Bramblepoint old wounds

Voice did not leave her ivory throat. His words hung in the air steady, unshaken, stone shaped and fractured by wind and time. Clean, not an invitation nor a promise, a reality. Ashen ears flickered, she did not blink, nor did she bristle, though something in the marrow of her quietude shifted, as ice underfoot before the thaw.
„Endurance is not the same as belonging.” The syllables left her cool and steady, a truth sculpted by time rather than grievance. There was no wistfulness in them, no yearning for what had been lost, only the weight of knowing, the acceptance of a life shaped by absence as much as presence. For a breath, she lingered, gaze tracing the spaces between branches, where shadows pooled like ghosts unspoken. A name is not a place; no, but it could be something close. Frostmaiden stepped forward, for the briefest moment eyeing Solharr.
They were so different, yet so alike; both slashed and quelled by the weight of the past, carrying it like a mantle. If this Forneskja was half what the flameborn is, then it was surviving. 
She could stand beside a man that shared her values, carved from stone, who understood loss. Yet, she would not yield with ease; the earth had crumbled beneath her once before. She rose then, frostbitten and unbowed.