night dissolves into this final frame

Frosted air prickled Lethalia's throat when she breathed in in deep, sweet on the back of her tongue. Without a saddle to separate them, the winter fuzzies Mavelle had donned were cozy beneath the satyr's thighs. Hoofsteps came so quietly with the ease that the equillion picked through the snow, just as much at peace in the cold as her owner. Steam rose from their warm bodies and trailed behind them in a ghostly veil. They may well have been revenants skirting atop the pristine white plane, Mav's trail through the boughs to be the only sign sign of their corporeal nature.

It'd been so very long since she'd laid eyes on an untouched winter; it felt as though it'd been an entire lifetime ago. In a way, is had been. Only natural that she had attachment to the snow when it had heralded some of the best parts of her younger life.

Her task as an outrunner was took a turn for the enjoyable, with a constant companion to share the burden on their hooves with. Clouds of dust filled the days when one was unlucky enough to pull rear guard, and the nights they had to watch over were dreary and exhausting. Her ever-present mare and faeron made the time more bearable; it was thanks to them she managed to make it this far. Worth it, considering they cost the largest amount of coin she'd amassed, at the time.

It would take her quite a lump of years more until she could afford to pay her dues to the Caravan, and find a real escape. Still, indentured servants that knew things made the Caravan more money than those who didn't. Lethalia had used that excuse to free herself from the Caravan's watchful eye, even if it was only temporarily, with a request to apprentice for an accomplished hunter at the foothills of the mountain range.

Head floating on the clouds of her nostalgia, Lethalia could nearly imagine these woods as pristine as those in the mountains. Before the labs sullied nature, chewed it up and spit it back out.. she could remember that. They chased beautiful white foxes through the snow, stalked burrows of stark hares. Mavelle could never be quite as light on her hooves as the spry bucks they pursued, but sure enough they'd catch a tired cervid in time. Damn well bet the brilliant mare came through to run down the one white buck Leth had ever seen; the antlers still hung in her bedroom. Back then, hell, she'd even come face to face with a bear, once. She'd rather stumble across another one, instead of the PHIL (or worse) that would be awaiting her in the woods now. The forests she knew back then were forever twisted, but this was close enough and better yet, still within her grasp.

There was so much... so much she had lost in life, so many things sullied. By her own hands, by the corrupting labs, by those who would lord over her. Yet here was a piece of everything she wanted laid out like an offering before her. She'd be a fool to not take it. As the satyr's resolve deepened, Mavelle cast a curious blue eye at the woman without breaking stride. She wasn't used to the burden she carried being completely silent. Leth hardly took notice, her hollowed gaze unable to find anything aside from the wilderness around them.

A flicker of white through the trees, the one she'd been seeking out. So there was something out there! Yearning for her bow barely flickered across her mind and her hand was clasped around one. Not suddenly - it had always been in her hand, yes. If she was out hunting with Mavelle, of course she'd had it pressed into her palm the entire time. It was the only logical conclusion; one generally didn't leave with the intention of hunting without bringing a weapon, after all. Of course, of course.

It was as perfect of a shot as it could get. The dayglow lit behind the fox, the corona of it's whispy white fur illuminated as if it were something heavnly. It was still focused on something past the satyr, unmoving in it's concentration and yet unable to see the predator headed right for it. Lethalia loosened her arrow, not a question on the truth of it's trajectory -

until Mavelle's keen ears twitched, and the equine spooked herself intangible.

It was the least graceful face-first dismount that Leth had ever managed, life in the saddle be damned. First time in probably a decade that the mare had thrown her at all. The satyr rolled out of the snow bank to flop on her back, blinking to clear the dark that still danced in front of her eyes. Before she could gather her wits entirely, the sense of loss she felt - from losing her fox? from the reality check in an otherwise perfect ride? from having that freedom yanked away yet again? - gave way to hot fury.

(Anger was an easier emotion to burden herself with, when she didn't care to dig deep enough to find why simply falling from her mount could inspire such sorrow.)

Mavelle had been approaching with delicate pricked ears and her nose twitching, but shied off again at her owner's foul mood. Lethalia pulled herself into a sit, viciously frustrated her most trustworthy mount would unseat her -

the satyr startled at the figures of children immediately to her right. Their game of ring around the rosy remained in eternal play, their icy faces frozen in jovial smiles. Leth had no recollection of passing such sculptures, but Mavelle's cloven hoofprints wove around these figures and the icicle-dipped deer nearby, and the frigid dog caught lunging at a snowflake. Not only once. Hoofprints wound a complicated network that brought them through and around the sculptures, passed by them so many times a slick, flattened lane had developed from the amount it'd been trampled on.