Archive of Our Own ^beta

~*~

“In the depth of winter, I found there lay, within me, an invincible summer.” - Albert Camus

~*~

Autumn was always your favorite time of year. When the humid heat gave way to cool, crisp winds and the leaves on the trees turned golden and red in proud botanical displays. The scent of earth and hay and the hurried working of the farmers as they brought in their harvests. 

It was a time of abundance. Of joy, soft and warm in your chest, like a flickering flame from a candle. 

Or, at least, it usually was. 

~*~

“It’ll kill them,” the elders whisper in panicked voices, staring at vegetables blackened with frost and huddling around the glowing embers of a hastily lit fire. The early winters were getting harsher every year, killing the crops before they could be harvested, bringing disease and ice and snow drifts nearly as tall as the trees.

“The children won’t survive,” the elders whisper in panicked voices, staring at the shivering babes swaddled in worn woolens and cradled against their mothers’ breasts. The months of cold will drag on and on, frail bodies unable to survive the harsher winds of ice and frost.

“The gods are displeased,” the elders whisper in panicked voices, staring at the flurries of snow drifting from the heavens. White and swirling, puddling on the frozen ground beneath their feet. Soon it will pile tall and the strongest of their farmers will brave the weather to shovel the snow and salt the earth before the trade routes close entirely. Eventually, they’ll run out of salt. They always do.

“It’s been three years,” the elders whisper in panicked voices. “We must do something before the gods kill us all.”

~*~

The elders weren’t cruel. That was the worst part about it, you think, as you pack a meagre supply of food and clothes into a worn canvas satchel.

They weren’t cruel or mean or demanding. They’d asked you. Quietly, in the dead of night where no prying eyes or listening ears could overhear, they’d asked you if you’d be willing to make the journey to the winter gods. To beg their leniency. To serve them for a time, if need be, in return for bringing some measure of relief to your small frozen village.

And it made sense, their asking of you. You knew it made sense to ask you, of all people, to make the journey. You had no family left to speak of—all having long moved away or passed on years ago—and your small little stall in the flea market decorated with bouquets of wildflowers and fresh baked breads and jars of honey and clotted cream, while charming, wasn’t exactly the most prosperous.

You wouldn’t be missed. And you would do the village good.

So. No. The elders weren’t cruel or mean or demanding. They’d asked you. And you, in that quiet dead of night, sitting at the worn wooden kitchen table and stoking the dying embers of coal in the stove to boil the water for a spot of tea, agree without question. Without second guessing.

In the end, when you’re walking away from the cottage to the village square, you think the only cruel one is yourself.

~*~

The forest is nothing like the village.

You think maybe you should have been prepared for that. That maybe you should have been more conscientious when you were packing your bag. Or maybe that you should have bought different shoes, ones that didn’t slip and skid on mud and ice and snow.

It seemed every step you took into the forest the landscape grew dimmer, darker, colder . A hostile, frozen wasteland. Quiet but for the sound of your own feet crunching through the snow, bare trees dotting the skyline seeming at first beautiful then growing more threatening as the sun began to set. A teeming mass of black vipers looming overhead, swaying with each gust of blustery cold wind.

The cold bit into you. Nipping past layers of wool and cotton, sending shivers down your spine and gooseflesh up your arms. It even sunk past the leather sole of your shoes, chilling your toes in their knit stockings.

The cold made it hard to think. To breathe. To blink your eyes.

You thought of the heat of the stove of your kitchen, the scent of herbal tea lingering in the air, and a warm bed calling your name. It was almost enough to have you turning your back, trudging back through the drifts of snow and telling the elders you’d changed your mind. The night was too long. The shadows too dark. The cold too bitter.

They could ask someone else.

~*~

And then came the wolf and all rational thought left your head.

~*~

You heard it before you saw it. The snapping of twigs, the odd cadence of steps behind you. Sound where before there had only been the panting of your own shivering breaths. 

And then you saw it, silken black mass slipping between the trees, golden eyes flashing in the darkness.

You ran.

Fast. Hard. Not bothering to look behind to see if it was chasing after you, shoving tree branches and snow covered brush out of the way with frozen fingers. Slipping and tumbling on hidden rocks in the snow. Lungs burning in the confines of your chest.

You could hear its howl in the distance. A long, low wail rising in pitch. It sounded further away than you’d thought. Perhaps it hadn’t seen you. Hadn’t smelled you or hadn’t thought the meal was worth the chase.

It’s relief mingled with blood-curdling fear that pounds at your temples, then, sinking your knees into the snow beneath the alder tree you cling to. Relief that your blood still lies within your veins and not staining the snarling muzzle of a beast stronger than any you’ve known. 

And the fearful knowledge that you are hopelessly, irrevocably lost.

~*~

It’s the tickle on your nose that wakes you.

Feathery soft, barely a brush of sensation against your skin. For a moment, stalled between the waking world and the sleeping one, you lose your grip on your memories. For a moment, you are suspended in time. Warm in the confines of your bed, eyes squinting closed to block out the morning dawn streaming through the window curtains.

For a moment, you forget.

A second tickle has you wrinkling your nose, grunting softly as you swipe cold fingers against the appendage. Laughter hits your ears, soft and lyrical, and you blink open your eyes sleepily at the sound.

Violet irises meet your own and you startle with a yelp, rearing your head back and scraping it against the bark of the tree behind you.

“Woah, woah,” says the owner of the eyes, raising both hands in a placating gesture as you cup the back of your bruised head with a hiss. There’s a paintbrush tucked under the thumb of his right hand, the wooden handle speckled with paint. Smudges against the linen cuff of his sleeve. 

Over his shoulder is a man, face a careful mask of blank impassivity that does nothing to quell the thump-thump ing of your heart.

“Didn’t mean to startle you,” the purple eyed man crouched before you says, drawing your gaze back to his. He flips the brush in his hand, waggling the bristles at your face. “Your nose was such a pretty shade of pink, I couldn’t help myself.”

Your hands dart from your head to your nose and the man laughs, head tilting back to bare his throat as he flings himself back in the snow. Overhead, the sky is clear and bright, and you swear you can hear the sound of birdsong echoing his laughter.

“Okay, that’s it,” The man looming above sighs, startling you, pinching the bridge of his nose. “You’ve had your fun, come on. Let’s go. We’ve got work to do.”

“Oh, come on,” the other says, spreading his arms in the snow beneath him like an angel spreading its wings. “Stop being such a stick in the mud, Harry, and live a little.”

“I’ve lived for several millennia, Teo.”

The man—or Teo, you suppose—scowls, flicking his hand up so a shower of snow cascades against Harry’s pant leg. “Not what I meant and you know it.”

“Maybe you should be a little clearer next time,” Harry says, neatly sidestepping a second rain of snow.

“Maybe you should stop being such an absolute fu—“

“I’m sorry, did you say millennia ?” You interrupt, drawing two pairs of surprised eyes to your own. You get the distinct impression they’d both forgotten your presence. “Are you the winter gods?”

There is a moment of pause where Teo and Harry stare at you. And then another pause, eyes turning to regard each other with wary bafflement. Teo sits up slowly, hair crusted with snow. A flake clings to one of his eyelashes, trembling there and giving him an oddly ethereal expression.

He looks more like a nymph than a god, you think.

His eyes flicker down to the torn fabric of your skirt, the smattering of bloody scratches trailing your arms, and frowns.

“We should get you cleaned up.”

~*~

The cottage, when you crest the treeline blocking it from view, is one of the most stunning sights you’ve had the pleasure of witnessing. With snow dusting its brownstone facade and tendrils of ivy—long since having lost their leaves to the freezing weather—still clinging to the eaves of a snow covered rooftop, the warm glow of firelight dancing in frosted windowpanes, and smoke puffing from its twin chimneys. A well sits beneath twin oak trees, their branches barren and dripping with icicles that sparkle in the sunlight, in what might be a garden or courtyard beneath all the snow.

Behind the cottage you can see the outline of another building—too small to be a barn, maybe a root cellar—half built into a roll of hill. Dotted in the snow, everywhere you look, are the remnants of toadstools and autumn flowers turned brown and dead in the frost, barely peeking their fragile heads from layers of snow.

In front of you, Harry and Teo are bickering amongst themselves, Teo occasionally sending you small, blinding smiles over his shoulder. The distance you’d trekked through the forest hadn’t been far but it had taken longer than it ought, with Teo stopping every few feet to point out some foliage or fauna to you, eyes glittering like starlight, and Harry huffing and—more than once—gripping Teo’s ear in a fierce grip and tugging him along.

Teo retaliated with shoving a fistful of snow—that he’d created, you noticed with a startled sort of awe—directly down the back of Harry’s jacket. Harry glowered at the man, shaking the snow from his back, as Teo rolled with laughter in the snow.

By the time you’d reached the cottage the bickering, while not having ceased, had lessened to Teo’s teasing comments and Harry’s increasingly darkening glare. All the while, Teo looking over his shoulder at you as if anticipating your reaction. The best you could muster were weak smiles.

It wasn’t that you hadn’t wanted to laugh, it was only that you were…well. Scared was not perhaps the right word, but it was certainly somewhere close. Frissons of unease tingling down your spine.

Neither of them had answered your question.

And as the cottage came into view, your heart stuttering in your chest, you wonder if maybe that’s all the answer you need. Certainly, mortals couldn’t make snow with their bare hands. Nor could they traipse through the snow in bare feet like Teo, lighter than the air itself, bending to pluck frost covered rudbeckias from the snow.

“Look, this one almost made it,” he says, stretching the bloom out towards you. Half-faded petals of yellow and orange encased in a thin layer of ice. Cradled against your palm, the light catches and sparkles against the ice like a gem, fragile and precious.

You nearly drop the bloom when a sharp crack echoes through the clearing.

“Oh, look, Quest is here,” Teo says, smiling, and you follow his line of sight to the other side of the property where a great, hulking mass is shifting in the trees.

You scream. Teo blinks. Harry sighs.

“It’s just Quest,” Teo says when your scream cuts off, vestiges of amusement twinkling in his eyes when you duck behind his shoulder, fingers gripping at one paint-stained sleeve.

“That is a wolf .”

“Right,” Teo agrees. “Like I said, it’s Quest.”

You open your mouth to respond, cut off again when the hulking beast shifts, a wavering mass of black that breaches the treeline and stalks into the clearing. Your fingers curl even further into Teo’s sleeve, tugging him back with a hissed,

“What is a Quest? ”

“Are we still feeling sleepy?” Teo laughs, bright and crystalline, reaching one hand back to grasp at your wrist, prying your fingers away. “I told you, that ’s Quest. He’s going to help you out.”

“He’s not—,” you stumble a little, resisting only slightly when Teo tugs you out from behind him, waving his free hand in the air with a call of greeting. “He’s not going to eat me or something, is he?”

Teo blinks. Frowns. “No? I don’t think he eats humans. Did you want me to ask?”

“Since when do wolves talk ?”

“Most wolves are not this wolf,” Teo says, smile glittering where he peers at you. Harry, from the other side of Teo, rolls his eyes. 

“You’re both being ridiculous,” he says just as the wolf—Quest, your brain helpfully supplies—saunters up, snow dusting the fur around his muzzle, golden eyes glinting from beneath a brow of pitch black fur. 

The wolf shivers, shaking the snow from his face as Teo crouches in front of him, running hands over his flank and scratching behind his ears, laughing when Quest sits back on his haunches, tail thumping in the snow at a sedate pace.

“Be careful,” you can just barely hear Teo murmur to the beast. “Our new friend frightens easily.”

“I’m not frightened,” you lie and Quest’s eyes flicker towards you, as if sensing the untruth. It’s a kindness, you think, when neither Harry nor Teo call you out on it. 

“We should get inside,” Harry says instead, flicking his gaze to the northern skyline before cutting back to the wolf at his feet. “Do you know where the others are?”

The wolf chuffs, snorting heavily through his nostrils and dipping his head in what you swear looks like a nod. And then he stands, dislodging Teo’s hands, circling around the man to lead you all down the path towards the cottage.

Teo captures your hand as he rises from his crouch, fingers tightening around yours, lips curled in a whisper of a smile when your eyes meet his. 

“Not far now,” he says, smile widening when you nod, slow and hesitant, taking one step towards where Harry and Quest are standing some several paces ahead, waiting for you both. Teo’s eyes flit from yours to the flower still clasped in your hand, brow furling in thought. 

After a moment, he squeezes your hand in his, pulling you in the opposite direction, ignoring Harry’s call of exasperation and your confused protestations.

“Here,” he says instead as you approach the well beneath the oak trees. “Watch this.”

Teo dips his fingers into the bucket on the ledge, drawing the ice out as easily as water, fingers pressing and molding it like clay until it forms the figure of a small vase. Cracks in the ice forming a dizzying pattern of fractals catching rainbows in the sun.

Teo slips the flower from your hand, then, placing it with a delicate ease into the vase, smiling first at it before turning towards you.

“You can pet him if you like,” Teo says, apropos of nothing, drawing your gaze away from the tiny ice sculpture with a startled blink. “I promise he won’t bite. He’ll treat you as gentle as a flower.”

You look at the bloom, frown, curling your fingers into the rough fabric of your skirt. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Sometimes,” Teo says, tilting his head towards yours, voice pitched to a low timbre. Like he was sharing a secret. His breath darting across your ear. “It’s the trying that makes all the difference.”

~*~

You still didn’t pet Quest by the time you entered the warm interior of the cottage, though the walk there with your hand cradled in Teo’s had done something to quell the bundle of tense nerves in your chest. And Quest had given you a wider berth as he entered, sitting back on his haunches by wooden shoe rack, staring up at you with a cock of his head and a low whine in the back of his throat that had unexpectedly tugged at a warm pit in your stomach.

So you reached the back of your hand towards his muzzle, flinching when he let out a small whuff of excitement, and then melting into a smile when he nuzzled a cold nose against your skin, tail thumping against the cobblestone floor of the foyer.

“At least wipe your feet on the mat,” Harry harangues at Teo as they step inside, Teo grumbling lightly under his breath something about old men and their dumb rules. “It’s called being polite, Teo.”

“Whatever you say, old man,” Teo retorts, fingers flexing at his sides. A small flurry falls from his fingertips, dusting the floor. It makes Harry’s forehead crease.

“You’re going to stain the floor.”

Teo stares at him, squints. “It’s cobblestone. What is there to stain?”

“They’re going to end up tracking it through the house—“

“They can just mop it up, it’s not a big deal.”

“It’s rude —“

“Oh, we have guests,” a voice says from the doorway, and you blink over at the tall blond with a dazed expression as they crane their neck over their shoulder, calling to the interior of the house for an Onion and Owl before turning back. They set their gaze first to Teo and Harry and then to you, to Quest still sitting by your side with his wagging tail. “You found her, then.”

“Toasty!” Teo crows happily, ignoring the scowl etched on Harry’s face. “We brought a friend.”

“I see that,” Toasty replies, smile widening. “I’m glad, Quest was getting worried last night.”

“Worried?” You ask, unable to help yourself, cut off from asking anything further when Quest noses his muzzle against your thigh before standing and walking towards Toasty.

You blink and almost miss the moment the wolf is replaced by a man.

You don’t…shriek. Or scream. And, for that, you’re grateful. But you do startle, feet sliding back of their own accord, clattering against the shoe rack behind you, and the look Quest gives you is nothing short of apologetic.

“Sorry,” he says, raising one hand in a placating gesture before sliding it up along the back of his neck. “I didn’t mean to frighten you. And I didn’t mean to frighten you last night, either. It’s been a long time since I met someone new in that form. I forgot how it tends to startle people.”

From your peripheral you can see Teo grinning and his eyes catch yours when you glance towards him, his mouth working soundlessly on the words, “ Keep trying. ”

So you do.

“It’s alright,” you say and you see some of the tension leaking from his eyes, shoulders drooping in a downward slope. You can almost picture a wagging tail behind him. And that, more than anything, brings the smile to your lips. “I think I was scaring myself out there more than anything else.”

“Is that girl here?” You hear another new voice ask right before Toasty stumbles at a pair of arms slinging around their neck, a smiling face and bright eyes peering over their shoulder. “Did we find out why she was wandering the forest? Is she okay?”

“Owl,” Toasty says, huffing on a laugh, hands reaching back to steady the man hanging off their neck. Over their combined shoulders you can see a third head, a dark pair of eyes peering out at you that you can only assume belong to Onion. “You could have just asked me to mo—“

“Oh,” says Owl. Blinks. Grins. “ Oh . Hello.”

“That’s why we’re here,” Harry says quickly when Teo makes to open his mouth, ignoring Teo’s resulting scowl and sliding forward until he’s standing almost directly behind you. “She told us—“

“I’m here to beg you to stop the winter,” you take your turn to interrupt. “Please, I’ll do whatever you want, just spare my village.”

“Uh,” Owl says, glancing over his shoulder at Onion then back at you. “What?”

You frown. Repeat, “I’m trying to stop the winter? Or, at the least, lessen it? A bit?”

A silence stretches between the beings—gods, you suppose—surrounding you, until Teo bounces on the balls of his feet and grins, eyes sparkling with untold mirth.

“We found her napping in the woods,” he supplies happily, cocking his head towards you. “Very pretty shade of pink on her cheeks, don’t you think?”

Teo yelps suddenly, doubling over with pain crumpling the lines of his face as he desperately attempts to shove away the boot currently crushing his toes.

“Not the time,” Harry says imperiously, lifting his boot away only when Teo knocks a weak fist against his thigh. Teo scowls at the man, clutching his foot in one hand and using the other to push at Harry’s hip.

“It’s called easing the tension, you jacka—“

“Alright,” Quest says loudly, cutting Teo off. “I think we’ve been dithering about in the foyer long enough. Someone needs to tend to our guest’s wounds and the rest of us should go about finding where the hell Xyx has run off to so we can talk about this. Owl, Onion, it’ll be easier to find him if we split up the ground together.”

“No,” Toasty says, voice pitched to a soft timbre. Quest pauses, glances back over his shoulder at the blond. “No, you need to stay here. Take care of her wounds. I need to work.”

“Work?” Quest asks, brow furrowing. Toasty nods, the motion jerky and uneven. 

“Her shoes ,” they say, sounding choked, and Quest follows their gaze down to your—honestly, rather shabby looking shoes. You scuff a toe against the cobblestone, fighting the urge to sink down and cover their ugly state with the folds of your skirt.

“Ah,” Quest says. Nods. Glances at Teo and Harry. “Are you two sticking around for a bit?”

Teo opens his mouth, frowns, closes it again. Squeezes a fist around the handle of his paintbrush and remains silent. Harry looks at him and then at Quest, shaking his head.

“We have our own work to do.”

“You’re leaving?” You ask, directing the question at them both but narrowing your gaze on the shifty look on Teo’s face. For all that his presence was a startling one this morning, the thought of him leaving has you feeling oddly bereft. Out of place.

Teo looks at you and the smile on his face seems sad, somehow. 

“I wish I could stay,” he says, cutting a glance to Harry and then to the window beyond. A gust of wind picks up a layer of fluffy, dry snow, swirling the flakes into the air in an artful dance. He draws in a sharp breath at the sight. “The old man’s right. I have work to do.”

~*~

“Do you think we did the right thing?” Teo will ask of Harry later, standing on the edge of a cliff and looking down at the cracks of ice in the frozen riverbed. 

The air is crisp there, at the edge of the world, tinged with the scent of turpentine and juniper berry. Bright and fresh, stinging at the back of the nose. Harry will look at Teo, at the blobs of blue and white paint crusting at his cheek and streaking patchily through one eyebrow, at the worn paintbrush twirling through twitching fingers. And he will sigh and smile, just a touch, the corners of his lips twitching with a fondness he doesn’t know how to speak of. 

“We’ll keep an eye on them.” He’ll say, instead, turning his gaze to the riverbed below and tracking the movement of a beaver on the ice. “We always do.”

And Teo will glance at him, worried frown replaced with something like a smile and Harry will know that Teo won’t speak of it either. This warm, soft regard they both choose to leave unnamed. Untouched. Cradled gently but never spoken of. 

“We do, don’t we?”

“Always,” Harry will repeat and Teo will nod, eyes flicking up to scrutinize the boughs of frost covered pines overhead, always critical of his own handiwork. Harry thought it was rather stunning, the way the icicles dripping from the branches sparkled with refracted light. He never could figure out what flaw it was Teo saw in them.

“Yeah,” Teo will agree, poising his brush over one of the icicles. “Always.”

~*~

Settling into the stool in front of the warm kitchen stove, you half wonder to yourself if maybe you’re still asleep under that tree, floating through the remnants of a fractured dream. The steam rising from the copper kettle on the stove–the scent of leather and wood in the air mingling with the bitter chocolate Quest was carefully chopping–doing nothing to quell the dreamlike haze of the moment.

And then there was Toasty, sat on a matching stool, hair tumbling over their shoulders as they pounded tiny wooden pegs into the heel of a half-finished boot, carefully skiving away the bulk of leather to sit even before adding a new layer, held in place with more wooden pegs. 

The boots, for all that you had met Toasty but half an hour ago, looked like weeks of work had already been put into them. Every once in a while, Toasty would reach into a leather satchel buckled around their midsection, drawing out myriads of odd tools they’d use to stretch and stitch the leather in place or poke holes to set their wooden pegs to.

At some point during the process, they’d rolled up the sleeves of their linen shirt, revealing a tapestry of art in shades of black and red ink that swirled dizzyingly with each flex of muscle and twist of wrist. It took you a few moments to parse the patterns as not just a blend of color but instead a rolling script of iconography tracing up and down their skin.

The maw of a snarling wolf, vines curling around its paws; a twin set of lovebirds in flight over the bloom of a budding flower; a pair of eyes hidden in the swirls and knots of a tree. Stretching high up their forearms—images cut in twain by the fabric of Toasty’s shirt—and further beyond. The barest hints of color peeking out from their collar, wisps of hair obstructing your view.

“Here,” Quest says, softly interrupting your examination with the pressing of a warm mug into your hands. “Drink this. Warm yourself up while I tend to those scratches of yours.”

“They’re really not that bad,” you protest only half-heartedly, the memory of Quest in his wolf form still startlingly crisp in your mind. He reaches out a hand, tipping the mug closer to your lips, and you obey the silent command with the barest hint of a sigh, letting the flavor of melted chocolate and black coffee burst on your tongue.

You’re silent for a while as Quest settles on his knees in front of you, carefully grasping one of your arms to inspect the litany of wounds, dabbing a sweet-scented tincture from an amber bottle on the worst of them.

“This isn’t what I imagined it would be like,” you say, mostly to yourself, though the glance Quest and Toasty share tells you the words were not half as quiet as you thought they’d been. “Are you really the winter gods?”

There’s a moment of pause, as heavy as the coffee on your tongue, before Quest answers, “We’re no gods.”

“You’re not?” You repeat, surprised all the same. “But I thought—what are you?”

The rudeness of the question doesn’t register until long moments after the words have left your lips and you swallow at the resulting silence.

“We don’t know,” Toasty says when the silence has just begun to stretch into uncomfortable territory. They pull a knife from the satchel on their side, razor sharp, scoring deep lines into the leather sole of the boot in their hands. “Once, a long time ago, we were mortals like any other. Now, we have no idea what we are. But I don’t think we could be called gods.”

“You used to be mortal?”

“A long time ago,” Toasty repeats, echoed moments later by a new voice.

“A very long time ago.”

The man peering down at you from the doorway, for all the way he slouches nonchalantly against the wooden frame, sets your heart racing in almost the same manner the wolf had. Something about the slow, lazy drawl of his voice and the minute quirk of his lips seems dangerous, somehow, even in what you had begun to recognize as the warm, safe little bubble that was the kitchen.

“Xyx,” Quest says, sounding vaguely surprised. “That was faster than I thought. Where’s Onion and Owl?”

“Haven’t seen them,” Xyx says, flicking his gaze first from you then to Toasty, to the boot clamped between their knees. “I’m starting to think I’ve missed something.”

“We’ve had a—“ Quest cuts off oddly, glancing at you as he rises slowly to his feet. “A guest.”

“A guest.” Xyx repeats flatly, lips curling in something that you think might have been called amusement on any other man. “My, my. Can’t say the last time we had a guest around here.”

“I came to find the gods,” you say before Quest or Toasty can respond. “I think I must have gotten lost, is all. I don’t think I’m quite cut out for the adventuring life.”

“No,” Xyx says. “I can see that.”

It’s not offense burning in your chest, not really, but it might be an embarrassed sort of flush rising in your cheeks all the same. 

“Right,” you say, “So if one of you could maybe point me back in the direction of my village? I’ll be out of your hair just as fast as you can blink.”

A clatter. Toasty mutters under their breath, half rising from their seat to pick up the smattering of tools scattered on the worn floorboards. Quest takes in a deep breath, watching them for a moment, before turning back towards you.

“Angel,” the word slips from his lips with such ease you don’t even notice, at first, looking up at him as if he’d spent lifetimes calling you by that epithet. “If you’re here, that means you can’t go back.”

“What do you mean?”

“He means you’re dead ,” Xyx cuts in, the words bitter on his tongue, sharp where they puncture into your chest.

“ What? ”

~*~

Death, you’ll think later, is an oddly small word for something so huge. 

It is cavernously large, a gaping black maw that consumes and consumes and consumes.  It eats away at you, sometimes, the knowledge that your mortal life is truly over. That all you will know for the coming days—years, centuries, millennia —is this small cottage in the heart of a still forest.

At other times, however, it won’t eat at you at all. At those times, it will feel soft and warm and peaceful. A quiet sort of magnitude, like the awe of seeing a red dawn on the horizon, the twittering of early morning birdsong in the air, and the knowledge that you are only one small fraction of a never-ending equation.

Yes , you’ll think then, death is far too small a word for a concept so very vast.

~*~

“I want to go home,” you whisper to the shining leather of your new boots. You can just make out the blur of Toasty’s face reflected on the vamp of the shoe when they pause, fingers stilling on the laces. “Take me back.”

A breath of pause. Toasty looks up, first to you and then to Quest. And then Xyx, still by the door, horror swirling in the depth of his eyes before he turns sharply, skittering from the door like a roach caught in the daylight.

Toasty sighs, rubbing their chin against their shoulder before resuming the tie on your boots.

“If we could, we would.”

“Am I really dead?”

No one replies. It’s answer enough.

~*~

And, like that, time passes.

~*~

Time doesn’t pass at all the way you think it should, however. The afterlife is a strange place. An eternal winter that seemed unfazed by the machinations of a fickle thing like time .

Some days seemed to stretch on and on and on, never ceasing, the sun arching brilliant in the sky for hours too long. Other days seemed unfathomably short, like you could blink and miss them, waking to a too-bright dawn only to turn around and find dusk nipping at your heels.

You learned to stop quantifying the passage of time by season or by day.

Instead, it became the minutiae of the everyday that marked the calendar for you. Every day the cottage inhabitants would gather in the kitchen for breakfast, usually made by Quest or Toasty, before they scattered to the high winds. Owl often dashing off into the forest, Onion following at a more sedate pace with a roll of his eyes and a twist of his lips.

Quest, too, would often be found in the outskirts of the forest, chopping wood for the fireplace. Or further out, howling in the deeper parts of the forest, hunting deer and fowl to be tanned and stored in the larder.

Toasty, in contrast, could be found in all parts of the cottage. One day, they’d be sequestered in the library with ink and a slew of odd looking instruments, passing a curved needle and thread through rough sheaves of thick paper dotted with delicate script. Binding the block with glue and leather and gilding the edges in gold.

Other times, they’d be found in the kitchen bent over the stove, the steam of a roiling boil fogging their glasses. Or in front of the fireplace, leather apron tied around their waist as they fiddled with a block of wood and a knife or pounded the leather sole of a shoe. They kept their satchel on their person at all times, dipping ink stained fingers into its depths whenever they required a tool or new material.

It was fascinating, watching them, and while you spent your time with the others—constantly assured you were welcome whenever you expressed apologies at the intrusion—you often found yourself by Toasty’s side. Simply…watching.

The fact that you never seemed to know where Xyx wandered off to every day was not lost on you. But you never were sure how to go about asking the man where he went and the others never brought it up, so you let your curiosity simmer in silence, assured at least that you would see him every night when everyone gathered once more for dinner.

Time passes. And you learn how to measure that passage.

~*~

Some days are better than others. And on the days that are worse, on the days where your heart seems to ache and bleed in your chest, pressing sore against your ribs with every inhale, you spend those days sequestered in the library. Pressed against the chill glass on a western facing window seat, feet tucked beneath you, gazing out at the soft flurries of snow dancing in the air or tracking the movement of deer grazing for berries in the forest.

And you let your heart ache.

It’s on one of these worse days, when the darkening billows of clouds overhead has your eyes straining even before lunch, that Toasty finds you. On their hands you could smell the scent of some strange chemical you were unfamiliar with and you could spy shavings of metal caught in their hair, glinting in the soft glow of candlelight.

“There you are,” they say, slipping into the library and nearly tripping over a pile of books that someone—your bet was on Owl—had left scattered next to an end table. Toasty scowls, cursing softly underfoot and muttering something about telling ‘Quest about this.’ 

It makes you smile, in spite of yourself. And when Toasty looks up, they flash you an answering smile so brilliant it has you blushing, cutting your eyes away to stare at the flames licking curlicues around crumbling logs in the fireplace.

“I thought you could use some lunch,” they say, hefting the basket they’d carried in onto a table and unpacking it just as your stomach rumbles in response. You can see the corners of Toasty’s lips quirking as they unpack the basket. Fresh baked breads and rolls of cheese wrapped in wax paper. A porcelain tureen filled with a hearty stew.

“How do you always know what to give?” You ask, watching Toasty’s hands as they fiddle with the supple leather straps of the basket, unclasping a pewter flagon of mulled wine. 

It takes you a moment to realize there are etchings in the leather. Small motifs of vines and birds and woodland animals. Tiny. You wonder if Toasty made it themself, embossing the leather with painstaking detail, back hunched over and eyes straining in the candlelight on their sleepless nights. 

“Ah,” Toasty says, cuts a glance to you and gives a tight smile. “It’s a bit embarrassing, to be honest.”

“What?” You laugh, chasing a bite of cheese down with the proffered wine as Toasty fills two bowls with stew. “How could it be embarrassing? Isn’t it just magic?”

“Sort of?” Toasty replies, pauses, smile turning a little more genuine. “Actually, yeah. Yeah, it’s magic. The same magic that powers all of our giftings.”

It’s your turn to pause, lowering the wine with a furrow of your brow. “All of you?”

“All of us,” Toasty confirms. “Y’know, I bet you could even guess what kind of magic it is.”

“I don’t know that much about magic,” you stipulate, frown, but Toasty only waves a dismissive hand in the air, grin slowly spreading across their face.

“You’ll put it together,” Toasty says. Confident. Assured. “Spend some time with the guys. Ask the right questions. You’ll figure it out, I’m sure of it.”

“Maybe I’m not that curious.”

“Aren’t you?”

~*~

You are.  

Gods above help you, but you are.

~*~

When you wander out into the forest to find Owl—at Toasty’s soft request—you don’t intend to ask him any questions about his magic. And you don’t, not really. But you do ask him a question. And, somehow, it seems to you a far more important one.

“How did you all come to be here if you’re not gods? No one has ever said.”

“Uh,” Owl hesitates, swiping his palm against the back of his neck and peering up into the branches of the evergreen. “I think mostly no one wants to say because they don’t—they don’t want to make you feel uncomfortable? ‘Cause it’s not—it’s not exactly pretty, how we came to be here. I mean, it’s the afterlife, yeah? We all had to die to get here.”

“You’re all dead?” Like me? You don’t say, though Owl seems to hear the sentiment all the same, smiling and nodding before frowning again.

“Well, no. Or maybe. We don’t really know how Xyx came to be here.”

“Why not?”

“He doesn’t remember,” Owls says, crouching and brushing the snow from the trunk of the pine tree, pulling boughs of brown needles from the ice. He draws them to his mouth, blows a hot breath across them to melt the snow before attempting to start a weaving circle for a basket. The needles break before he can get far, making him scowl. “Damn. Why is Onion always better at finding the fresh needles?”

“Why don’t you pull them from the branches?” You ask, tipping your chin to the green needles overhead. Owl looks up, shakes his head.

“Nah. I don’t want to disturb the cones. The birds need the seeds as much as they need the berries from the juniper and holly trees.” As Owl speaks, a cardinal alights on one of the branches, and Owl smiles at the sight. For a moment, the two of you are silent, watching the bird as it ruffles its russet plumage against the snow.

Owl sighs, dips his eyes back to the ground, fingering the broken pine needles in one hand.

“To be honest, I think the others are kind of ashamed of how they died. And, I mean, I get that. I do! It’s not like dying is something to be proud of, is it? But I—I don’t know. I guess I just never really felt the same way about it.”

“Can I,” you pause, try to find a gentler method of asking. More polite. Realize, at the last moment, there’s no etiquette book in the world that could properly prepare one for this conversation. “Can I ask how you died?”

“It was an accident,” Owl says promptly, raising his eyes to meet yours, catching and staying transfixed. “My father, he went to go check on the beaver traps one winter and I was supposed to help him. We were out there for maybe three or four days? It was boring and hard and I hated doing it. So I took every chance I could to slouch off. One time I ran off and climbed a tree so my father wouldn’t find me and—what do you know, there was another kid sitting in the upper boughs.”

“A kid?”

“Yup. Little older than me. Nearly scared me off the branches, would have fallen if he hadn’t grabbed me at the last second,” Owl smiles at the memory, sitting back on his haunches, back propped against the bark of the tree as if he didn’t feel the chill of the snow.

Then again , you thought, what kind of evergreen ever seemed to mind the cold?

“We became fast friends. Made a game out of seeing how long we could stay hidden from my father. I always got caught. He never did.” Here, his lips twitch into a more sardonic expression, gaze lifting to the watery sun bleeding through the canopy. “I thought it was odd that there was a random kid hiding in the forest all alone, but I was more preoccupied with having fun. And he was good at evading questions. It wasn’t until my father and I were turning back home that things turned sour.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing, at first. The kid was sullen. Upset. I knew something was wrong but I was too happy to be going home to care,” Owl takes in a deep breath, lets it out slowly. “The closer we got to home the more he seemed to panic; kept asking me to stay, made all these wild promises.  When I refused he got angrier and angrier.  Until I swear I saw the snow swirling up from the ground and the trees stretching towards the earth. Trying to grab at me.

“It scared me. I made my father ride hard that night. I tried to tell him about the boy in the forest but he didn’t believe me. Either he thought I was making up stories or just plain delirious but, either way, something about my panic must have shone through to him because we made what had been a nearly two day journey in one night. I remember seeing the clearing where we’d picked the spikenard berries that autumn and thinking that was it. If we passed that clearing, I’d never see the boy in the woods again.

“I don’t know what made me think that,” Owl admits softly. “But I’d never been so sure of something in my life. It made me start crying. I almost asked my father to stop the horse. And then I heard this heartbreaking wail and the next thing I knew I was on the ground, watching my father ride off with my corpse in his arms, while the boy from the forest wept on the ground beside me.”

You draw in a sharp breath and Owl cuts his eyes away from the sky, meeting yours as you sink to a seat beside him, ignoring where the cold seeps into the folds of your skirts. “It was Xyx, wasn’t it? The boy?”

“Yes.”

“He killed you.”

“Not on purpose,” Owl replies. Voice pitched low. “He was just lonely. Out here, all by himself, nothing but the trees and snow to keep him company. If it were me in his shoes, I probably would have done far worse far sooner. I never blamed him for it. As it was, he tried shoving me back more times than I can count.  And then Onion—“

Owl trails off, frowning at his knees. You glance at his hands, at the pine needles still in his grasp, crushed now as he squeezes them in a tight fist.

“Onion?” You prompt after a moment of silence. Owl shakes his head slowly, opens his mouth to respond, is interrupted by the fluttering and flapping of wings overhead. A brown cardinal meeting the red one, hopping up and down on the branch twice before they both take flight, swooping through the chill air beyond.

The two of you watch in silence for several long moments, until all you can see of the birds are small specs in the distance. Owl pulls himself off the ground shortly after, stretching his arms overhead before turning towards you.

“Come on, let’s get you inside before you freeze those cute little toes of yours off.”

~*~

You cry the first time you see Onion and Owl duel.

At the time, you hadn’t even known it was a duel. Not until Toasty had sidled up behind you, whispering soft explanations in your ear. It looked more like a dance. Or a ritual, held in the quiet din of the forest, with the sun hanging a brilliant gem in a crystalline sky, snow swirling with each kick and jump in the air.

“He’s trying to bring back the spring,” Toasty explains, when Onion sinks to his knees in the powder. Owl looms above him, arms poised overhead as he moves with slow, deliberate grace. “Owl is the keeper of winter, so the two duel to see who will win.”

“Does Onion ever win?” You ask, watching with your heart lurching in your chest as Onion throws himself back in the snow, a flash of greenery swirling around his knees before Owl reaches down, pulling him out of the snow by his arm.

Onion’s panting, then, sweat dripping from his brow, as the foliage withers and dies as fast as it had come.

“No,” Toasty says, a moment later, and out of the corner of your eye you see them grimace when Onion swirls himself out from Owl’s grasp, sending the smaller man toppling into the snow. “Not yet.”

For a moment, Onion seems to be in control, stretching his hand out as Owl attempts to rise, ivy curling around his biceps and pulling him back down. A bird squawks in the distance, breaking Onion’s concentration, and the ivy, too, withers.

“Why not?”

You can see panic building on Onion’s face. A desperate sort of glaze in his eyes as he spins away from Owl, trying to draw the life back into the forest, only to be pulled back by flurries of ice and snow as Owl grasps his shoulders and draws him back, fingers raking across his chest. The two grapple there, for a moment, grasping and pulling at each other’s arms with fierce grips.

“Who knows?” Toasty replies as Owl breaks away from Onion, kicking snow into the air as he spins circles around the other man. Onion spins after him half-heartedly, stumbling, looking dazed and weak with each passing moment. “It’s possible he’s just not strong enough.”

“Do you really think that’s why?” You ask, doubtful, and Toasty smiles down at you.

“No,” they admit, as Onion gives an almost pained sounding yell, sinking back into the snow on hands and knees. There was melancholy in the movement and something that seemed to speak of an indescribable pain, like the echoes of a never ending grief. A bleeding wound, untended and left to fester. “I don’t think that’s why at all.”

The duel is over almost as soon as it begins.

Onion digs his hands into the ice in one last desperate attempt, the knees of his trousers growing sodden with the melting snow as golden bracken surges from the earth. Owl, behind him, moves forward with all the grace of a panther on the prowl, hands outstretched, flurries of ice dripping from his fingertips. Pain and fury flashes across Onion’s face before dull, weary acceptance takes its place.

Through a haze of tears clouding your vision, you think you see Xyx in the distance. Eyes catching against yours before he ducks behind a cluster of trees, vanishing from sight, and you are left with the image of Onion lurching up from the snow, dead leaves skittering from his brow as he staggers away from Owl, who stands with a victorious grin poised on his lips.

Too far away to make out the words, you watch as Onion scowls at something Owl says, knocking a weak fist against Owl’s bicep in a gesture that has Owl laughing and slinging his arm around Onion’s shoulders. 

Toasty smiles again and this time you can see nothing but sorrow in the expression.

“I think it’s fear.”

~*~

“I remember it as if it were yesterday,” Quest admits, squatting down to tie the snowshoes to your winter boots. The wooden rackets are unwieldy to walk in on the best of days, but they’ve kept you from sinking into a snow drift on your hunts with Quest more than once and you’d been grateful when Toasty had placed them by the eastern side entrance Quest favored departing from.

Still, though, Quest in his wolf form had no need for the contraptions, and you couldn’t help but feel jealous of that fact.

“Not too tight?” He asks, peering up at you from his fringe, and you give a few testing stomps of your feet, shaking your head. Quest slips two fingers between the straps, tugging lightly. Not too loose. “Good. You know, Owl told me you were asking him questions about our deaths. Didn’t tell me why, though.”

“Curiosity,” you answer, wry, trying and failing to steal the pack of supplies before Quest could sling it onto his back. At some point he’d need to turn into wolf form, relinquishing the pack to you or tying it to a tree for safe keeping, but despite your protests he never let you carry it until then.

“Save your strength,” he always said when you complained, turning a grin in your direction that seemed the very definition of wolfish . “You’ll need it to keep up.”

Together, the two of you trudge out of the cottage and into the snow, skillfully skirting around the small glade where Owl and Onion are arguing over whether the ptarmigan and grouse prefer juniper berries or winterberries. Quest helps you hop over a fallen log, snow dusting the petrified mushrooms along the trunk, before he speaks again.

“I’d say curiosity killed the cat but that seems a bit on the nose,” Quest says, smiling when you snort your amusement. “I’m surprised you didn’t go to Onion first.”

“Why’s that?”

Quest glances at you, frowns. “If Owl didn’t tell you, then it’s probably not my place to say. It’s just—well, Onion came right after Owl. It set a precedent, I suppose, in a way.”

“A precedent?”

“I really can’t say anything more,” Quest says, sounding apologetic, and you nod. Rubbing your mittened fingers together for the warmth and ducking under a low hanging branch Quest lifts out of the way. “I’ll tell you about how I came here, if you wish, but it really isn’t all that interesting.”

Quest stops you both at a thicket of black chokeberry, drawing a drawstring bag made of a soft suede from his pack, holding it open as you pick the ripest berries to be made into jams and pies and wine later. As you pluck, snow and berry juices staining the yarn of your mittens, Quest begins his tale.

“I really do remember it like it was yesterday,” he repeats. “I wish I knew how all of this afterlife nonsense worked, why I can remember it so clearly when others can’t.”

Why Xyx can’t , he does not say. You hear it anyways.

“I remember the cold, the snow on the ground. I remember the river, how it had only just frozen over, and you could still see the water rushing below the ice. It wasn’t safe to cross yet and I had to trek over a mile to reach a crossing that wouldn’t send me toppling into the water. I was a hunter then, did you know?”

“A hunter?”

“Yes, I know,” Quest says, lips twisting in irony. “Terribly cliché, the hunter becoming that which he once hunted.”

“I was actually going to say that it makes sense,” you respond, tying the cords on the pouch closed after shoveling the last of the berries inside. “I always wondered how you seemed to know so much about the forest.”

“I don’t know as much as Xyx,” Quest denies, though his lips soften into something like a grateful smile. “Or even Owl or Onion. There’s many parts of the forest I haven’t explored, areas that are entirely unknown to me. Those three, it’s like they live and breathe with the very trees themselves. I think if you described the shape and color of a particular rock they could find you the exact one before the day is out.”

It’s odd, but you can’t find it in yourself to deny the notion. You think they probably could and, what’s more, would find you that rock if you asked.

Or, rather, Owl and Onion would. Xyx was. . .Xyx was an anomaly you could not parse. Not yet. You promised yourself you would, sometime in the near future. At the least, you’d make the attempt.

“Were you out hunting, then?” You ask softly, redirecting the conversation, and Quest gives a long, slow nod.

“I messed up,” he says, just as softly, frown pulling at his lips. He tilts his head back, gazing into the upper canopy of bare alder branches overhead. Mutters softly under his breath, “See how high the hornets nest; ’twill tell how high the snow will rest.”

“Hornets?”

“Hornets, bees, wasps,” Quest shrugs, sighs, shaking his head as if dislodging the sticky tendrils of a memory snagging at his mind. He busies himself with storing the bag of berries away with a careful hand, drawing a thermos of hot coffee out of the pack and giving you both a hearty, warming sip before you continue on your way. “It’s an old wive’s tale. Or I always thought it was, at least. The hornet nests I saw were always abandoned in the winter. I thought the correlation was defunct.”

“But it wasn’t?” You hazard a guess.

“Not that winter,” Quest responds, something almost bitter in the back of his voice. The sting of remembered arrogance and folly. “Most of the hunters I knew were taking precautions after the mild autumn to begin with. But I got into this—and, mind you, I know how stupid this is going to sound—I got into this fight with another hunter.”

“Like,” you squint at him. “Fisticuffs?”

Quest laughs. “Near enough. But no, no outright blows. Just—he was outselling me the whole year. Telling people how terrible my pelts were, how rotten the meat, said it made folks from other towns ill just from the smelling of it. It wasn’t true, if anything it was his stock making people sick, but it seemed once the rumor mill got started it didn’t matter whether it was true or not. All it took was one person to believe it and for him to fan that belief until it became a roaring flame and I’d be chased out of market.”

Horror and indignation fills your chest, burning hot and bright against the chill of the wind, and some of the ire must show on your face when Quest smiles at you.

“It wasn’t too bad,” he temporizes. “I still made a decent living, even with all of that nonsense. But it still made me angry and back then—well, I didn’t do well with anger, so much. That winter I ran myself ragged, trying to get the best pelts and the best cuts of meat you could find. I crossed the river, tracking a pack of wolves, followed them right up the side of a mountain I wasn’t familiar with and got stuck in a blizzard I never saw coming.”

You drag in a sharp breath, cold air stinging at your nose. Quest glances at you and then away, eyes trained on the downy snow beneath your feet.

“I took a tumble down the mountain, injured myself pretty badly and lost my sense of direction. I was freezing cold right up to the point that I wasn’t and, by then, I knew I wasn’t going to make it any further. I remember being too tired to keep walking, laying down on the snow and staring up at a starless sky and thinking I’d never seen anything so bleak and dark. I hated that sky.

“Hated myself too, a little,” Quest admits softly, fingers flexing around the strap of the pack slung over his shoulder. “It didn’t have to end like that. Bleeding out in the snow, numb from either the cold or the blood loss, it didn’t have to end like that .”

Something odd happens to Quest’s face, then. A ripple of emotion flickering across his eyes that feels odd, given the conversation. Evocative of peace, happiness, lips quivering on a smile instead of a frown. Like he was about to laugh or sing or recite poetry.

“And then came Xyx.”

“Xyx?” You repeat, startled. “Was he there too?”

“He was,” Quest confirms. And then he does laugh, just a little, a chuckle of breath between the words “Found me face up in the snow, peering over me with this look on his face like he’d found some poor mongrel in the snow that he had to figure out how to drag back home and patch up without them biting his hand off.”

You smile. “Did you? Bite his hand off, I mean?”

“No,” Quest says, glancing up at the sky overhead. “Or, if I did, I don’t remember it. I do remember what he was wearing, though. Blue and green. I remember the way my blood stained his shirt and I remember thinking if I died, then, at least it would be a prettier sight than that black sky.”

Another laugh, breathless.

“Do you know what he said to me?” Quest asks, rolling his neck to peer down at you. “He said, ‘Why not give it a shot?’ I had no idea what he was talking about. Hadn’t even realized I’d spoken out loud, I was so out of it. ‘Paint the sky,’ he said.”

Quest smiles, bright, the canines of his teeth flashing where he directs it towards you.

“So I did.”

~*~

Later, you’ll watch Quest do just that. Running through the snowy mountain side, white powder shimmering in his fur, muzzle stretched wide in a howl. You’ll watch the colors swirl in the air, stretching higher and higher until they mingle with the stars.

Blue and green and red against a backdrop of black, waving back and forth on unseen air currents as Quest sings his song.

It’s then that you’ll wonder to yourself which, precisely, is more beautiful. The sky, or the one who paints it.

~*~

“What is it you do?”

Xyx stills, the steam from the copper mug in his hands curling in the space between his lips. “Bit of a non sequitur, that.”

You shrug, carefully gathering the scattered dishes from that morning’s breakfast and carrying them to the kitchen wash bin. Quest had brought in buckets of snow earlier and you used the ice to temper the heat of the boiled water from the kettle until your hands could withstand the temperature, carefully rolling up your sleeves before grabbing a washrag and chunk of soap from the cupboard.

“Not really,” you say, dipping the rag into the water. “I know that Toasty makes gifts; I know that Owl and Onion duel for the seasons and care for the animals; I know that Quest paints the sky in a symphony of color; I even know that Teo paints the frost on the leaves and Harry guides him through the forest. But in all this time I still don’t know what you do.”

The look Xyx sends you is inscrutable. A flat, expressionless sort of look, eyes narrowed where they peer through the rising steam. He takes a sip, flicks his gaze to the windowsill where a vase of wilting flowers sits. Onion had managed to make them earlier in the morning, swiping the sweat from his brow as he scoured the cabinets for a vase to put them in.

“They’ll die by afternoon,” Owl had said to you in a low tone, lips quirking upwards as he pillowed his chin in his hand, watching in obvious amusement as Toasty drew a crystal vase from their satchel and began arranging the flowers into an artful display. “They always do.”

It had saddened you, seeing the pride flashing in Onion’s eyes, knowing the source of that pride would be tossed out into the snow all too soon. You’d found it hard to muster the energy to return his smile, when he’d turned those eyes towards you.

“Owl and Onion may care for the animals,” says Xyx softly, drawing your gaze away from the drooping petals. “And Teo and Harry may walk through it, but the forest is mine .”

“Yours?”

Xyx nods, doesn’t elaborate for several long moments, the edge of one nail tip-tapping against his mug. “It’s always been mine.”

“Quest told me something to that effect,” you say slowly, carefully. Dragging your cloth in slow, even circles across the plate in your hands. “Said you lived and breathed with the trees. And Owl said you’d been here longer than anyone else.”

“Tell you a lot about me, did they?”

You look up, eyes catching against his. You think you see a smolder of heat, some dark ember glowing deep and hot, shrouded by a thin veneer of indifference. It sends shivers down your spine. “Yes.”

Xyx tips his head back, chest rising on an inhale. Lowering on an exhale. The water sloshes when you rinse the plate, floorboards creaking under foot. A petal falls from one of the wilting blooms, catching and sticking to the damp skin on the back of your hand, a dull red painted across your knuckles.

“Did they tell you I killed them?” Xyx asks, so soft it can barely be heard, and by the time you glance up at him he’s already setting his mug on the counter, arms stretching overhead. You’d almost think he hadn’t spoken at all, except for the way your heart had started pounding in your chest. “Time to start the day, don’t you think?”

He pats the counter as he pushes away, taking long strides towards the door.

“Thanks for the tea,” he calls over his shoulder and you frown, pressing wet fingers to your blouse, just below the collarbone, where your heart is thundering. Willing it to slow back to a reasonable pace. 

It takes you long moments to realize Xyx still hasn’t left, paused in stasis at the doorway.

“You know,” he says, fingers scratching grooves into the doorframe where he grips at it. “You didn’t deserve what happened to you.”

He leaves before you can answer, mouth open on half-formed words that catch and drag in your chest, sitting heavy and uncomfortable. The thundering of your heartbeat does not cease.

When you pick up his mug to wash it, you find it’s still half-full.

~*~

It wasn’t often difficult to find Onion. Of all of the cottage inhabitants, you found he often stuck closest to the cottage or, otherwise, in the less shadowy outskirts of the forest with Owl, dueling or quietly observing the downy woodpeckers and mourning doves searching for their meals. 

So when you’d spent the better part of the afternoon searching for the man with no success, you were beginning to grow worried. If it had been Xyx—whose presence in the cottage waxed and waned like the moon—you wouldn’t have felt half as concerned. But Onion was nothing if not predictable and his disappearance grated against your nerves like sand prickling along your skin.

“Oh, he’s probably by the cliff,” Owl had reassured you when asked. “He goes there every once in a while.”

“To a cliff?”

Owl had smiled at you, tipped his head to a path in the forest cutting to the south. “It’s a special cliff.”

And, approaching that cliff, you couldn’t help but agree. Here, where the sun beat against the upland rocks, it was almost warm . You could hear the plink-plink of water falling from the overgrown pines, the sunlight glittering where it caught the tiny droplets as they fell. 

The overnight freezing temperatures made sculptures of the fallen water, frozen stacks and splashes mingling within the bracken and grass underfoot. And beyond the cliff, in glistening splendor, was the frozen expanse of a winding riverbed, its waterfall suspended in time. You could see small creatures skittering along the ice, beavers and foxes and waddling geese.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Onion calls over his shoulder from where he sits, legs dangling over the cliff’s precipice. You murmur an agreement as you come to a still behind him, gazing out over the bluff and breathing in the sharp air, shielding your eyes from the sun’s glare with one hand. “It was a pretty good place to die, all things considered.”

The second breath hits your lungs even sharper as you glance down at the man, blinking when he cranes his neck to return the gaze with a cool sort of regard.

“That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it?” He asks. “It’s my turn.”

You frown, stepping around him to sink to your own seat along the cliffside, not quite daring to let your legs hang over in the same precarious manner, for all that you knew you, too, were dead and past the mortal fear of heights. 

“You don’t have to,” you tell him, ignoring the way the coolness of the rock beneath you bit past your wool skirt, not quite warmed enough by the sun, even here, to do little but remain chilled. “Not if you don’t want to. It’s just—I don’t know. Idle curiosity.”

“Idle curiosity,” Onion repeats, drawing his arms together across his chest. He kicks one heel against the rockface, chipping small chunks of ice from the overhang and watching them fall into the drifts of snow below.

You’re both silent for long moments, drinking in the slight warmth provided by the buttery sun hanging in the sky above, before,

“I killed myself,” Onion says, pointedly avoiding your sharp gaze and scowling.

“You what? ”

“Not—not the way you’re thinking,” Onion is quick to correct. “It wasn’t like I threw myself off this cliff. I just—“

He trails off, frowning down at his crossed arms. You can see a number of moose in the distance—or maybe elk, you weren’t quite sure, only able to make out the vague shapes at this height as they lumber towards the ice.

“Did you know I used to live in the same village as Owl?”

“No,” you reply, surprised. “I didn’t.”

Onion nods, slow, tilting his head until the bones in his neck crack. 

“It was a long time ago,” he says. “We were both kids. I didn’t—I didn’t really hang out with him much, back then. He was a little rambunctious and I had far more than enough rambunctiousness from wrangling my younger siblings.”

“Sounds like not much has changed,” you say and Onion huffs on a surprised laugh, shaking his head.

“You may be right about that,” he agrees, lips quirking before his smile fades in the face of his memories. A bird or squirrel skitters in an overhanging branch, sending a small flurry of powdery snow raining down on you both, and Onion scowls faintly upwards. “It sounds terrible, but I didn’t really pay attention to him until he died. And then it was like there was nothing I could do but pay attention.”

“What do you mean?”

“I saw him,” Onion says and the crystalized ice dusting his cheeks reminds you of tears. Or maybe stars, glittering in the night sky. “I saw them both, on the edge of the forest, like specters in the snow.”

“Both of them?”

“Owl. Xyx.” He glances at you, then away, frowning. “Do you know what it is to see a father in grief?”

“No,” you say, soft, quiet. As if afraid to break some as of yet untold spell. 

“It’s terrible,” he says, and the words are a whisper. “Like the howling of a dying beast. Only at least a beast grows quiet. Too weak to continue. But with grief it—it just keeps going. Even when they’re quiet, when everything grows still, you can still hear it echoing in the wind. You see it in their face, in the way their hands shake. It just never stops.”

“I’m so sorry,” you breathe but Onion only shakes his head, breathing in sharply as if dispelling some emotion lodged in his lungs.

“It was three days,” he says. “I spent three days watching that grief, watching the figures darting in the forest, before I cracked.”

He looks down at the cuff of his sleeve, at a small tear that had been mended with silvery gray thread. You wonder if Onion had mended it himself or if it was Toasty’s careful handiwork on display. 

“I’d never been superstitious,” Onion says, running his thumb over the small bump made by the mended fabric. “At first, I thought it was some sort of practical joke they were playing. And I was—well, I was angry. I couldn’t imagine the kind of cruelty that would lead to faking your own death, to standing idly by in the face of that terrible grief.”

“But it wasn’t a practical joke.”

“No,” Onion agrees, sounding stricken. “I figured that out when I saw them crying outside Owl’s old bedroom window, when I heard Owl begging his father to look at him and Xyx sobbing his apologies into the snow. I tried to call to them to figure out what happened, but Xyx seemed—he seemed horrified, somehow, that I saw him. Spoke to him. He ran into the forest and Owl stumbled after him.

“I thought about following after them but I was smarter than that. Or, at least, I thought I was,” Onion says, voice turning rueful and bitter. “I didn’t know what was going on. But I knew that I saw Owl alive, or what I believed to be alive, and that I could stop the grief. At least a little. All I had to do was tell Owl’s father and let him handle it.”

The moose—for now, they were close enough that you could tell that’s what they were—were only a small herd of half a dozen and you could see them grazing on tall shrubs and low hanging willow branches.

“Did he not believe you?” You ask, watching as a young calf strained its neck to reach the supple twigs of an upper branch. Onion snorts softly, shaking his head.

“Oh, he believed me, alright,” Onion says, derision slicing sharp inside his tone. “It was everyone else who didn’t.”

The frustrated calf stomps its hooves in the snow, calling out in high chirrups that echo in the clear air until its mother, head shaking in what you can only imagine is a snort, beats the snow back with her hooves until the roots of an underlying shrub were exposed for the calf to nibble on.

“They said my eyes were stolen by a trickster spirit,” Onion says, eyes carefully trained on the scene below when you turn to look at him. “Or, otherwise, that I’d been consumed by some madness. An illness that would spread and infect the whole of the village. Like I was some diseased stranger that had stumbled upon the village in the dead of night instead of a neighboring child who’d helped them tend their fields and raise their barns.”

The breath you let out is shaky, uncertain, and when you draw it in again to respond you find you have no words with which to make one. The corner of Onion’s mouth quivers, not quite a smile, before dipping down again.

“I didn’t mind at the time. Like I said, I’d never been superstitious. Figured time would be on my side to prove me right. And, besides, I didn’t need the whole of the village to believe me,” he says. “Just the father.”

“And he did?” You ask again, uncertain in the face of the bitterness flashing in Onion’s eyes.

“Do you know the worst thing about grief?” Onion asks, in lieu of an answer. “It’s the way it twists you. Corrupts you. Like a poison. It digs its claws in, scrapes out the meat of you, and leaves a broken shell behind. And that person, that shell, will do anything to feel whole again. They’ll stuff anything they can find into the cavernous hole left behind, just so it’ll fill up again, no matter if all it is they’re shoving in there is dust and garbage and unfettered hatred.”

“Onion,” you say, soft, barely an interruption. Onion twitches, as if he had forgotten you were there, breath rattling in his chest when he breathes it in.

“He made me take him into the forest, where I’d seen them run off,” Onion explains, dropping his hands to the cliff’s edge and curling his fingers around the snow covered rock until his knuckles turned white. “When he found I could see them but he couldn’t, he—he abandoned me. In the dead of night, he just ran off and left me there.”

“Gods above,” you curse, feeling a well of hatred and sorrow bursting in your chest. The prickle of tears stinging at the back of your nose. Onion continues on, your words unheard.

“I tried to go back on my own,” Onion admits. “But I didn’t know the way. And Owl, Xyx, they—well, honestly, I think I was frightened of them. Superstitious or not, Owl’s father not being able to see them, that shook me in a way I wasn’t prepared for. So when Owl tried to help, tried to guide me home, I just ignored him. Like some part of me, deep down, believed he really was a trickster sent to deceive me.

“And Xyx, I had no idea what to make of him. He wouldn’t look at me, wouldn’t talk to me. He darted behind trees, following Owl and I through the forest, but he never said a word. Not until Owl’s father came back.”

Onion closes his eyes, the lines of his face deepening, and whatever remaining levity that had been in the air slipped and fell away into the cavern below their feet.

“He came back with a torch .” Onion says, and his voice is stricken and sad. “Buckets of whale oil he poured onto the trees. He—he was going to burn the entire forest down. And I couldn’t let him. I just—I couldn’t. That was the first time I heard Xyx speak. He sounded terrified. Him and Owl. Screaming, shouting, begging for Owl’s father to stop. I was terrified.”

He opens his eyes, looks down at his hands as if seeing them for the first time. “I nearly killed him. Grappling with him in the snow, I nearly killed him when he slipped and hit his head on the rocks. I thought I had, at first, until Xyx managed to explain to me what had happened to Owl and we all realized that his father hadn’t turned into a specter. That he was still breathing.

“I ended up dragging him back towards the village, towards a clearing I knew the hunters liked to use to camp in. Stayed crouched in the brush until I saw someone find him and carry him off back to the village.”

“You didn’t go with him?”

“I couldn’t go back after that,” Onion says softly. “Alive or not, the village already believed me insane. If they thought I’d tried to murder him—which I nearly had—they’d just as soon have killed me in return. No matter that I was one of them. No matter that I had family among them.”

“What did you do?”

Onion cuts you a glance, shrugs. “I stayed with Owl and Xyx. It didn’t take long for the cold to reach me. It was terrible. They tried to convince me to go back to the village at first and when they couldn’t Xyx tried to guide me through the forest to somewhere safe. But we were just a bunch of kids. Not a one of us knew what it took to survive out here. Not on our own. Not without supplies.

“I ended up sitting right here on this cliff, begging Xyx to take me before the cold did.”

You reach a hand towards him almost unthinkingly, twining your fingers around his forearm and squeezing. Onion glances down at your hand, lifts his opposite off of the crag and covers your own with his.

“You know the worst thing about it?” Onion asks and there is a smile quivering in the corners of his lips. Small, sad, beautiful and heartrending in its tender honesty. “If I had the chance, I’d do it all over again.”

You catch his eyes with your own, peering intently into them as if that would bring clarity to  all the complicated emotions swirling inside your chest. “Would you really?”

“For Xyx? For Owl?” He looks down at your clasped hands, at the remnants of dry leaves and dirt smeared across his skin, and his smile twists into something more sincere. “Without question.”

~*~

“How does the forest work?” You ask Toasty one day, as they sit sprawled on the rug before the hearth, smudges of graphite and ink staining their fingertips. They look up at you from a halo of blond hair curtaining their face, the reflection of firelight dancing in their eyes. “I don’t understand why some mortals can see you and others can’t.”

“Most can’t. Not unless they’re dying or already dead,” Toasty corrects, sitting up to tap their lead pencil against their knee in thought. “The forest is—it’s not really on the same plane as the mortal world.”

“It isn’t?”

Toasty shakes their head slowly, peering down at the drawings of flowers and woodland creatures scattered around their person. “As far as I can tell, no. It’s more like we sit adjacent to them. Or on top. Coexisting but never mingling together. Like there’s a barrier between us.”

“Like ghosts.”

“Something like that,” Toasty agrees. “A veil between the worlds.”

“Then how did Owl see Xyx? How did Onion see the both of them?” You ask, voice pitched low. You almost ask if it really was a trickster spirit, some malevolent force that would see children die or nearly commit homicide simply for the entertainment of it. Toasty smiles, sad, shaking their head in answer to your unspoken question.

“The thing about a veil,” they say, “is that they’re fragile to begin with. Look,”

You watch as Toasty sits up further, drawing a roll of thin vellum from their satchel and spreading it on the floor, using a hand and one knee to tamp the corners down as they draw roughly on its surface with the lead of their pencil. Soft hills and drifting of snowfall.  

“If this is our plane,” Toasty explains, dipping their chin to the parchment before sliding one of their drawings underneath. A fawn under a tree, now peering out through flakes of snow falling about its ears. “Then the one underneath is the mortal one. Below, things change. The seasons progress, children grow, the world continues turning.”

Toasty swaps the parchment underneath for a new one, the fawn now turned into a buck, grazing on the edge of a riverbed. 

“Our plane is stagnant. It remains the same throughout time. But every once in a while,” here, Toasty presses their pencil hard against the vellum, until it tears sharply, leaving smudges of dusty gray on the parchment below. “Something bleeds through.”

“Like a child seeing a ghost.”

“Or a winter that comes a little too early and stays a little too long,” Toasty agrees, lifting their knee and watching the torn vellum curl in on itself. 

~*~

You hear the argument more than you see it. 

There’s no shouting, no fists thrown. Only threads of tension piercing the air, thick and uncomfortable as you step onto the back porch, a bucket of dirtied mop water in hand to be tossed into the snow.

“It’s not right and you know it,” says a voice you know to be Quest’s. His voice carries from somewhere around the corner of the cottage, over near the root cellar, the snow doing little to dampen the sound. “The way you treat her—like she’s a stranger—it’s not right.”

“What?” Comes a scoffing answer you recognize as Xyx. “Did you expect me to welcome her with open arms?”

The words send your heart beating too quickly in your chest, a painful staccato against your ribs.

“You did to us,” Quest responds, softer. Almost too soft to be heard. And the response, nearly as soft,

“Maybe I shouldn’t have.”

“You don’t mean that,” Quest says, voice rising in pitch again. Frustration laced in the tone, hot and tight. “I thought we were past all this.”

“Nothing to be past,” Xyx says and there’s an odd sound from Quest, like he’d been about to speak only to be cut off suddenly. There’s quiet for a few moments, long enough that you consider setting the still-full bucket down on the worn wooden steps of the porch and going back inside, and then, “I should get back to work.”

“Xyx,” Quest tries, voice raising as he speaks. “You can’t avoid this forever.”

“I’m sure I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Xyx calls back, sounding further away, and you can hear Quest exhale roughly before you catch sight of him, in wolf form, bounding across the property towards the forest.

Even long after you’ve returned to the warmth of the cottage, it takes a long time for your heart to slow back down, the echoes of Quest and Xyx’s voices still ringing in your head.

~*~

“Is the eternal winter because of Xyx?” You ask one day, on a rare occasion where most of the cottage occupants are sequestered indoors. There’s a blizzard outside, the flurries falling in thick sheets you can barely see the trees through, and all but one of your number had elected to remain indoors, huddled together by the blazing hearth. “Because he was here first?”

Quest looks up from where he’d been thumbing through the pages of a book he’d snagged from the library, Toasty settled on the floor by his feet and shuffling bobbins on a bolster pillow, lace pooling on the ground around them.

“Xyx is,” there is a pause, a breath, eyes shifting. Quest tries again, “Xyx isn’t exactly winter.”

“Neither is Onion,” you point out. Soft.

“I’m spring. Summer. The sun on your back. The mighty oak.”

“The eternal pain in my ass,” Owl adds with a grin, yelping when Onion reaches over to smack the back of his head.

“So if Xyx isn’t winter and Onion isn’t winter, why is it always winter here?”

Another pause. The others frown, glancing at one another then out the window at the snowy landscape.

“Majority rules?” Owl posits hesitantly. Quest shakes his head slowly.

“I don’t think so,” he refutes softly, a furrow in his brow. “Xyx said it was always winter here, even before. Maybe it has something to do with when we all died.”

There’s already a flaw in that theory, you think. Even barring the fact that no one was sure if Xyx even was dead, “I died in Autumn.”

Four pairs of eyes turn to you at the soft admission, silent and somber.

No one speaks for a long time afterwards.

~*~

“We should have a ball,” Owl says, reaching up to hook his fingertips around the top of the wooden frame of the doorway. He barely manages it, the soft linen of his shirt riding up over his abdomen, back arching from the effort. “Have you ever been to a ball?”

You look up from where you’re helping Quest and Toasty chop vegetables for dinner, eyes lingering on the sliver of skin on display. Out of the corner of your eye, you can see Toasty and Quest doing the same. Owl’s lips twitch in a smirk.

“No,” you say. “I didn’t know many people who threw balls, to be honest.”

“I always wanted to go to a ball, back when I was human,” Owl says, smirk fading, voice turning into something wistful. “I wasn’t allowed. Too young. I was just a kid back then.”

“You’re still just a kid,” Quest calls over his shoulder as he bends to peer at the roast cooking on the embers in the stove. Owl scowls, dropping one hand from the doorframe and pointing at Quest in mock offense.

“Hey, now, I’ve been here longer than you,” he cries. “I’m practically your elder.”

Quest sends him A Look. Owl blinks. Frowns, then shrugs, dropping his hand with a grin.

“Fine, so I’m a kid at heart,” he says, grin widening when Toasty snorts. “Doesn’t negate the fact that we should have a ball. I wanna dance .”

“You dance all the time with Onion,” you point out. Owl wrinkles his nose.

“That’s not a dance, that’s a duel.”

“It looks like a dance.”

“It doesn’t count,” Owl says. Whines. “Come on, haven’t you ever wanted to go to a ball before?”

You had, actually. Even if you hadn’t known the sorts of folks who put on balls, you still heard about them. Sometimes literally. The sound of music and laughter spilling out onto cobblestone streets, warm light in the windows as people adorned in fabulous dresses and tailored suits waltzed past, the smell of feasts scented with mouthwatering spices in the air.

You remember longing on those nights, glancing through your fringe at windows framed with gilded curtains as you hurried by, ignoring the breathless sort of tightness in your chest that spoke of childlike wonder. Nostalgia for something you’d never experienced.

“Maybe,” you say softly, instead of voicing any of your thoughts, and from the corner of your eye you see Toasty raise their head and peer intently in your direction.

“We could get all dolled up,” Owl continues. “Onion and I can take care of the decorations and Toasty can handle the music—I’m sure they’ve got something in that satchel that’ll do the trick—and Quest has got a handle on the food. Meanwhile, Xyx can—“

“Xyx can do what?”

Owl yelps at the sudden voice behind him, tripping over the threshold and landing on the stone floor with an oof . He squints up from the floor at Xyx, who is standing in the doorway where Owl once stood, grinning down at him and propping his shoulder against the doorframe. Owl scowls up at him.

“You’re the worst.”

“Oh, am I?” Xyx drawls, nudging Owl’s stockinged feet with the toe of his soft leather boots. “I’m not the one over here volunteering my mates for mysterious tasks without their permission. Pretty rude, if you ask me.”

“We’re planning a ball!” Owl says, shifting to his knees, ire apparently forgotten as his excitement comes barreling back. Xyx furrows his brow.

“A ball.”

“All you’ll need to do is make a clearing in the forest,” Owl babbles on, either ignoring or oblivious to the growing shifty look in Xyx’s eye. “We could dance in the reception hall, of course, but that’s boring . I don’t wanna do that. And it’ll be easier to decorate if it’s outside—“

“Owl,” Xyx interrupts, a snap to his tone that has all of you tensing and looking at him. For a moment, he seems to stretch in height, limbs lengthening, the planes of his face hardening into something sharp as flint. And then back to normal, quick as a flash, the change measured by the softening of his voice. “We’re not putting on a ball.”

“What?”

“I don’t want to hold a ball,” Xyx repeats. “There’s not even anyone to hold a ball for . It’s not exactly like we have a whole slew of eager guests to invite, is it?”

“It’s not for them,” Owl insists. “It’s for us. For me. For her .”

You blink when Owl tosses a hand out, pointing his finger once more, this time in your direction. Xyx follows the line his arm makes, gaze flickering over your eyes briefly before he’s looking away again. There’s silence and then,

“Whatever. Do whatever you want. Just,” he pushes himself off the doorframe, lifts a hand to waggle it lazily through the air. “Leave me out of it, yeah?”

Owl complains heartily after Xyx departs, Quest half-heartedly attempting to soothe his wounded pride as he finishes making dinner, and while you listen to them with half an ear you find yourself distracted by the odd tightness in your chest. 

And by Toasty, who sits with knife still poised over their cutting board, staring at the bare space Xyx left behind with the same intent expression you’d seen directed towards you.

~*~

Owl doesn’t let the thought go quietly. He continues to lodge complaints against Xyx well into the following day, as you’re trailing after him and Onion into the forest, and you can see a dim sort of ire growing in Onion’s gaze the more Owl speaks.

You aren’t surprised when he finally snaps.

“Maybe Xyx is right,” he says and Owl whirls where he stands, kicking the snow up around his feet.

“Excuse me?” Owl says. Splutters, mostly, the tip of his nose and ears turning a fetching shades of pink you can’t tell if comes from the cold or his rising anger. “No, he’s not. He’s just—I don’t know, a spoilsport. I guess I can’t be too surprised that you agree with him, though. I swear to the gods, you’re as fun as a wet blanket sometimes.”

Onion scowls but doesn’t bite, running his fingers instead over a willow branch and attempting to draw life back into its barren wood. Owl taps his fingers against his elbow, glances at you and gives a roll of his eyes.

“I don’t know why he keeps bothering with that,” he says, not low enough for it to entirely be an aside. You can see Onion’s shoulders tense, his grip on the branch slacken. You open your mouth to cut in, to respond or ask if he’s okay, only to be drawn back to silence when Owl continues. “It never works to begin with.”

Onion breathes in sharply, hands falling to his sides as he turns a calculating gaze on Owl.

“Do you want to know why I agree with Xyx?” He asks and Owl twitches, his eyebrow raising at the same time the line of his mouth thins. “It’s because I don’t think we have anything to celebrate out here.”

Owl starts, confusion then fury darting across his eyes. “Oh, come on, you can’t be serious.”

“I’m perfectly serious,” Onion replies flatly. He leans his back against the trunk of the willow tree, tips the crown of his head towards you. “What do we have to celebrate? Her death? Ours? An eternal winter? How is any of that worthy of celebration?”

The fury melts back into confusion.

“It’s—“ Owl starts, then cuts off, shaking his head. “How could it not be? It brought us together, how is that not worth celebrating?

 “You don’t get it, do you?” Onion huffs, rubbing a hand over his mouth. “Not all of us enjoy being here, y’know.”

 “Since when did you care about us being dead?”

“I don’t. That’s not—“ It’s Onion’s turn to cut off and he tips his head back, bouncing the back of his head lightly against the willow bark. “Xyx hates this place, y’know.”

“Okay, now you’re just lying.”

Onion snorts. “No, you’re just obtuse. Or willfully ignorant. I don’t know what’s worse. Xyx has always hated this place. From the get-go, he’s hated it.”

“He hated that it was lonely,” Owl refutes, voice rising in pitch. “But it’s not anymore. He has us now, things have changed.”

“Have they?” Onion asks, sounding tired. Snorts again, shaking his head. “Yeah, fine, sure. They’ve changed. Whatever.”

The whole of Owl’s face turns red now, eyes flashing and fingers curling into fists. 

“Yeah, they’ve changed,” he says, practically vibrating with anger. “And I don’t understand why you’re always trying to get rid of it .”

“Get rid of it?” Onion raises his head slowly, meets Owl’s eyes. “Is that what I’m doing?”

“I don’t know, is it?” Owl retorts. Mocks. Lip curling in a sneer. “Not that it ever works. Gods only know why you keep trying.”

“Someone has to.”

“ No, they don’t ,” Owl replies, stomping his booted feet into the snow as he stalks towards you. “Come on, cutie, let’s leave him to his fucking flowers or whatever.”

You open your mouth to respond, the words catching in your throat as you dart your gaze between Owl’s furious expression and the slow crumpling of Onion’s.

And then Onion is speaking and you find you have no desire to speak at all.

“I don’t belong here,” Onion says and the words are broken. Wet. You think he means to shout them. Instead, they come out as a whisper of breath, trembling in the stillness of the air. Owl is frozen beside you, face gone slack with the shock. “I’m not like you. I don’t belong to this eternal winter. This isn’t my home.”

“Of course it is,” Owl interrupts, turns back towards Onion, stuttering into stilted motion, hands raising then falling to his sides. Listless, as if the strength had sapped out of them. As if he weren’t even aware they existed anymore. “Of course it is. This is our home. What are you even—“

“No,” Onion replies and, here, the snarl can be heard. Twisting his mouth into a crude grimace. You look at it and think of Quest, of his wolf form, think you can see echoes of the same animalistic growl in the lines on Onion’s face. “It isn’t. Not for me.”

“No, that’s not—“ Owl cuts off when you lean forward and grasp his hand, looking down at you with bewildered eyes. Onion doesn’t seem to notice, turning back to the forest line and staring at the snow covered trees.

“The mighty oak,” he says. Whispers. Sneer catching then fading from his lips. “What’s so mighty about a bunch of fucking twigs?”

He pauses, glances at you, down at your hand clasped around Owl’s, then turns his face away.

“It’s a fucking wasteland out here.”

~*~

“It’s home,” Owl whispers later, staring at the bare branches of an oak tree. He reaches one hand to the lowest branch, fingering the ice laden twigs delicately and startling when they snap in his grasp. 

“It’s home .” He’ll whisper to the twig in his palm, clutches it in his fist as if to seal the words into the dead wood. “ It’s home. ”

~*~

“I have something for you,” Toasty says some two weeks later, snagging your hand in a warm grasp when you make to leave the kitchen after breakfast. Their voice is pitched low, as if sharing a secret, and you can’t help but smile when they grin down at you with an obvious, giddy sort of excitement.

Over time, you’ve come to expect this from Toasty. This slow, steady showering of homemade gifts that always seemed to be exactly what you need. The others seem to expect it too, or at least are used to it in some fashion, darting into the cottage at odd times of the day with quick words of thanks that always left Toasty grinning happily.

So you follow them without question, letting them tug you out of the kitchen and down the hall to what had been designated as your bedroom, ushering you in with a squeeze of your fingers and a tip of their head when you hesitate in confusion.

“You’ll need to try it on so I can make any adjustments,” they say, slipping the door closed behind you both and nodding towards the bed. “I’m a little rusty with dresses.”

“What do you—“ you cut off abruptly at the sight of piles of a soft, pale blue fabric spilling over the patchwork quilt folded on your bed. Drawing close, you can make out the folds of a full skirt of tulle and a bodice adorned with a cascade of spring blooms in shades pink and white,

And in the train of the skirt, too, puddling at your feet like cherry blossoms in a pond.

“Try it on,” Toasty urges and you suck in a breath, letting your hand trail over the glittering gems scattered among the flowers before nodding and gathering the bundle into your arms.

Toasty helps you as you shuffle behind the partition in the far corner to dress, carefully unburdening the dress from your grasp while you undress and then darting behind the partition once the dress is on, helping you close the hook and eye closures trailing up your spine.

And then they’re drawing you out, pulling you towards the looking glass balanced on the wall, fingers drawing a cord of soft suede from their satchel to tie your hair out of the way.

“Beautiful,” they say and something in you can’t help but agree, staring the picture the dress makes, as soft yet bright as a spring morning, feeling rosy cheeked and as beautiful as all the ladies you’d ever seen gliding behind windows of extravagant buildings resplendent with laughter and song.

“Not quite finished, though.” Toasty says, half musing to themself as they reach back into their satchel.

You don’t have a moment to even ask what they’re doing before they settle a cape around your shoulders made of a lace as delicate as the frost, nimble fingers tying the silk ribbon into a bow at your neck.

“This won’t keep me very warm.” Even as you say the words, you think they might be a little untrue, a feeling of warmth unfurling in your chest not so unlike the sensation of turning your face to a warm spring sun.

“We’ll just have to dance enough to keep you warm, then,” they say, smile glittering. “Make sure to save one for me?”

You laugh, raising your arm to see the patterns of the lace better. You think you can make out deer and tiny little woodland animals in the motifs.

“I thought we weren’t having a ball,” you say, thinking of Xyx and Onion and feeling something squeeze and constrict in your chest. Toasty’s lip twist, smile growing wry.

“Just in case,” they say, ignoring the sharp glance you send their way, quickly distracting you by futzing with one of the flowers sewn into your bodice, muttering under their breath about placements and geometry until you’re laughing anew.

It isn’t until later, when they’ve poked and prodded and sewn their last stitch, that address the elephant in the room.

“You haven’t asked me yet,” Toasty says softly, and you glance up from where your hands are smoothing the folds of your skirt. Breathing in, then out, in a long and steady breath.

“I know,” you respond, just as soft, wetting your lips. “I’ve been—I don’t know. I don’t know if I can keep doing this.”

“This?”

“Asking questions. Listening to these stories. They—they make me sad,” you admit. You can feel Toasty’s eyes flickering across your face, attentive, and you draw in another steadying breath as you continue, “They make Xyx sad.”

It feels like a confession. The way the words drop in the air between you, heavy and guilt-laden. Toasty smiles, warm and touched with sorrow.

“I know,” they say. “But isn’t that why they’re important?”

You have no answer to give. Toasty doesn’t seem to be looking for one. They reach forward, clasping one of your fidgeting hands in their own and squeezing your fingers in a tight grasp.

“You don’t have to ask the question,” Toasty assures you, “but may I tell you how I died anyways?”

There is a moment you consider telling them no. A moment you think of walking out the door, of letting this odd emotion in your chest wither and die instead of being poked and prodded and explored. You think Toasty would let you, even, without a word of complaint or so much as a disapproving look.

It’s the look on their face now, though, that gives you pause. Tender and sweet, open, a vulnerability wavering deep behind curtains of affection that leaves you breathless.

“Alright,” you say, dipping your head to peer down at your clasped hands. Toasty squeezes your fingers again, gentle pressure that sends sparks of some other unnamed emotion up your arm, settling bright and crackling like the logs of a fire in the center of your chest.

“I’m the only one Xyx didn’t find,” Toasty says, smiling when you look up at them in surprise. “As a human, I lived in poverty. I never had enough food. No coal. Never enough wood to burn in the stove. I’m not even sure how I died. Whether it was the starvation or the cold. All I remember is waking up in the shack I used to call home and realizing I was staring down at my own body.

“I didn’t know what to do. I stayed there for maybe a week or two, saw the local town coroner cart off my body for a pauper's funeral, then wandered off into the forest. Got lost. A lot. And then I found him .”

Toasty laughs, the sound sudden and quick, making you jump and then smile in return. Unable to help it, not in the face of such warmth.

“We scared each other shitless,” Toasty confesses between errant chuckles, laughing anew when you giggle in response. “I was used to nobody being able to see me and he was used to being the one to find everyone. I swear, my ears were ringing for weeks after the shriek he gave.”

You reach up a hand, smothering your laughter with your palm and Toasty’s grin widens briefly before softening, warming into something gentle and warm.

“You know, I don’t think any of us would survive the winter without Xyx. I know how that sounds,” Toasty says when they catch sight of your brow furrowing. “Really, I do. Us being dead and all. But that’s what makes it true to begin with.”

“What do you mean?” You ask when Toasty trails off, eyes peering past your head at things unseen.

“If it weren’t for Xyx, we’d be alone,” Toasty says and their voice is firm. Hard as flint and steel. “We would have died scared and alone. All of us.”

“That’s not true,” comes Xyx’s voice from the doorway.

You startle, not having noticed the door had even opened, and when you look back at Toasty you see none of the same surprise echoed in their face. As if they knew he’d been there all along.

“Isn’t it?” They ask and their hand is still warm and dry around yours. You think your own is trembling softly in their grasp. 

Xyx makes an odd expression, somewhere between a frown and a scowl, fingers gripping at the doorway. He doesn’t look at you, eyes trained on Toasty’s.

“Don’t tell her lies like that.”

“Sure,” Toasty says, laughter threading his voice. “As soon as you show me where I lied, I’ll be sure to correct myself.”

Xyx lurches as if he’s about to lunge from the doorway, the only thing holding him back being his own nails cutting grooves into the wood. You imagine, faintly, that you can hear it creaking under his grip.

“Don’t paint me as some fucking saint, Toast,” Xyx says, low, tipping his head to peer up through his fringe at them. “We both know I have too much blood on my hands for that.”

“I can think of plenty of saints with blood on their hands,” Toasty easily rebuts, shrugging lightly. “Besides, my blood isn’t on your hands. You didn’t kill me.”

The look on Xyx’s face can be called nothing less than a snarl, eyes flashing, and for a moment you can see the forest in him. Wild, untamed, colder than the ice, and dangerous all the while besides. You squeeze at Toasty’s fingers, clutching them like an anchor chaining you to the earth.

“No, no,” Xyx says, a mocking lilt darkening his tone. “I just murdered everyone else.”

“Not me.” You aren’t sure what it is that propels you to speak, what courage it is you find. Maybe it’s little more than desperation—time spent in a frustrating cycle of discomfort and unease when it came to Xyx—or maybe it had more to do with the way you could feel the heat emanate from Toasty’s body, a gentle reminder of all that you had come to cherish in your afterlife.

But then Xyx’s face is crumpling, blanching, the hard and untamed expression weakening into something more like despair. Fragile. Childlike in its broken sorrow. A fawn, abandoned by its mother, left alone in a forest in the dead of winter.

And then he’s gone, stumbling from the doorway at a breakneck pace, the sound of something that might have been an unsteady breath hanging in the air. All at once, you feel something slotting into place in your mind. A sudden knowledge of what had stood before you all this time, the unwavering brick wall of a guilt misplaced turned to anger and despondence.

It had kept you at arm’s length from him, that wall, too large and too thick to be climbed over or chipped away at. It needs dismantling , you think, or a well-timed swing of a sledgehammer. 

Toasty turns their head slowly, catches your eyes with their own. “Are you going after him or am I?”

You’re out the door before they even finish speaking.

~*~

There is no fear or uncertainty in you any longer. It is anger now, pulsing in your veins, rich and hot and righteous in its furious blaze. Charging into the snow, you don’t bother to slow long enough to don your overcoat, ignoring the calls of your name from Quest and a bewildered Owl.

You don’t see Onion and, dimly, you can register the concern of that in your own heart. But it is Xyx who concerns you more, now, and catching sight of his fleeing form through the trees you do not hesitate to give chase, twining your hands in the folds of your skirt and clomping your way furiously through the snow.

“Xyx, you utter bastard,” you shout to the forest din, echoed by the startled flapping of bird wings in the air. “Stop running from me, you coward!”

There is no reply but you can still see him ahead, darting between the trees, eyes glinting wildly when he peers over his shoulder at you.

“This is very mature,” you yell towards him. “Making a lady chase you through the snow without so much as a coat to keep her warm.”

“No one asked you to chase after me.” Comes the response, not quite stable of voice, echoing through the trees.

“Yes, well, maybe if you weren’t such an idiot, I wouldn’t have to.”

“An idiot?” You can see Xyx pause flipping around just as he reaches a clear, a crag dripping with ice down its rocky surface behind his back. “Is that what I am now? My apologies, doll, I’ll try to be a little bit smarter the next time I go about murdering someone.”

You let out a strangled yell as you grow near, bending to scoop a handful of snow into frozen fingertips, flinging it at the infuriating man with all your strength. He doesn’t flinch when it makes contact with his chest, exploding into a rain of fine powder.

“My death is not yours to steal,” you say, fury and spittle on your tongue. “You didn’t murder me, no matter what idiotic guilt complex you have swirling in that empty head of yours tells you.”

“Didn’t I?” Xyx spits, eyes darkening where he glowers back at you, chest still heaving from the effort of his run. “I told you, didn’t I, that this forest is mine . Whose fault is it that you came bumbling in here, looking for the winter gods, but my own?”

“Yes, yes, that’s a very clever way to add to your own guilt,” you mock, sneer curling at your lips. “Except that you aren’t the winter gods. Or did you forget that little tidbit?”

“Does it matter?” Xyx responds. “I know you’ve been talking to Toasty, I know you’re clever enough to understand that this winter is bleeding into the mortal world. This forest is bleeding into the mortal world. You shouldn’t be here. None of you should.”

“And where would you have us be?”

“Anywhere! Anywhere but here. Somewhere where it’s light and warm, somewhere where there’s a spring,” Xyx shouts in response, flinging his arms wide. “You should be fucking alive not wasting away in this dead place.”

“Maybe I don’t want to be alive, have you thought of that?”

Xyx freezes, the blood leaching from his face in the pale sun, eyes flashing where they dart across your face. His hands raise, then lower, mouth working on syllables he does not speak.

“Yes, I died. And, yes, I grieved for that death,” you say, softer now, just a touch. Still angry. You don’t know what it is not to be angry, now. “There are things I miss about the living world. But grief is not the same thing as desire, Xyx. I lived my life. It was a good life. But now so is my afterlife and I would be a fool to throw that away.”

“You are a fool,” Xyx finally replies, eyes cutting to the snow at your feet. “If you see anything but destruction in the power I wield.”

“Do you wanna know a secret about power?” You ask. Snarl, almost, the words dripping from your lips like poison. “You can’t steal it. You can’t take it . It’s something you have to earn. Some people—tyrants, kings—they rule their subjugates with an iron fist, they garner their power with fear and pain and blood . And somehow, after all this time, you’ve convinced yourself that’s how you earned yours.”

“I killed —“

“No,” you cut him off and in your ears you can hear the pounding of blood, a static buzz rising and falling with each breath. “You were a child. A lonely, desperate child who made a mistake. And you have spent every waking moment since paying penance for that mistake. Every day, every action, every ounce of power you have earned has been earned through love. 

“Onion? Quest? You brought them here out of love. Out of compassion . You made their deaths into something meaningful, something they can look back on with smiles on their faces. And you dare call that cruelty?”

“I didn’t—“

“Toasty chose you. Do you not get that? They woke up in a bitter, lonely afterlife and chose to spend it with you . And so have I.” You take a deep breath, flinging an arm out to indicate the whole of the forest. Xyx follows the line your arm makes with his eyes, opens his mouth as if to respond and freezes there. “You say this forest is yours but I don’t think for a single moment you’ve ever seen it for what it truly is.”

Xyx turns back to you and the growing horror on his face registers only dimly to you, a haze of desperate sort of anger clouding your vision. He doesn’t understand , you think, and then you tell yourself it doesn’t matter. 

You’ll make him understand.

“You and Onion, you look at this forest and all you see is its pain.” The buzzing in your ears is growing, louder and louder, an itch crawling up your arms that you cannot scratch. “You see a frozen wasteland—barren trees and snow and ice—and you call it dead. Decaying. But do you know what I see? I see life . Dormant, yes. Sleeping, yes. But alive. So, so alive.

“And every day I wake up in that cottage, every day I see your faces, I’m reminded of that again. I see Onion and Owl and I hear the birds singing in the trees. I see Quest and I see the night sky brimming with a color so beautiful it makes my heart ache. I see Toasty and I feel the warmth of a full belly and boots on my feet.

“And at the center of it all is you, Xyx. You think it’s dead and it’s not . And that’s all because of you, because you breathed life into it. You brought us together and brought this forest to life. That’s your power. That is what you’ve earned . ”

 “Wait—“

“I will not wait,” you say, voice rising in pitch even further, fingers trembling at your sides. The buzzing in your ears nearly deafening, louder than anything you’ve known. “I’ve waited long enough, Xyx, I’m tired of waiting for you to get your head out of your ass. Waiting is for fucking lo—“

“No, I mean,” Xyx cuts off with a groan, surging forward, hands sliding into place around your jaw and neck, keeping you from stepping back in surprise. And then his lips are slotting against yours, warm and sweet and then desperate and frantic as your brain kicks in and realizes he’s actually kissing you .

It ends too quickly for your taste, a gasp of breath shared in the space between you as you part.

“Well,” you say after a moment of catching your breath. “I’m glad you see things my way.”

“What? Fucking hell, doll, I—“ Xyx cuts off again, this time with a laugh that sounds suspiciously wet. “You have bees in your hair.”

“Excuse me?” You say, jerking back, fingers reaching up to pat at your hair. Sure enough, a cluster of bees tumble onto your hand, crawling along your palm before unfurling their wings in flight. It’s only then, watching them fly off in bewilderment, that you notice the crag has changed, the ice along the rock face having grown smaller and…wetter.

Tiny droplets dripping into the snow below—snow that is growing into little more than slush and mud, and overhead you can see the branches of pines once caked in powder now dripping with the same melting snow.

Beneath your feet, under melting snow, ochre grass and bracken is turning verdant and lush.

You blink, frown, glancing back up at Xyx who takes in a shaky breath.

“You have powers,” he says. There is awe in his face, in his voice, shaking and tremulous, hands still cradling your jaw. “You actually have—I’ve never even seen the forest thaw.”

You nod. Squint. “About fucking time.”

Xyx blinks. Then laughs, cut short when you lean forward and kiss the laughter from his lips. He moans into your mouth softly, sinking forward, melting into you the way the snow melts into the earth below.

"I can't believe I took this long. You taste as sweet as honey," Xyx whispers against your lips. "My little honey bee."

Another kiss. Warm, wet. The taste of salted tears on your tongue. You’re not sure if they’re his or yours. You’re not sure it even matters. 

When Xyx pulls away, he smiles and it is warm . Blinding. The brilliance of sun against the snow. 

“Dance with me?”

“Dance?” You splutter, laughing curling your hands against his biceps. “Here? Now?”

“Why not?” Xyx says with a shrug, glances down at your figure with a look you could only describe as awe . “Can’t let all of Toasty’s hard work go to waste.”

“They did work hard on it,” you hedge, peering down at lace and tulle and blooms with a heart that feels full to bursting in your chest. “It would be a shame if I didn’t get at least one dance out of it.”

“One at the minimum,” Xyx agrees, lips splitting in a grin as he pulls one of your hands to rest against his shoulder. One hand in his. His other hand cradling at your waist. “Possibly many, many more.”

“It’s the least Toasty deserves,” you say, as Xyx takes the first step, your own foot sliding back. 

“The very least,” Xyx says and then there’s nothing left to say at all.

It should be awkward, dancing under the crag with no music to time your steps. But you find the dripping of the melting snow on the rocks and the call of birds in the air to be a sort of music of its own, perhaps more precious and beautiful than any you’d heard before.

And interspersed between the sound was Xyx’s laughter, bubbling from his chest as if he couldn’t contain it, eyes darting across your face like a parched man finding his first source of water in days. Or millennia, perhaps.

You let Xyx lead you in dance after dance, until the water of melted snow threatens to sully your skirt train, and then for even longer. Until he twirls you into one final, slow dip, raising you back onto steady feet with an unsteady breath.

And then Xyx’s hand is carding through your hair, thumb brushing below your eye when he cups your cheek, dropping featherlight kisses against your brow, your cheek, the tip of your nose, the corner of your lip. And then a pause, heavy, pregnant, right before his lips slot to yours once more,

“Is that a cat?”

~*~

It was, in fact, a cat. A raggedy looking thing, half drenched from the melting snow, and neither of you had the heart to abandon it at the crag. Nor, it seemed, did the cat have any intention of staying. 

It trotted after you like it had known you all its life, like it had chosen you, and wasn’t that a funny thought? That even a cat could make this choice, to follow, to make their home, to love and be loved in return. And perhaps the thought was a ridiculous one. Too sappy.

But the smile Xyx kept darting at you was doing funny things to your chest, curling around your ribs like the vines of ivy stretching their tendrils around the brick facade of your shared cottage, and somehow you couldn’t bring yourself to be any less saccharine.

By the time you reached said cottage, spring was leaping from the ground like a dead man come to life. Squirrels and chipmunks peeking their bleary eyes out from their beds high above in the treetops, rabbits skittering through the brush underfoot, the sound of bees happily buzzing through the air as they flitted to flowers bursting out from beneath the melting snow. 

It’s Xyx who calls the others out from the cottage, hands cupped around his mouth, a joyous shout telling them to get out and enjoy the weather. They emerge in twos, confusion and panic flashing across Owl and Quest’s face as they dart out of the building before melting into a dim sort of awe at the sight of life and verdant green leaves against a robin’s egg sky.

Toasty and Onion follow at a more sedate pace, Toasty’s arm threaded through Onion’s as they pull him into the sunshine, though they too stop short when they catch sight of you and Xyx wiggling your feet in the small patches of grass peeking out from the slush.

“Onion,” they say, sounding stricken with awe. Or maybe it was tears, warbling through their voice, and Onion looks first at them in concern before glancing towards you, freezing there with something that looks closer to horror than awe.

“This isn’t real,” you see him mouth to himself, eyes flashing wildly from tree to tree. “This isn’t real.”

You pull your eyes away from his stricken form, darting your gaze across the blooms peeking through the mud until it alights on the well sitting beneath the twin oak trees. Under their canopy, growing steadfast between the rocks and roots, are bushes of rudbeckia so tall you think they might reach your thighs if you tried to stand among them.

And on the edge of the well, standing tallest and proudest, is the lone bloom Teo had slipped into an ice vase what now seemed like eons ago. Its roots slipping into the cracks, foliage drooping down the well’s exterior and mingling with the moss staining the rocky surface.

“Onion,” you call when you draw near to the well, fingers pinching the stem of the flower until it breaks off into your hand. Onion turns his bewildered eyes towards you, head still shaking in denial when you step towards him.

For a moment, he looks like he’s going to step back, like he’s going to turn tail and flee back into the safety of the cottage. The moment passes, though, and he stands still as you draw close to him, the only sign of motion being his fisted hands quivering at his sides.

You press the rudbeckia to his hair, slotting the stem behind his ear, pressing your lips to the errant tear streaking down Onion’s cheek. 

“It’s real,” you whisper there, in the space between you, curving your arms around his back when he crumples into a sob. “This is real.”

~*~

It’s Xyx who insists on the ball, shooing the others inside to get dressed while he works on setting up a clearing, and for once you get to watch him at work. Arms outstretched, grin on his face as the branches sway and bow to his command, twirling and twisting against one another until they form a canopy of greenery overhead, dotted with blossoms you weren’t even sure grew on those trees.

Fragrant, sweet, the light of golden afternoon sun sending warm shafts of light piercing through the canopy.

When the others emerge from the cottage, Toasty wastes no time in pulling out a contraption from his satchel, gleaming with metal and polished wood, winding it up with an old brass key until the first notes of song are ringing through the forest. 

You dance with Onion first. Twirling under a canopy of budding oaks, snowdrops peeking out beneath your feet. Eyes red and smile wide, untouched by sadness, bright and incandescent with the joy of obtaining that which neither of you ever believed possible. 

Next comes Owl, who refuses to cut in at first, eyes shining with a suspicious wetness until Onion rolls his eyes and grabs his hand, stuffing yours into it. He moves behind Owl, bodily manipulating him into the right stance and steps, and Owl is frozen for moments too long. Sandwiched between your bodies, lips slack and trembling, until some strength seems to surge in his chest and he shudders with a breath.

Owl takes the lead then, smoothly transitioning without even a single misstep, and Onion smiles in what might be triumph. Brushes his fingertips against the back of Owl’s neck as he steps away, causing the man to flush a pretty shade that nearly matches the holly adorning his crown.

Quest comes after, twirling and spinning and dipping you through the clearing, the steady pressure of his arms a warm security that lit up bright in the center of your chest. When he was done, he pulled you in close, pressing a kiss to the center of your forehead with a whispered, “Thank you,” on his lips.

Finally came Toasty, whose smile was nearly as warm as their name suggested, eyes gleaming and rimmed with something red. Their dance was fast, filled with immutable joy at each spin and stride, until you were breathless from the laughter. Beyond their shoulder you could see the others pairing up in twos, joining in the merriment with laughter of their own.

And you were certain you had never been so grateful for a spring morn in your life.

~*~

Toasty never asks if you finally figured out what it is that powers your magic. You tell them anyways, late in the night, when you’re both seated in front of the blazing hearth, Cat squished happily between your thighs. 

The others are sprawled on the rug in front of the carpet, Owl stretched between Quest’s legs and Xyx’s head propped on Quest’s hip while Onion captures the space between all three, one leg slung over Quest’s and his head pillowed on Xyx’s bare chest. Their snores and snuffles punctuating the air as you give your soft confession. 

Toasty looks up from where they’re whittling at the wooden carving in their hands. The light from the fire dancing across their tattooed arms, sending shadows licking across their face. You can see the sprigs of inked rosemary creeping up from their collar, wisps of blond hair curling at their nape where they’ve escaped from their braid. 

“I know,” they say gently, grabbing your hand and placing the whittled figure on your palm. The shape of wings catches your eye first. And then the stripes, in contrasting colors along the body of the figure. Red oak and white alder, you think. 

A bee. They’ve carved you a bee. 

“We love you too.”