The snow was cold.

Delicate flakes glanced his skin briefly - ghostly - but each was like the touch of chilled steel.

This night the sword would sing, and his name – this name, this form, this existence, would be meaningless, perhaps destroyed.

But never the purpose, the only truth he knew – that he always knows. He was there to protect, until the end of all things, what was precious -

To everything that loved and lived.

And a secret even to his heart – buried and cold like the snow – to himself.

LCF regarded him without expression. “Are you ready?” He asked it like a threat, and a promise of calamity.  


*  *  *  *  *

The Girl who Sees him:


She didn’t care about the cold.

She didn’t care about the world.

She didn’t care about dying and ending it all. Ending it all.

She only saw him, alive, in the night and the falling snow. The falling snow that touched him when she could not.

His eyes too, – lambent and violet - perturbing in the way they seared through the darkness, she saw them, so clearly - the most clearly. She hated and loved them, that in them she saw so perfectly his beauty and his determination to defend. And to die.

For her. She hated that most of all, and despaired of him for it.

And she despaired of herself because in her heart she knew all too well that she loved him with every part of her that felt and thought and was.

Running to him through translucent dark.................

I love you,

God save me – us,

I love you.