Meadow

The earthly storm had passed, but the sky turned and twisted still, a flat of dark grey mud churned roiling by soldiers' boots and dying, clutching fingers, the clouds slung low under the crippling weight of what he imagined must be incomprehensible heavens above it. Ozone ran its unkempt nails along the insides of his lungs, and the thickness of the air left his ice-studded garnet fur prickling. His thin flesh, taut like a ripe fruit on his narrow body, was not meant for this damp cold- and yet, winter after winter, he remained.

The dripping red ‘why?’ could be ignored, for when his foot came down upon the frozen grass with a little too much force, the fragile glasslike crackling drew a heretofore unnoticed spectre from the glittering dim. They summoned him with a soft sound, low and inviting in the dizzying illusion of the moonlight on drifting snow, and as his black eyes peered at their ghostly silhouette, he thought that something in the voice of their breathing was familiar- some pitch and texture drew him closer, though the invite alone would've done it, and yet his predatory approach was slower in the recognition. Only as he prowled nearer did she lose the eerie whiteness that he'd first construed- was that thick tangle of dark hair as black as it appeared? Were her eyes freckled with flecks of gold leaf, or was it simply the refraction of ten hundred times ten hundred snowflakes making galaxies of her stare?

“Do you think the ermine or fox will emerge first?” she breathed, and her whispered voice was a spear of recognition slicing a hushed arc through the heavy winter air by his straining ears, close enough he thought he felt the quiet blade of it part the fine hair of his cheekbone as it rushed by. Yes, that dark hair was pitch running down her hide, and there, at her shoulders, a dim glitter of twin obsidians like brooches holding the black velvet of her cloak across her back. His own breath gushed out of him like a violence, plumes of frosting condensation cascading from his grinning black mouth to her feet.

“Who’s to say they cannot travel together?” He did not whisper back, his rolling, shaped-bronze voice rippling through the mists around them seeming too large, too deep for his delicate bloody body; his slithering red throat that uncoiled in her direction as that distant warlike voice rang on. “If the ermine so chooses, I’m sure the fox would accompany her.”