Stone Circle In a quiet kind of litany, she accepted some defeat

She had never been an older sibling; she hadn't gotten the chance. She was always the youngest, the baby of the family, the one they all obliged and protected. If she'd stayed, maybe she would have become an older sister the way she always expected to. But she'd left, and now it had happened, but not in the way she expected at all.
In some ways, she was still the one to be obliged and protected in this dynamic. Bjarna was young, but Reverie was beginning to understand the importance of her role in Kvarsheim. The reason no one had questioned her own presence here. It was odd to think of Bjarna as a leader and protector, but wasn't that what she was to Reverie?
Even in this moment, strangely, she felt like the child; the one who could not possibly understand the burdens Bjarna carried. Suddenly she remembered something Lestan had said, something she'd lost to the fog. We become odd when we live an odd life.
But we become kind, too, don't we? We become the things we lost, and the things we needed most and never found.
She wondered what had made Bjarna, the girl who carried hopes much older than her years and, for all that, was still a child at heart. But those thoughts were for another time, and besides, there it was!
It being a large pile of snow; not the stiff heavy kind, which Reverie had come to dislike, but the freshest snowfall. She had kicked the pile together just that morning, because she wanted a pile of snow and didn't trust any of the naturally-formed ones. For all she knew, there could be something inside of those. So she had made her own, not really expecting to share it with anyone. She was delighted for the opportunity, though.
She skidded to a halt before they reached the mound of snow, which was about twice the size of herself. For a second she struggled to redirect her focus from Bjarna to the snow, and the resulting moment of confusion had her half-turning to the girl as she stopped. If Bjarna didn't prove more graceful than Reverie was being just then, there was a good chance of a high speed crash.