Ashe
Early dawn spills gold over the snow, painting Halo in a light it doesn’t deserve.
I’d flown in yesterday, wings carrying me over miles of frostbitten emptiness, the horizon carved sharp in winter’s hand. Yes—I’m still tracking her. I wouldn’t call it stalking, and “hovering” sounds far too soft, but… it is. Theea is grown, stubborn in all the ways I was, yet still I can’t loosen the tether in my chest. I know she’s safe in the Citadel for now, with plans to return home in the morning, so I force myself away from the gates. At first light, I’m gone.
This place… gods. Halo has teeth, and it’s bitten me before. The worst of my memories live here—more bitter than the Guild, sharper than any old wound.
Kalt’s death. That pain outweighs them all.
Maybe that’s why I find it easier to wear my furs here, shifting into a form that feels safer, a black wolf slipping through the shadows of the pines. I pad through underbrush, paws crunching on the thin crust of snow left in the night’s quiet hours. It won’t last the day, but it bites cold against my pads in a way I both love and hate. It drags me into the present—the scent of clean ice, the frost-laced branches, the sound of distant water—and keeps me from drowning in old grief.
I don’t like the cold, but I grew up in it. This stretch of Halo feels just enough like home and just different enough not to break me. I don’t have memories with Kalt here, though I know he’d have loved it—running with me through the trees, wind in our fur. The thought jabs deep in my chest, sharp and unkind.
It’s then that something cuts through the ache. A new scent on the air.
Familiar. Vaguely. I can’t place it, but it tugs at me like a frayed thread. My ears snap forward, sharp and alert, my head lowering toward the snow. Golden eyes narrow and gleam, catching the early light as my breath plumes in the cold, listening, searching the treeline.
I’d flown in yesterday, wings carrying me over miles of frostbitten emptiness, the horizon carved sharp in winter’s hand. Yes—I’m still tracking her. I wouldn’t call it stalking, and “hovering” sounds far too soft, but… it is. Theea is grown, stubborn in all the ways I was, yet still I can’t loosen the tether in my chest. I know she’s safe in the Citadel for now, with plans to return home in the morning, so I force myself away from the gates. At first light, I’m gone.
This place… gods. Halo has teeth, and it’s bitten me before. The worst of my memories live here—more bitter than the Guild, sharper than any old wound.
Kalt’s death. That pain outweighs them all.
Maybe that’s why I find it easier to wear my furs here, shifting into a form that feels safer, a black wolf slipping through the shadows of the pines. I pad through underbrush, paws crunching on the thin crust of snow left in the night’s quiet hours. It won’t last the day, but it bites cold against my pads in a way I both love and hate. It drags me into the present—the scent of clean ice, the frost-laced branches, the sound of distant water—and keeps me from drowning in old grief.
I don’t like the cold, but I grew up in it. This stretch of Halo feels just enough like home and just different enough not to break me. I don’t have memories with Kalt here, though I know he’d have loved it—running with me through the trees, wind in our fur. The thought jabs deep in my chest, sharp and unkind.
It’s then that something cuts through the ache. A new scent on the air.
Familiar. Vaguely. I can’t place it, but it tugs at me like a frayed thread. My ears snap forward, sharp and alert, my head lowering toward the snow. Golden eyes narrow and gleam, catching the early light as my breath plumes in the cold, listening, searching the treeline.
inside my blood and bone
and their network of tendon and meat
you and i, our histories of hunting
and being the beast.
