Channeler

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The cold keeps him company. But what of love? Of hope and might? He laughs, some strange sentiment frozen stiff in his eyes. Alongside him his shadow smirks separately, then points out towards the mountain range. Where the snow settles and secures the ancient ways. Out over morning, catching colors off the sun.

The war washed away everything. He shook the shackles from his ribcage and his ankles and banished himself into some nameless place even further north, where the killing could not come. No... here a different kind of death, silent and slow, the creeping ice and the snowfall cloaking mountain peaks, covering up their crowns. There is a gentle anger in him, solemn, secretive. He looks out into the sky and swipes a finger, letting stream a show of magic--an aurora borealis, partnered with broken shadows, with storms. The lights bow and bend to his voice--soft, alluring. Alluding to the eternal hold of winter winds and dark tides.

Yes, here the cold rules. He calls the dead to his door, in that same haunting voice, barely a whisper, barely a breath. His spells are all spun out of something cryptic, the frost, the clinging of death to a frozen corpse. The shadows at his feet writhe and deepen. And in the language of the dead, he forms words, having given his name to those powers.

The crests of the mountains will fall, he observes. The dead seem to agree, and he dismisses them with grace. Away, across boundary lines they blur, and he, alone with his shadow slips away against the crevices and along the slopes, to the shelter he knows only as home. Night claims the ice as quickly as day comes.

The blizzard steadies sometimes, calms, departs. But the storm inside him, old and nameless, still blows heavy on the heart.