Moonstone Quarry dragonspine

She walked a pace ahead, but not to lead, only because it was easier to breathe when she wasn’t looking directly at him. The mist clung to her limbs as she moved, swirling soft and slow around her ankles, like the past trying to hold her still. But her steps were deliberate, light yet sure, her shoulder blades rising and falling with each breath she dared to take.
His presence lingered at her side, quiet as always, but steady, as the thrum of distant thunder held just beneath the earth. She felt it in the way the air shifted near her flank, in the faint sound of stone giving way beneath his larger paws. It did not unnerve her. Not anymore. Hs words brushed her ears like a warm current beneath ice. They settled deep, past the places she usually kept locked, stirring something older than grief, older than fear.
The frostmaiden halted; only for a heartbeat. Her paw hovered above the ground before she let it fall again with purpose. Her head tilted just enough for her eyes to catch his golden gaze; a glimmer of reflection in pale glacier-blue, framed by lashes still damp with fog. „Then let it remember,” she murmured back, voice a breath between stone and silence, „that even ghosts leave footprints.”
The smallest smile touched her mouth; not wide, not bright, but real, as the first crack of thaw after a long winter. Her shoulder brushed Solharr in passing. She didn’t flinch. „I used to think survival meant silence,” she continued, softer now, as if afraid the moment might vanish if she spoke too loud. „But maybe it means being heard... even without words.”
A pause. Her steps slowed, and for once, she didn’t race ahead: „I don’t mind the sound of your steps beside mine.” And though she did not turn again, the warmth that rose beneath her fur betrayed her. Not shame, not embarrassment, but something quieter: hope for the future. Aneira would not let herself forget the vow his heart once made to another; that history was not hers to rewrite. But she did not shy from the warmth between them: she allowed it, accepted it. Let it linger like the warmth of sunlight through frost: fleeting, but real.