Life was an endless string of trials and errors. Errors that usually resulted in failures. But failures that amounted in lessons learned. As soon as his eyes had opened, as soon as the truth had been revealed that he would never look upon the sun as it rose over Glorall's eastern coast, he'd been marked. Marked as inconsequential, as inferior, as deformed. A curse had been laid upon his head, perhaps by the very father who had spawned him, before he'd ever had a fighting chance.
Blindness prevented the boy from running down the beach in carefree delight. Instead, each step he took was calculated. He ventured further from the familiar terrain that surrounded the den he'd been born to each day, testing the boundaries of what was known to him. He was only a pup, and he still made mistakes that often led to him tripping over something that hadn't been in his path the day prior or scraping himself on an unanticipated rock that he walked too close to. Sometimes he wondered if Esdeath and Keturah went out to the trails he'd become confident in traversing and purposely put something in his way so that he'd look like a fool.
Onwards he continued, with his peculiar fashion of walking. Though he only walked a fraction of a second slower than his siblings normally would, if one watched closely it was noticeable why. He would test the soil beneath his paw with partial pressure before fully setting his foot down and moving the next. In this way he made his way down the beach, until a sound to his right caught his attention and he froze midstep. Placing the paw back down to the print it had just been raised from, his nostrils flared and he turned his head towards the sound. Twin snow white ears perked forward, attuned to something he could not smell at first. Finally his entire body pivoted and his hindquarters sank to the sank as he faced the channel. For some months now the beach had become quieter than normal, and he'd discovered the reason why when he'd ventured closer one day only to find the coldest, hardest surface his young paws had touched. Ice, he'd been told. The channel had frozen solid. Now noise came from where none had come for months. It was a groaning sound, infrequent and inconsistent, but a groaning none the less. And so Cartel sat, unseeing eyes staring out at the island that he thought he would never be able to visit, wondering what the lament of the ice meant.
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