The urge to crawl away, to scamper, is strong. But I’m so weak that all I manage is a whispered moan before my cheek presses harder into the solid earth, smooshing it, and my lashes flutter that bit lower.
Blood.
Too much blood.
It soaks into the earth, defrosts the cold and the ice, spilling out of me too freely. I can feel it, myself, fading, and in a flutter of my lashes, the cold warrior stands.
I hold onto the tether of consciousness, the fear that pumps through my veins like shards of ice.
The words of the general send a hush rippling down the camp—and whatever it is she said, it commands the cold one to move for his steed.
His ungloved hand reaches for the neck of the hairless creature and, somewhat softly, he strokes it. Like… like there is a bond there between them, some form of affection.
That thought knits my brows closer together.
These monsters withfeelings… it’s a whole thing I don’t want to sink into, like I’m sinking into darkness now.
The cold warrior murmurs words to the beast, words I can’t hear in the distance between us, but I see his mouth moving over silence. It’s like he’s reassuring it until—
Blood whips through the air.
Not a blast, not an eruption. Ribbons and threads of hot, fresh blood.
It’s thick and black and spurts out from the steed’s neck, and hollow shrieks come with it.
The cold fae…
He tore out the steed’s fucking throat.
Literally tore it out.
There’s a hole, now. Gaping and sputtering.
The legs of the steed wobble with its cries, sharp and icy, until it collapses, just crumples to the earth at the cold warrior’s boots. Hurt by the one who murmured soft words to it, who stroked its neck with some pretence of affection, of a bond that doesn’t exist.
A shudder rinses through the cold warrior, a tension in his jaw, and he holds the creature’s throat in his fist.
He stands there…
He just fucking stands there and watches the steed writhe lamely on the ground. He watches as its movements slow, and slow, and it all gets so feeble…
Until it’s silent.
And there’s no more twitching.
In the silence of the camp, with the steed dead, the taste of inky blood is thick in the air.
The camp simmers in it.
The quiet, the moment, the violence.
The cold one stares down at his steed for a long while. Then, as if breaking a spell, he tosses the fistful of a throat to the earth.
It thuds on landing, right at the hoof.
And it’s like fingers snapping in the silence, because that’s all it takes for the camp to return to life, to movement, to sound.
Boots cut through my line of sight, some stares are thrown at me, liquids slosh in bottles, murmurs grate and metals clang.
