I
thought you were a ghost, when I saw you.

“You are not the first,” she says, her chin still tucked close to her chest and the words one long, shuddering breath.

Still—there is a hint of steel there, of iron will to bend and perhaps fracture but never break. If there is a hint of strength then the rest of her is whimsical, sleek and fleeting. When she lifts her face towards the mare that had so kindly—or perchance fortuitously—found her amongst what remained of the mountain’s winter snowdrifts Derry finds that she is grace embodied. She tilts her chin high so that she can see her, more shadow than figure in the half-light.

The taut lines of her small, aching body soften perceptibly and she drops her face back down towards her feet.

“I will be sorry to disappoint,” she returns, a quickness in her now that might be unexpected, from a creature such as her, sleek lines and bleached bones, “but I had hoped to stay; I am certain that camouflage will come in handy, some day. My name is Derry.”

There is nothing meaningful about it, but the soft way it sounds rolling around her mouth, off of her tongue. She closes her mouth around the word and it pops, like baby pink bubblegum.

“And if you are not Athena, or Hippolyta, then we shall both be equally disappointed,” the dexterity with which her words had been wielded has long since fled; now she is soft, sloping smiles and rounded eyes. The moon reflects back off the darkness of them; the things she has seen unfathomable or inconsequential. Her back trembles again and she steels herself against the cold.

Something in her chest has rooted where once before it may have loosened, and slipped away. She holds on to it now with fists desperately clenched. The dusky amazon who stands before her is frozen glory; Derry wonders, briefly, if she has ever seen anything so magnificent.

She will not tremble, she thinks, not for much longer.