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Sylvi could not see the stars. They should have been looking back at her like a thousand faraway eyes winking against the dark canvas of the sky. She should have been able to follow their milky curve like a path, should have been able to smile at the constellations she had made up as a child—the owl in mid-flight, the leaping frog, the rearing stallion—like they were old friends. But tonight it was all obscured by a wall of opaque, low-hanging gray, and when Sylvi looked up she was forced to blink rapidly against a sheet of freezing rain.
She shivered, and was glad at least that it was still too warm for snow. Though her mother had told her theirs was the old blood of northern horses—that ice was in their veins—Sylvi felt as though it wasn't in hers at all. Her first snow had been a magical thing, spent chasing the falling crystals and bulldozing the drifts like an avalanche, but once the novelty had worn off she had driven her mother mad asking over and over when the flowers would come back.
This year was her third winter, and perhaps it was because it was her first alone, with only the memory of her mother to keep her company on her return journey to the islands, but Sylvi was coming to find that the bleakness of the season was pulling her mood into a fathomless pit. She no longer wanted to rise with the sun; she wanted to stalk the night like a panther, wallowing in her solitude as she was tonight. Let the bright starkness of the daylight and snow stay far away. She did not want to remember how her mother looked with the sun in her hair, or how she called Sylvi's white markings, with the way they licked up her legs and belly and face, to contrast starkly against the iron-gray of her body, her 'snow-spray'.
Tonight the rain and the sea were her company. She stood a stone's-throw away from the shore with one hind leg cocked, in the lee of a boulder that was choked with scraggly shrubs, her eyes turned, unfocused, towards the gaping black maw of the sea. Without so much as starlight to brighten its surface, the water was a hypnotic void, almost ethereal and dream-like in its darkness. Sylvi felt comforted by it. It was a boon to know there was something out there even blacker than her heart.
"Another lost soul?" she murmured when a shadow loomed out of the dark toward her. It did not move hastily, so she did not feel threatened, and indeed hardly moved at all, turning only one gleaming wet ear toward the stranger while her gaze remained fixed on the sea. She might have mourned the loss of her alone time, but instead felt only numbness. Perhaps it was the freezing rain. She shivered again.