Winters Rhythm

Part 1

I like to watch the snow.

I sit at the mouth of our cave, marveling at how the snow can be so happy, even though it's home is so cold and unwelcoming.

I like to watch it dance to the rhythm winter sets it to. How it chooses to react, being pushed around and bullied into submission.

I would tell you I liked being the first to do everything. But I would be lying, and Mother always said lying was bad and it put a bad mark on you in the Tally of Life.

Like in the mornings I would be the first one outside, to taste the fresh air on my tongue like no one else had been out there before.

I was the first to frolic through the fresh snow that fell the night previous, to make the first footprints in the frost flakes.

And I like to think I was the first to feel the frighteningly cold air in my fur every morning Mother would let us play outside.

But I was the first to disappear from winter.

Akilah crept out of her mother's warm embrace, the cold biting into her flesh as if starved. She shivered but kept padding along the frozen dirt towards the yawning cavern mouth. Her claws clattered on the ground as she scrambled up the cold, hard rocks leading to the entrance.

Something moved behind her, she froze, slowly turning her head to look at her family, still huddled together and fighting off the cold as if at war with it.

She mentally sighed her relief. Akilah rushed up to the welcoming light that shone down on her, she'd been trapped for what seemed like a lifetime.

She burst into the white world of ice she had inherited.