Duskfire Glacier you ever go hungry 'til you keeled over?

he was going to die.

it felt tangible in his legs and his chest and his mind. hadn't he been here before? in the snow, awaiting the colder clutches of an end.

it hadn't even been that long ago! he recalled all the blood in the snow, he recalled the smell of bear on them beneath that copper smell.

sword had been there, alongside him.

now sword was gone because quen had been stupid. foolish. dumb. emotional.

he exhaled and felt the burn of it all again. his legs refused to move anymore, they burned too. the pain in his body had become too great to ignore.

he moaned, he wailed, rendered useless among the ice and snow on the glacier. he felt like a spirit here in these times. the way he could only, wordlessly, express the anguish that raked through him with the harsh teeth of the bear.

his wailing and moaning grew louder.

Hope you dont mind a Metis!

It was a rare thing when the firestarter chose to be philosophical. She preferred to let life pass her by, unknowing and unseeing of anything she caused.

It wasn't like that now. 

She thought of it as she walked. The snow piled on her shoulders and her head, burying her in white. She was a ghost, now, little more than a wraith of the white glacier. She thought of her home, the Weald and the Shadewood before it. She thought of her brothers, why she hadn't dedicated herself to finding them. And, well, that was simple wasn't it? They’d blame her. She was the problem child, the reason her mother had left, the idiot kid who didn't know or understand what she was doing to the woman when she ran off in pursuit of glory. Metis wasn't the future of any pack.

She was just Metis. Just the white, haunting ghost, her monochrome mother’s opposite. So, on she plowed through the snow, fueled by her own bout with teenage angst. The only thing to draw her attention from it was the moaning and wailing of something distant. It connected to something in the hindbrain of the girl, some old predator’s instinct from way back when, when her ancestors had first developed teeth and taken their first meals. Helpless, small creatures, it whispered, needed to feed the strong.

She turned, unerringly, towards the cries. It would only be as she drew close that she would recognize the wolf notes, and stop, a vision of white in the middle distance. Then, she would raise her nose, howling a haunting note in reply to the wailing. She did not know this wolf’s angst, but she would share it.

something sung back.

spirits old, spirits burning. it seemed as haunted as he felt in that moment.

he wailed back. prepared to continue this communion with the spirit that had found him upon the glacier. let the world hear him. laid bare for all to see, to witness, to judge.

he began to sob at the end of the sound. choked and gurgled upon his own body made saltwater.

The shrieking wail of the distant wolf was harsh in her ears, like glass breaking, or wind howling. The girl breathed out a sharp breath, casting cold steam into the air. Were she anything softer, anything less that the hard edges she was, she would have felt the noises heartbreaking.

She raised her voice again, the song speaking of shared pain. She did not draw closer, just remaining a vision of white.

he could not call back out.

his voice was strangled in his sobs. dying out in his throat.

maybe the spirit would be gone, just as quickly as it had arrived.

But she did not.

The sobbing was a distant noise, barely caught by the hairs of her ears. The animal that longed for companionship that had long burrowed into her chest when her brain silenced it begged and howled for her to go closer, to comfort where she could.

So closer did she go, just a few steps, gliding across the snow. In this moment, she was graceful, quiet, her features blanked out by the white snow.

Metis released a low noise, a crooning thing, gentle. A question, and a request for an answer.

she was a ghost.

and quen carried with him a long list of ghosts. each more haunting than the last. maybe she would haunt him too and he'd have another ghost to carry with him.

a warbled, strained note escaped him between his crying. and for the first time in days, he wished someone was there to cradle him while he cried.

He did not speak, nor did he run as she drew closer. Steam like smoke rose from her nose, like she banked a thousand fires in the forge of her chest.

The warbling noise twanged an odd chord in her chest that could have been misshapen maternal instinct, yet another instinctual tripwire. Her wet nostrils flared, grown cracked by the cold, but she went forward, slowly, carefully, until she could reach out with her nose, just to touch the nape of the boy in front of her.

and it set him on fire, fittingly.

something sparked in his brain and he felt the lowly wanting of company. of family. of friends. only to know he had signed it all away. given it up in a moment of pained selfishness.

never to get it back, he thought.

his cries turned into tired, heaving sobbed sighs. and tired he reached for her. wondering if she too might vanish into the snowy winds.

The boy reached for her. And she ached for him in that moment, like knowing like, the grief that wrapped her shoulders in grey like a funeral veil. 

It wasn’t hard to arrange her body against the wind, to lay her head atop his neck, to huff out warm clouds of breath against his neck fur. There was nothing to say to make this any easier for either of them.

So she said nothing, and waited for sunrise.