his voice a dry, low rasp that seemed to vibrate against the very air she breathed. He did not cast her a glance immediately, keeping his gaze on the fractured horizon of the ridge. „He was merely noise in a world that requires silence. A variable I had already solved and discarded.”

He remembered the Kaan; he, too, had offered the same hollow comforts with a heavy hand of high regard. But honor had proven a fragile thing when the war-drums began their march across the ice. When the glacier finally shattered, those he had respected hadn't stood firm; they had dispersed like ash in a gale. They had left him to drown beneath a frozen sea with a cougar’s teeth sinking into the marrow of his neck while they sought their own safety.

Astier had learned then that a full belly was a poor shield against abandonment, and that ‘provision’ was often just a down payment on a betrayal. He would not be lured by the simple things again; not by a bear, and not by the promise of a stable hearth. He had already paid that debt in blood, and he wasn't looking to open a new account.

„You ask what I seek as if the answer isn't currently walking beside me,” he continued, his tone dropping into something dangerously quiet, his gaze still away from her, „I do not seek 'something' greater, Siofra. I do not chase shadows for the sake of the hunt. I am here because the trail ended the moment I caught the scent of sea salt on a mountain that has never known the tide. I have found exactly what I was looking for.” A ghost of a smirk, jagged and cold, touched his muzzle. „Now, I am simply deciding if I like the answer I’ve been given.”

I LOVE to see it

The woman continued her pace, dissecting his words, her ebony-tipped ears twitching as his lowered voice vibrated through the frigid air between them. He was carved by a past, one that remained enshrouded in mist. But to her, one thing seemed clear:
"You've already decided."
The words came as blunt as they were light. She could not see how the wraith could trek so closely-- a wisp from true touch-- otherwise. His admittance did not come as a shock to her, no. But the confirmation warped into something far more chilling than she had anticipated.
Gently, the calloused hands of memory reached to wrap around her throat. And, for the first time in moons, Siofra felt...humility. A humility that had nearly been laid to rest by time and many lonesome nights. ...Nearly.
He sought her, unaware of the irreparable stain which loomed above her image. A past that she refused to reface. Hidden by her secrecy.
And, between the two of them, it was her whose iron composure cracked first. A tremor in her breath that could have passed for cold. At last, Siofra turned her head to gaze upon the man's silvered face, her gait faltering as she stepped aside from his flank. 
If she harbored any ounce of respect for him, let it be known...  "I need you to understand," she spoke, a grit now present in her hushed tone-- barely detectable. "My side will bring you nothing but dishonor, Astier." And she did not elaborate further.
He claimed he did not chase for the sake of the hunt. But to a woman whose lineage was gilded by pride and servitude, dishonor was something far worse than caving to beastly desires.