Her breath comes short in the night air—smoke rolling insipid from her nostrils. She is no dragon cast in wreaths of moonlight, but instead an ethereal wraith-creature draped in seaweed and salt to dance across the grass. The moon on her skin casts long shadows. These are the terrible deceptions: her muscles ripple beneath her skin, her jaw is wide, slathering, her eyes are coal and seamless. Her eyelashes brush against her cheekbones as she moves. Her jaw is a tapered, elegant point.

For now she is unremarkable, a daughter of the earth stained muddy brown; but come summertime she will bloom, however belatedly, like petals opening to the sun on her back. She is a girl of a peculiarly independent bent —

(she had longed to strike out on her own, and here, now, briny and feathered and shivering with her little feet planted in the snow, she has accomplished it)

— and yearns for nothing more than this. For now, then, she is unremarkable, but contented. She breathes in and her lungs shudder. She breathes in ice and frost and exhales brimstone, the uneven pearls of her spine trembling in the cold. Her muscles bunch beneath her skin and even then they are paltry, pathetic things; they scream for oxygen and the thin mountain air evades them, tantalising and ticklish and brushing against her lazily, bringing her up in gooseflesh.

Derry wonders if they will think her cowardly — these unbending warrior women forged from cold steel — for she trembles like a child ripped from its mother's side but blames it, wide-eyed and earnest, on the cold.

She doesn’t call attention to herself. She doubts, curling her small face into her breast, whether she could call forth the effort required to loudly beg admission.

She is so very cold.