Moonsong Glacier Dreams of what I once claimed to know.

;___;

when kukutux lifted her head, revui ostrega had ceased to be. how many times had she seen the look of death upon a calm face? and yet the vision of his sightless eyes staring off to where his spirit had walked broke something deep within the duck. she rocked back upon her haunches, a cry rising strangled in her throat and cascading into the guttural keen meant to guide him skyward.

her mind closed to his name.

to call

revui

to speak it now would be to tether him to the glacier forever. faceless. nameless. a ghost must be allowed to untie itself from the earth, and to do such, it must forget the name it wore in the waking world. tilting back her head, the ticking sounds from her throat taking on the rhythmic cadence she had sung before; lying grandfather to lie within the charnel heap, arranging him so that he would enter the dancing lights reborn.

kukutux rose, the death-song echoing in all her bones; her chest, her mouth, her paws; stained with his blood,

she left a smeared trail of red as she stepped nine times around the body that had once housed the spirit of the trader; shattering, fracturing, singing, singing; voice twining into a howl that carried from the ice of his body to moonspear, to the glen, a shout that reverberated between stone and ice with the force of her great and horrible sorrow. 

and when at last she stopped, kukutux nosed the body's cooling limbs — jerking her mind from his name his name his name — until the man lay where he had fallen, curved against the womb of the cold world as a child might emerge from its mother's body, ready to be reborn among the long lights that danced in the night sky.

"nine days," she grit to keres, voice hoarse and filled with tears. it was an empty expression she turned toward the grey woman, brother-blood drying in bright splashes upon her pale fur. darken, darken as the night came. "moonspear was not his home. i bury him here." her love for hydra vied with the unspoken wish of the stone-man, and she knew in her marrow she would help to unclasp him from the edge of the world here in the coldness of the winterbound glacier where he had fallen.

beneath another time, another place, the duck might have more words for silent, watchful keres, but she could only feel herself fade beneath new noiseless tears as she turned away, moving off some distance in her singing to set her paws against the frosted earth and begin the formation of his death ulaq. she would not come home that evening, nor the next, nor the next, nor the next; kukutux bound herself to the taste of his blood turning to ash upon her tongue and would not leave his bones until she knew he had left her and gone fully to walk in the next world.