Wintercearig

Chapter One-Patience

Wintercearig
(adj.) lit. "winter-sorrowful", the feeling of a deep sadness comparable to the cold of winter.

Lance McClain

Lance McClain remembered lying in the snow, a cerise mess of warmth in a blanket of icy unforgivable. Vital blood poured from everything that made him-Lance McClain. The wolves surrounded his lithe frame, licking him, biting, probing, pressing at his body, he imagined it was how a scientist would examined a dead corpse on a metal table. Their huddled bodies blocked any light that shined between the tall oaks that covered the woods.
Their ruffs glittered with crystallized snowflakes and their breath came out in puffs that he could feel against his caramel skin. The musky smell of their fur reminded him of earth: wet, the bark of damp trees, something almost foul, and yet, like something wonderfully alive. The animal's tongues dissolved his skin like how the sun should've the bloody pulp of snow around him-and it probably would've too, if his family hadn't moved up North a few years back. Teeth carelessly clawed at his sleeves, snagged through his brunette hair, and shifted to sink around the pulse in his neck. He couldn't keep from thinking of his mother's hands: comforting but easily could destroy.

Lance McClain could've screamed, but he didn't. He just laid there and allowed it to happen, watching the winter sky grow dark with clouds above him.

One wolf pressed his snout into his palm and again on his cheek, casting a soft shadow across Lance's narrow jawline. His violet orbs locked into his ocean ones while the other wolves jerked him every which way like a rag doll.

Lance held on to those eyes for as long as he could. Violet. And, up close, flecked magically with every shade of purple and lilac. He didn't want the wolf to look away, and he didn't. He wanted to reach out and grab a hold of the charcoal fur, but his hands stayed curled on his thin chest, his own arms frozen to his body-not from cold from the only thing that could be described as death. Would his Mother place Cuban flowers into his hands when he laid days later in a coffin the shade of the sea back home?

He couldn't remember what it felt like to be warm. His plum colored lips parted slightly, a smile that felt as foreign as he appeared. This was it. This was how he was going to die. Alone and completely forgotten, in a mess of his own broken, useless flesh.

Then the violet eyes were gone, and without them, the others closed in, too close, stiffly suffocating. Something fluttered in his chest.

There was no sun; there was no light. Lance was dying. He couldn't remember what home looked like.

But he didn't die. He was lost to a sea of cold, and then he was reborn into a work of warmth.

Keith Kogane

They snatched the boy off his tire swing in the backyard discreetly, and dragged him like a blanket into the woods, his body made shallow trail marks. The humans would find him later, unfortunately it wouldn't matter much then. Keith watched it go down, from the boy's world to his. He saw it happen. He didn't stop it.

It had been the longest, harshest winter of his life. Day after day under a bright, worthless sun. And the hunger-the hunger thrived hard in his mouth and gnawed, a sadistic power that couldn't be clenched. That month nothing moved, the landscape frozen into a colorless, unsatisfactory void. Mother Nature had ate any wildlife that was common to catch in the area near home. One of them had been shot with a dark shotgun trying to tear open a man's garbage off his back step, so the rest of the pack stayed in the woodland and slowly starved, waiting for warmth and their old bodies. Until they found the tan skinned boy. Until they rushed in like maggots.