A Match of Monsters

Chapter Seventeen

The air was freezing, so cold that every exhale form Elain or the kit she was curled protectively around, formed a small cloud in front of their faces. It was not long before the two of them had managed to breath out a mist so thick and expansive that it shrouded their silhouettes completely from sight, but did nothing to protect Elain's eyes from the bright glare so strong that her eyes watered at the potency of it.

No matter how she turned her gaze, the stark white still burned her sight. Closing her eyelids did not help, as the fleshy films were too thin to block out the light, rather only strong enough to stain it red. Even when Elain rolled onto her hands and knees – still clutching the kit to her breast – from where she had been curled up as tightly as a new born chick on her side, and she faced the ground, she still could not bare the bright reflection it gave off.

She brushed off the snow as best as she could from where it had packed against the thick wool and fur linings of her cloak, after all it could not keep her warm if the snow melted and it became wet on the inside. Her boots slipped in the loose powder as she tried to scramble to her feet. The leather tips digging into a ground that did not have the compact strength to remain still.

After many long minutes of struggling, Elain finally succeeding in standing up, bur almost tripped to the ground once more when one of her feet caught on an exposed hole. It looked more life a rabbit's burrow than anything else, and she amazed to realise that she had escaped through something only the size of her head.

It was when once the air had settled once more and a breeze had picked up that was strong enough to blow away the heated mist of Elain's breath, was she able to clearly see her surroundings. She shivered against the cold wind, biting her lip as her form swayed in an attempt to stay upright. The blinding brightness was disorientating, and there was nowhere that she could look to escape from it.

Fresh snow covered every surface she could see, packed tightly enough to reflect the sunshine, but not so packed as to be easily traversable. Not even the wall of boulders jutting up two feet from the ground had managed to escape the winter wonder. Where they stood erect un a straight line on her left, their sharp tips had been softened by snow, and what bare rock she could see had been encased in a thick layer of transparent ice. The sky was full of fluffy clouds. Thin and pleasant to look at, they drifted about lazily high above without the volume to filter the sunlight, but encompassing just enough if the skyline so that the unbearable brightness bounced off their wispy fibres and back towards the earth, joined by beams directly from the noon sun where it had crested high above, alike to the crowning jewel of nature's beautiful and deadly emblem.

Faint sounds could be heard in the atmosphere, indistinct and indistinguishable from each other by the tangle of echoes that followed them in their wake as they bounced all over the area. Elain could not tell what the noises were, or where they were from. But they still seemed important despite they anonymous nature – somehow far too important to risk not understanding their origins.

She did not know where to begin looking as she was unable to distinguish any directions from the way the shallow resonance and its echoes came from everywhere. But while she decided, it would be best if she could find even partial cover from the harsh weather she and her young charge were exposed to. She curled her body and heavy woollen cloak around his smaller frame, baring her right side to the strong winds in the process, and began a long struggle over a short distance to seek protection under the wall of boulders.

To Elain, it felt as if it had taken an entire age to get there, as she struggled through feet of snow and lengthening shadows that attempted to drain her strength and persistence. It was only the bull-headed nature that she had inherited from her mother that kept the exhausted girl going, no matter how much her body protested.

By the time that she finally arrived, having travelled a distance of barely one hundred feet, the sun hung low and swollen in the sky. Slowly it lowered itself past the sharp line of the horizon, and as the fierceness of its bright glare began to fade, the sunset stained the once pure-white world around Elain in a bloody hue that lingered ominously even after the great orb could no longer be seen over the silhouette of the distant ridges.

As the sun dropped, so did the temperature.

It did not take long for Elain's body – still overwhelmed as it was by shock and fear – to begin an uncontrollable and unpredictable that almost had the kit falling from her arms. She could do nothing but huddle under the shelter of the stones as the cold wracked her entire frame. Her jaw made more noise than the marching of an entire army as her teeth clashed against each other with vibrations string enough that she could feel them at the tips of her frozen toes. Her ears rang with the sounds and her mind throbbed at the abuse her body forced upon itself.

The deep freeze of the oncoming night infested her flesh and infected her movements so thoroughly that she could barely even control her blue hands enough to tighten the edges of her cloak around their shivering bodies.

Within the goose flesh embrace of her thin arms, the kit curled tighter within himself, just as desperate as his caretaker to retain what little warmth there still was around them, to possess enough heat to stay alive.

She managed to slowly shuffle her unwilling body until almost the entire of her arched back was tightly pressed up against the hewn rock where weather and time and faded and smoothed over the once jagged edges and cuts that it might have once possessed. It was now almost comfortable for her cold body to lean against.

The sky darkened until it had completely transformed into night. The cold crept in, struggling past the barrier of wool and fur from the cap that covered both the young woman and younger dragon, fighting against the weak waves of body heat that stood as a natural buffer to the frosty breezes, before finally managing to seep into their bodies and further plummet already dangerously low internal levels of heat. As the temperature cooled more and more and pierced through stronger and stronger, Elain's body began to submit. It travelled with a bite that had not been in the air while the sun had still rested in the sky, and the hypnotic compulsion of sleep that it contained grew increasingly difficult for her to resist.

Futilely, she battled her fatigue as her eyes grew heavier and her vision blurred. The symptoms became more prominent the longer she attempted to stay conscious, but Elain could not hold off the swarming blackness forever.

She was unable to stop herself from succumbing to sleep in the snow, nature winning against desperation.