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[zayden]

[div style="width: 550px; text-align: justify; font-family: helvetica; font-size: 8.3pt; letter-spacing: .3px; line-height: 1.35;"][align=center]4 FEB 2019. / WORD COUNT 246 LISTENING TO OLD FRIEND by ELDERBROOK / TAGS

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ooc: this is rather rushed, sorry! i was just excited to have this up — i haven't even finished his tags!

Evergreen branches bowed to the bitter wind; overhead, a lone bird circled, searching for food. Disturbed by human footsteps, a nervous hare skittered through the snow, bounding into the deep forest.

Unperturbed by the gnawing cold, Zayden pressed forwards, trudging up the mountain. Forbidding as the landscape was, its beauty stole away discomfort, and passing the halfway mark made the promised lodge ahead more enticing than the warmer valleys below. Food, too, was a powerful motivator, and childhood metropoles seemed far less alluring when distance was accounted for.

Had he been told, mere months ago, that he would find himself willingly stepping into winter, he likely would have laughed. Nomadic as the last few years had been, he was to warmer climates as a moth was to a flame — impossibly, unbearably attracted, even despite any potential danger. Admittedly, there was something exciting about deep winter — and it certainly brightened Christmas. Songs of winter wonderlands and snow never quite had the same affect in the heat as they did in the hypothermic wild.

Restless, Zayden rubbed at his arms as though the half-hearted movement would repel the cold. When it didn't, he buried his hands in his jacket and quickened his pace until the lodge emerged from the tree-line like a mirage, an oasis in a sea of white. Rustic and warm, it pulled him in as though he was leashed and he stopped at its door, lifting an ice-blued fist to knock against the heavy wood.