I slumber under the ice, hidden beneath my cloaked mind. My slow yet consistent heartbeat was softly pulsating among the echoing silence. While my soul has been sealed to rest, I appear to smile, speak, and even laugh at times. A cold and crackling shell has been formed, which awaits its liberation by the fire.
A figure approaches, tall and slim. As she gets closer, her silhouette almost seems to hover above the frozen ground, breaking through the bounds of the mortal world. Her pale arms reach out to the ground, where I'm curled up, and lift me up as if I were a feather.
My eyes finally pry open as I sense the heat of her body and hear the soft cracking sounds under her bare feet. A pair of grey eyes glittering in blue stared warmly back at me. I noticed the snowflakes that had settled on her lashes. She was humming a soft tune, and as we glided through the frozen land, I glanced at a strange, mist-like, shining trail that followed her movement. My fur sat tightly in her gentle arms, warming her cold hands.
I squinted my eyes shut and gasped in agony as my breathing quickened. She halted and held me upfront in both of her hands while kneeling down to place me on her lap. With her soft fingers, she parted the fur across my body, to reveal a deep wound, gushing with fresh blood, carved bone-deep above my heart. Her gaze flinched, and her eyes watered upon witnessing the heinous wound.
Little did I know, that all that has died still lives on, and what has been ripped apart still continues to function. The idea of destruction has been transformed by the ice and snow into a beautiful metamorphosis, where my broken bones cracked and I wailed under her enchantment, as she begun to sew my chest torn asunder.
In a transformation by silver magic, from the cold, broken body of a small fox, a trembling maiden has emerged.
‘And from sorrow and pain, from darkness and ash, shall rise anew, born from silver tendons’; — she chanted — ‘she, the shape-shifter, a pilgrim of lost lands, a Silver Changeling.’
Her words shattered the ice around my newly born body, which sat tightly on the ground, resonating with the frozen land. My chest, still pounding rapidly, now moved intact, with only a straight, carved line of scar visible in the middle.
She saved and reformed me, as I was lost and found. I have died and been reborn. A silver gale erupted from the dust, and I entered the world of spirits and magic, frozen in time, a form-bender threading light through life and death.
