Faintly, he hears the crunch of hooves on snow. They grow louder with the mare's approach. Good, the stallion thinks with his eyes closed. He has never truly feared death; he has his mother and her teachings of Valhalla to thank for that. His knowledge of the afterlife for fallen warriors has been a great source of comfort to him throughout his life, both in his childhood when his sire and many of his male relatives had died on the battlefield, but also in his military career, especially in those moments where he had felt his life's blood pumping just inches from the teeth of an enemy.

He waits.

Death does not come.

Instead, the crunching of the Yakut's hooves travel past and behind him, stopping close enough to his back that - had his senses been less numb - he might have felt the slight tickle of her legs against his fur. Grim's blue-brown eyes fly open. Overhead a cloudy lavender sky still hangs like a thick, velvet canvas, snow billowing down like giant motes of dust. On both sides of Grim's peripheral vision are smears the color of rust: to the east is the dawn sky, while behind him, the Yakut mare looms above. Grim lifts his head an inch from the snow to see the pale gleam of her bared teeth shining against the red of her face. What is she doing? he thinks, and for a moment he knows fear, real fear. She is not going to give him a clean death. She is going to stamp on his spine, leaving him to die in agony. She will deny his rightful passage to Valhalla, instead sending him to join Queen Hel and her realm of the dishonored dead.

Then the Yakut drops from his sight, and he feels the pressure of her body against his: not the hard, sharp pressure of hooves, but the soft, firm pressure of her barrel against his back. With what strength is left in him, he recoils, his body going stiff as a corpse, but she does not relent. Her neck drapes across him; her muzzle she lays in the curve of his throat, so that her warm breath blows onto the thin, delicate skin there.

Grim's eyes are wild, his ears buried in the ruin of his mane and his upper lip curled. "Fjandinn hafi þi--" he spits, or tries to; his clumsy tongue slurs the curse in his mouth. "Get off me. Get... get off..." He struggles feebly, but his body is too cold, too stiff, and too weak to fight her.

As the snow continues to blanket them both, Grim's fury abruptly leaves him. He stares blankly into the thickening blizzard, watching the snow endlessly swirl until the sky and ground become the same indistinguishable shade of pale gray. Everything is quiet, the sounds of the tundra muffled by the snow, and before he loses consciousness, Grim's last thoughts are of Frigg and how she had looked when he’d left her for the last time, with snowflakes dusting her flaxen mane.

He lies unconscious for close to an hour, his breath becoming shallow and his heartbeat slow, until the warmth of Valka's body and the thin blanket of insulative snow atop them begin their work on his broken body. The spark of life left in him is nurtured by the protection, like a tiny flame sheltered from the wind by cupped hands, and slowly it grows, filling him with warmth. His heartbeat strengthens; his breath steadies. Then he begins to shiver, and this is finally what wakes him.

The snowstorm has abated by the time he awkwardly extricates himself from Valka's embrace, and the light of a pale morning sky gleams on the sparkling crust of unbroken snow, near-blinding Grim as he struggles a few paces away. From head to toe, he trembles, and as feeling returns to his body, he becomes once more aware of the pain. Everywhere, from the cuts on his face to the sore patch of crest where his mane had been torn out, as well as the deep, sickly rattle in his chest and the raw flap of skin hanging from his flank: everything hurts, and the sharp teeth of the frigid breeze against his wounds do not help matters.

Neither does the knowledge of what he had just done with an óvinur. His skin crawls where she had touched him.

With shaking knees and chattering teeth, Grim mentally collects himself, and then looks back at the mare who had saved his life. His ears are buried in what's left of his mane, and his lip curls with disgust and anger. "Why?" he says simply, his voice little more than a low growl.