Dawnlark Plains Pagwį

The silence gathered around him like mist curling at the hem of the earth. He stood still, as though carved from the very mountain she had named him after; an effigy of ice and stone shaped by storms long passed. The wind stirred faintly around his limbs, lifting pale strands from his mane-like fur and tugging at the dark ridges of his cloak. He impersonated a phantom made flesh, borne of some forgotten winter. Yet beneath the stillness, he breathed: and that breath carried the weight of unsaid words.
When her voice left her throat, his ears shifted barely. As though each word she offered was a ripple across a frozen lake, and he was listening not with his ears, but with something older, something deeper. His gaze, frostbitten and unwavering, found hers with the quiet gravity of a falling star. „You listen like the land,” a quiet remark. His voice was neither warm nor cold, only deliberate. „And answer like a stream through stone.” Her face seemed familiar.
Then came motion, slow and controlled, a shifting of his weight that rolled through his shoulders like distant thunder, a fluid descent from soldier to supplicant. He moved not as one with urgency, but with a grace born of caution and thought; as if lowering himself to the earth was a ritual. His limbs folded beneath him, the heavy cloak of his fur settling like snow across slate.
Across from her, he came to rest. There, in the hush between two wild things, he looked to the yarrow, then to her paw, stained faint with earth. And something shifted in his gaze: a recognition, ancient and solemn. „Something,” he repeated, voice quiet enough to let the wind through it, „Even if not what we ask.”
The wraith sat in silence, spine straight, but not rigid, the kind of stillness that came not from tension, but from mastery. His breath misted in the cool air, visible only for a heartbeat before vanishing. His tail coiled lightly around his side, a loose curve of shadow against frost-kissed soil. „I came to forget the voice of war,” he murmured then, words slipping like water from a high place. „But it follows.”
And though his eyes never left her, they softened minutely, as ice on high ridges just before spring. „You are not what I sought,” the ghost confessed, gaze falling to her hands once more. She was a shadow with a will of her own; restless, wandering, ever-changing. A wild thing shaped by dusk and distant roads, tethered to no soul; at least, not yet. „But you are what I found.” And he did not rise. He recognized the shape of her then, familiar as a dream half-remembered, the woman he had once met alongside the white mother, long ago, beneath a quieter sky.