Author's Note: This one-shot takes place right before my other Winter story, Winter Returning. I wrote the bulk of it a few years ago, before I even started that one, then I didn't publish it because I thought it wasn't important to the rest of the story. However, looking back, it seemed like there were some loose threads in Winter Returning that weren't well explained (e.g. Winter and Lynx's friendship), so I decided to fix this old draft up a bit and share it with everyone. Consider it a sort of prologue, or bonus feature, for Winter Returning!
It also (hint hint!) sets up some things for the sequel that I'm currently working on.
To Weather a Storm
Late autumn winds howled outside of the small, lopsided igloo. The snowfall was lessening, but merciless bouts of rain and hail continued to fall. It was, in all, a rather gloomy day.
Or night, Winter thought, who knows? It's like even time stopped for this wretched, star-swallowing storm. He couldn't even tell how many hours had passed since he'd first taken shelter here. Probably a lot. Pressing himself to the ground, he buried snout into the freezing snow and tried not to scream from boredom. He wondered if any other IceWing had ever wished to freeze to death.
"Would you like some of my seal jerky, sir?" the small dragon beside him asked in her cheerful, creaky voice. Her accent, like that of everyone in this little village, was one of the lowest commoners. She opened one of her bearskin bags and offered him its over-salted contents. "Look here, Prince Winter, it's not even a year old. I think."
With great effort, Winter raised his head and tried to look both humble and regal (rather hard, since those two words seemed like opposites to him). "No thanks, Pasque," he said, repressing a cringe. I guess I should be casual with her. I'm on her level now. No, I'm below it. Is total-erasure-from-the-rankings even a level? "It's just Winter, by the way. I'm not..."
She only smiled and shook her head in a kindly, ancient way. "How humble he is!" she laughed gleefully. "No, you are a true prince. Your bloodline is written as clear as summer ice on your scales, sir!" Then she hummed a little ditty, something royal-sounding.
Winter wondered if she really meant what she was saying, or if she was messing with him. It was hard to tell, with these villagers, the common IceWings. Some of them hated royalty; some of them respected it. Most of them just didn't care. They wanted help, and were grateful regardless of where it came from. And Winter was happy to lend a talon.
Still, he could do without all of this "Prince Winter" nonsense. Every time she called him by his now-former title, it was like another serrated claw being stabbed into his back by the family that had rejected him. Maybe Kinkajou was right, he thought, ruefully admitting that the hyperactive RainWing did have some good ideas, maybe I should have come up with a secret identity. Mister Freezeface was a bit too ridiculous, though. I wonder what Kinkajou is up to now. Back at the academy. Probably...
The shrill whistling of the wind distracted him, causing his thoughts to trail off. It was hard to focus with all that noise outside. He was actually grateful for this, because it helped keep his mind from drifting back to that inevitable place. That face: green eyes and glimmering trails of silver.
"I won't have you starving to death, Prince Winter," Pasque went on. Her old face, or what Winter could see of it in the darkness, was white with hints of faded lilac. As she had said while Winter stumbled around and waited for his eyes to adjust, the lower class IceWings didn't have fancy Gift of Light lamps, so they made do with their night vision. "You're to be our savior this year. Saviors can't die before they do their saving, now can they?"
Winter snorted. He was no savior. All he was doing was helping the villages prepare for the upcoming winter, which had been predicted to be especially harsh. The fact that these dragons were so desperate and that the upper Circles didn't care disgusted him. What's Snowfall doing about this? Enjoying another feast? He thought about Hailstorm and Tundra, sitting at the same table as Queen Snowfall, being toasted for their acts of valor, and immediately felt sick to his stomach. Doesn't matter. I'm here, helping my tribe. I chose this.
"Bad skies next year," Pasque observed. "Angry. Loud. I feel it in my bones." She shuffled her wings and frowned ominously, then went back to curiously studying him. "Is that what troubles you, Prince Winter? The weather?"
He sniffed and turned away from his host's prying gaze, wishing she would stop it already. He tried to concentrate on his plans for the next week. He would have to regroup with his Talons of Peace allies and head back north to make sure the nomadic mountain IceWings got supplies. If this storm ever even ends! The spines on his back prickled impatiently. He hated when his plans failed, or were ripped out of his talons by some stroke of bad luck. And oh, how often that happened!
Pasque continued to stare at him intently. Clearly, she wouldn't leave him alone until he answered her.
"One can't really hear storms in the palace," he replied finally. He glanced up, worried that this less-than-magnificent igloo would cave in under the force of the downpour. "The wind and the hail and stuff, I mean." He shrugged. "Thick walls. Even the glass there is soundproof. I think it's enchanted."
"Sir! That's no way to live!" Pasque exclaimed. She tilted her head and blinked her dull purple eyes at him. "A dragon must feel his storms to be alive. That's what I always say. Yes, an IceWing must know the winter sky." She leaned back. "So this is your first real storm, is it, Prince?" He expected her to keep babbling on, but instead she just looked at him and smiled again.
Winter nodded curtly. He wrapped his wings around himself, accidentally making himself seem even more pathetic than before. As hard as he tried to look like the heroic, honorable guest that he totally was, every anxious tremble of the igloo's walls made him recall an old nightmare about avalanches and suffocation.
"I've known at least twenty great storms in my life, Prince Winter," Pasque rambled on. Then she laughed, a rough and pleasant sound like a frozen lake breaking. "A hundred, if you count the emotional ones those darn, handsome soldiers brought me! But oh, that's a scandal for another time." Eyeing him mischievously, she poked him with her bony wing. "What about you, Prince? Do you have any special dragon putting lightning in your life?"
Winter flopped over and said, flatly, "No."
Outside, the wind reached a desperate pitch, shrieking and pounding like a dragon possessed. Winter pictured the endless white of the snow piling up on them, drift after drift, sealing their igloo away like a tomb. Maybe the storm would never pass. Maybe it would rage on and on and he would be buried here, in the cold blankness, alone with his heartache (and a nosy old village dragon) forever.
"Your heart has been broken, too, sir," Pasque said softly.
Moon. Despite all of the walls that Winter had put up in his head, all the distance he'd put between himself and her, the memory of her still instantly appeared. He thought about her eyes, glimmering green in the low light of dusk. He thought about her dark scales, just a little too warm, and the swirls of stars on her wings.
Winter's head snapped up. He couldn't think about Moonwatcher, not now.
"It's alright. That's your business, I won't ask." Pasque shifted snow around with a careful claw. "But, if I may say something of it...I think you will heal, Prince Winter. I think you are a good dragon, with a good head on your shoulders. Not the kind who breaks because of one blow to his heart."
That was high praise, coming from a commoner who knew him only as an exiled prince who guiltily passed out supplies and glared at everyone. That's not me, he wanted to say. You've got the wrong dragon. I'm not a hero. Instead, he fell silent and stared at the wall, listening listlessly to the wind.
Pasque began to sing.
Winter sunshine, silver noon
Lilac mornings and purple clouds
I'll meet you by the cold sea soon
Fly down the blue ice with me
And watch the frost form as fate allows
Things that were not meant to be
Things that were not meant to be
Her voice was frail but firm, soft but soulful, achingly ancient and kind. The tune sounded old, like the kind of song you here in village after village with different lyrics every time and a different story behind every singer. The notes fell gently, full of the cold sadness that seemed to frostbite all forms of IceWing art. It was mournful but comforting, something that a mother would sing, or that Winter guessed a mother would sing, since his mother had preferred lectures to lullabies and always scolded her dragonets before bed.
She paused to take a breath, and Winter gazed on in quiet awe. Then, seeming to forget the rest of the song, or perhaps too tired to hit the high notes again, she went on repeating, Things that were not meant to be. Things that were not meant to be.
Winter thought of Moonwatcher, of Hailstorm and Icicle, of Jade Mountain Academy, of the IceWing palace, of a million things he should have done and a million things that were not meant to be.
"My son was like you," Pasque said. Her voice became softer and sadder, but her smile stayed on her snout. "My only dragonet. He wanted to change the world. He wanted to...do something, anything, to help end that thrice-damned war. So he left, found more dragons like him, and moved so far away that even his mother couldn't find him. That's how you know someone's really set, when they cut off ties with their own mother."
She sighed, still smiling. Bitterness crept onto her face, mixing oddly with her sweet, nostalgic expression. "The Talons of Peace. Good dragons, stuck in a time when it was too dangerous to be good. He helped them, for a few years. And then he died. And world kept on suffering." She shook her head. "That's my Hvitur. Did what he could."
Winter blinked at her, surprised. "Hvitur? You're Hvitur's mother?" His head spun. He'd never known Hvitur, just heard stories of him from the other Talons of Peace operatives. The name lingered faintly in Winter's mind, associated with sad faces and tragic tales from the SandWing War. Since Cirrus had turned out to be a creepy RainWing in disguise, Hvitur was the only real IceWing Winter knew of in the Talons.
Pasque's eyes lit up hopefully. "Did you know him?"
"No." Winter looked at the ground and shook his head. "He died before I hatched. I only heard about him from the Talons." He flicked his tail toward the bags of food and bundles of blankets that had been piled inside the igloo. "They've been helping me gather supplies. I don't usually talk about them, though, not with other IceWings." Much of the tribe was still wary of the Talons, thanks to false propaganda that had been spread during the war.
"Our dear Ice Kingdom has never made friends of peace groups," Pasque agreed, sighing. "You're wise to be careful, Prince, but there may be more allies here than you think. Most of us are just quiet about it." She picked at her seal jerky. "As we must be. We have our ways of making a difference. Little things, little changes."
Winter said nothing. He thought about Hvitur, about how much the Talons of Peace respected his memory. Is that how dragons will remember me? As a hero? Or will I just be another weird, scandalous story that they gossip about? Is that all I'll leave behind? In these freezing, dreary months, Winter had found himself contemplating sad subjects like that, and it scared him. What an awful thing to think...
"There's another helper who's been about. You must meet her after this storm clears up." Pasque paused, her dull-scaled face crinkling with thought. "Another noble, like you, sir! What was her name... Twinks? Oh, Lynx!"
"Lynx?" Winter's wings flared, nearly hitting Pasque's precious bag of seal jerky. "Lynx?! Lynx is here?"
"Oh! You know her!" cried Pasque, delighted. "You heroes are like little penguins, all huddled together, hmm? She seems like a fine dragon, this friend of yours. They've been singing her praises all through the mountains."
Friend of yours. For some reason, that little turn of phrase made Winter want to shoot frostbreath from his nose. Was Lynx a friend? Was she more than that? He hadn't seen her in so long. In fact, to be honest, he had been avoiding her.
"But what is Lynx doing out here?" sputtered Winter, thoroughly confused. Lynx was a model IceWing: a hero from the battle of with the NightWings, a loyal guard of the glimmering palace, the pride of her pompous family. In short, she was everything Winter was not.
"Same as you, I'd wager," said Pasque simply, "doing the right thing."
"She'll want to avoid me then," grumbled Winter, "because I usually mess that up."
Pasque only laughed. "Oh, you're just like my son, sir. Cold as ice, but always burning like SkyWing fire. What a trick of the moons."
Why am I here? Winter wondered. All this time, he had told himself he was doing a good deed, helping his tribe. But why was he really here?
Part of him ached to be like Hvitur. To become a true hero, selfless and brave, who did the right thing for the right reasons, not because he was trying to fly away from the past. In hard times like these, his tribe needed heroes. Wasn't it time for him to shed the scales of his old self and step into a new role? To be the kind of dragon Moonwatcher had once thought he could be?
Then he remembered what had happened to Pasque's son. What always happened to heroes in the end.
Maybe it wasn't such a good idea, to try and change the world.
Maybe Winter was doomed to mess that up, too.
Besides, he reasoned glumly, I'm not a hero. I've done nothing for my tribe or my friends. Three moons, it's like I've been exiled from both. And now I can't even manage to pass out some old whale blubber, because this stupid storm won't pass!
Pasque, sensing his anger (or rather, seeing the very obvious signs of his lashing tail and princely glare), busied herself with making a snowball. She hummed to herself, spinning an intricate and wordless tune, while her grumpy guest drifted off into troubled sleep.
By the time Winter awoke, Pasque had finished all her seal jerky... and the winds had finished their screaming. He blinked, his head tilting this way and that as he adjusted back to the silence of still, soundless air. How strange, to be back in a world of calm.
"Ah, sir," Pasque said, her voice crinkling with old age, "the storm has passed. It takes a strong heart to weather a storm like that." She paused, then smiled kindly at him. "And it takes a good heart," she added softly, "to weather a storm within."
It was oddly refreshing for Winter to dig himself out of that igloo. Pasque did what she could, but every joint in that poor old dragon's body seemed to have been frozen by age. He simply couldn't let her fight through all that snow, despite her insistence that she was "as tough as a winter hare, and just as good at hopping!"
Once he had cleared a decent tunnel out to the rest of the world, he sat down to rest and let his eyes adjust to the light. It all seemed so strange and vast out there now, after so long trapped in this tiny hole with only seal jerky and a quirky old villager for company. Perhaps he had come out of it better, and wiser, but that didn't stop his eyes from hurting or his wings from cramping up like crazy.
Pasque went out ahead of him, humming her old song, her crooked tail swinging jauntily behind her. Then she gave a little, excited shout, startling Winter up from his spiky ball of sulking. "She's out there now," she announced, poking her head back in, "your friend."
"My friend?" Winter paused. Then it dawned on him. Lynx. "Oh."
He cautiously emerged, blinking in the blindingly bright morning sun, and felt his heart skip a beat when he saw Lynx's familiar agile shape twirling through the blue heavens. Part of him wanted to dart back into that igloo, and pretend that he had never seen her, and avoid all the awkward questions and inevitable heartbreak that he knew, just knew was in store.
We haven't talked in so long! cried his racing thoughts. She'll want to know everything. And I'll ruin it. I always do. Just like before. Maybe he could have stood there worrying forever.
But the Pasque gave him a little shove, and his cooped-up wings seemed to unfurl of their own accord, and before he knew it he was racing forward and waving to her and calling out, "Lynx!"
"Winter!" she cried, her whole face lighting up with happy surprise. "What are the odds? Oh, Winter!" She landed beside him, scattering fresh snow, her wings still poised to fly, and laughed with disbelief and delight.
It felt good, knowing that she was glad to see him. That he had made her day just by weathering that storm and digging out of that snow and showing up in the same sky as her. The sight of her familiar smile made his day, too. He found himself smiling and laughing with her, albeit a bit falsely. He just wanted to see her joy.
With a little shout, Lynx sprung back into the air. "Freezing moons," she exclaimed, "look how pretty that sky is!"
"Oh." Winter nodded, his tail twitching awkwardly as he lingered below. Afraid. "Yeah, it is."
"Come on!" she said. "Let's stretch our wings!"
Following her, soaring upward, Winter felt his smile become a little less false. Up here in blue sky, breathing the thin air, beating his stiff wings, everything seemed so simple. He had Lynx. A friend. And for now, that was enough. Circle after circle, together in the sky.
Soon they would have to land. Then the real world would come crashing down on them, with its horrible and hopeless future. With its heartache and questions. But for now, all that dread was just a whisper on the breeze. Winter could block it out and start to piece together some kind of plan.
A friend, thought Winter, gazing up at Lynx. That's a good place to start.
Meanwhile, Pasque ambled out below, her faded wings trailing languidly in the freshly fallen snow, her little voice rising triumphantly as she finally finished her song. It was sad and slow, as all IceWing songs seemed to be, but something changed in that second stanza, shifting defiantly, and it ended, strangely, on a high note.
Winter sunshine, silver noon
Lilac mornings and purple clouds
I'll meet you by the cold sea soon
Fly down the blue ice with me
And watch the frost form as fate allows
Things that were not meant to be
Things that were not meant to be
Winter moonlight, graying night
White mountains and icy haze
We'll watch the frozen stars so bright
Till stormclouds are all that we see
And I'll remain there for days and days
Things that were not meant to be
Things that were not meant to be
Things that were not meant to be
Things that were not meant to be