Duskfire Glacier mountain bone

uktark did not shift when she pressed into him. did not flinch when her breath warmed the fur along his throat. his gaze held forward, fixed on nothing and on everything—on memories burned into ice, on ghosts that still clung to the stone of this place. the weight of it sat on him like a pelt still damp with old blood.
her words brushed against him, soft where his world had only ever known hard edges. he let them settle. let them fill the quiet between them. but silence was still his first language, and grief was its dialect.
at length, his breath left him in a slow, rough exhale.
tartok, he said, voice gravel and shadow. is way of life.
the truth of it hung in the cold air.
he did not lift his head. did not straighten. he only let the next words break from somewhere deeper, from bone and loss.
mate gave it to me, a pause, a shift of muscle beneath her touch, before she died.
the memory tightened the line of his jaw.
he closed his eyes briefly, as if bracing against something sharp. perhaps it was the pain in his heart.
i lose everything to become it. a beat. closer to a confession than he had ever allowed. to become sangilak.
[indent[uktark’s gaze swept the hollow, the furs, the stone, the empty spaces where other scents used to live.
this was home.