take what you can Posted on August 3, 2021 at 06:42:42 AM by Rade
rade
Winter’s deadly jaws had closed on the throat of the Crossing, suffocating everything that was green and flourishing beneath a crystalline layer of frost. Forcing squirrels and rabbits and voles into their burrows where they would waste precious weeks of their brief, warm lives as prisoners. But even there, it would not stopped— even there, it was not sated. Like a fist closing tightly over the roan stallion’s gaunt body, the cold sought to claim Rade, too. It raked frigid claws of wind across his ragged gold coat, burned in the hollow of his chest. And where that proved insufficient to move the Lagoon’s Boss, it bored beneath his skin and gnawed at his aching joints, sending tongues of fire to lace through his long-damaged shoulder in particular.
Ice and fire, fire and ice. They’d always coexisted within the slender stallion, but now they had somehow united without as well. Was the world so determined to destroy him? Rade didn’t know, he didn’t know. What he did know— watching the misty plume of his breath melt away into nothingness— was that he could no longer endure the season passively, as he’d done in his youth. If winter was a pack of howling wolves, then he had become their favored prey. A creature weakened by age, left vulnerable by injury, and laid bare by grief. A creature whose sparsely-guarded life could serve to nourish countless others. But the altruism of such a sacrifice was beyond Rade, who would always be selfish beneath the polished armor of his humanity.
If there were lives that might be spared in the loss of his own, then let them fight for it.
Breaking free of the thorned fingers that clutched at his white-dusted hide, the old bachelor staggered from his sanctuary and into the pale light of early dawn. Behind him, the Lagoon was entombed beneath a heavy veil of silence, grey and bleak and still. Ahead… Rade’s tattered ears swung forward, his nostrils flared. There was nothing to find, nothing, but he continued north anyway. Chasing the ghost of a memory, the shadow of a dream. Following a path he’d taken in what might have been another lifetime entirely; a lifetime in which he’d had a family and a heart and a home. And though he tread over bare soil and frost-dewed grass, in his mind’s eye the roan saw bone-white sand and bright green palms. In his mind, the distant hum of the falls was the soft murmur of the sea, and the sun shone as brightly as his golden-bronze coat once had.
The dark shape he inevitably found might have been conjured from such wistfulness as well. But to Rade, the line between reality and memory had blurred. To Rade, she was real, this girl-child who’d once splashed in the waves of a kingdom that had never been truly his— just as the filly herself had never been. Not that such a truth had ever stopped him from claiming her. Not that it could stop him now from stumbling forward on wooden limbs, a shambling corpse seeking absolution from the ghosts of his past. “Jaws?” The single syllable was more plea than question or greeting. Styrke and Conquistador, Sciannath and Fiero, Cherish and Fatale. Gone, all of them gone. He’d been left alone to bear the burden of his crown, to bear the weight of his regrets.