Yith

All is still under the distant sun.

It has been this way for decades – nature itself silent and sleeping under a heavy blanket of snow and frost. The trees themselves barely dare to grow, inching up by mere centimeters as months and years pass, even this small progress often covered by the fall of further cold white flakes. The snow is six feet deep at the shallowest, over a dozen in the valleys that catch the wind’s burdens. Animals have long since given up foraging in this realm of endless winter -- only the smallest birds are able to survive, eating the tiny seeds that rest on the surface of the snow, doomed never to grow in this freezing wasteland.

Every bird in the forest takes flight, however, when a cry of challenge breaks over the frozen landscape. It echoes down from the mountaintop that had been dormant for so, so long…but now bore a single, smoldering plume of dark, staining the crystalline sky. A promise of flame, of heat, of an end to the eternal winter gripping the quiet, frozen land.

Yith

Awakens

One at a time her eyes open, down her face and neck, all along her spine – taking in the frozen cave around her – the air still vibrating with the awakener’s challenge. She stands, wings crackling with frost as she stretches the length of her body, every vertebrae preparing for the journey ahead. This is not the first time she has had to respond to Hracken’s call, and it will not be the last. However, as she steps carefully out from her snow drift and across the frozen pool, as she winds her way around the icy stalagmites that sparkle in the light reflected from outside, she feels no bitterness towards her long-time foe.

She plunges into the snow, running for the cliff’s edge with speed unhindered by the piles of white that explode with her passage. She leaps, casting herself off the top of the frozen waterfall, every frigid ripple and polished surface reflecting her glittering length as her wings snap open at the last second. She glides across the dark mirrored surface of the lake, admiring her reflection, and then a few beats carrying her upward, away from the solid water, onwards across the forest where the birds finally dare to peek out from the shadows.

The cold wind under her feathers is joy, is friendship, is life itself as she speeds towards the smoldering mountain.

And when Hracken sees her coming and bellows his challenge anew, she almost smiles.
Filling her lungs with icy air, she dives, her answering battle-cry hitting the mountain with jubilant, gleeful defiance.

It was worth her nap being disturbed for the chance to teach that old fool a lesson once more.