YEAR 4 | Winter | Early Morning | Clear / 14°F Last night had brought a fresh snowfall. It coated the terra with all the smooth grace one might expect, and Mira found herself leaping through it with a mixture of youthful glee... and growing exhaustion. It was halfway up her slender limbs and then some, and she did not have the brute mass to simply push her way through. She was reduced to bounding, cursing her occasional slips, and giggling to herself. It was fun to occasionally fall over sideways, give herself to gravity, only to be saved by the fluffy white cushion below. When she at last came upon the field of boulders, she was at first confused. They appeared to be large, ovular mounds, perfectly white, like eggs half concealed within the earth below. Mira stopped, one ear perked upwards, and allowed her head to tilt ever so gently to the side. What on earth... The orbs floating between this mounds with the same glee that she had made her way through this rolling plain. Well, if they liked them they couldn't be all bad, right? Mira pranced forwards, circling the first white mound she came to. It looked... so smooth? Tentatively she raised a paw and pressed against the object, going slow until she hit something solid and rough... It dawned one her at once that this was almost certainly a field of rocks and she filled the air with a gale of wind-chime laughter. "Talk" "You" Think

Hephaestus hadn't been expecting the snowstorm that had swooped down upon him the evening before, catching him away from his den. He'd been brooding at the borders again, but losing his way in the white out had quickly driven the moodiness away in favor of not dying on his way to tracking down his den. He'd finally had to give up looking for his den when he'd stumbled into a huge boulder and realized he'd wandered straight out of Ebony's lands and into their former home, the rock garden. Rather than continue wandering and end up in the ocean he'd curled up in the lee of the boulder and let the snow pile up around him as he curled tightly into a gold and copper ball. The storm raged, and eventually he fell asleep beneath a blanket of snow, his thick coat keeping him warm despite the frozen precipitation. He woke up to the beautiful sound of laughter, muffled by the snow over his head. Curious the heavy boy lifted his head, breaking through the fluffy blanket and blinked molten eyes in the sudden bright light until a form came into focus. A pretty, feminine form. He stretched his way up out of the whiteness and stepped her way. "Hello," he said simply, seriously.

Perhaps her evaluation of the rock field had been... slightly less than scientific. After all, testing one of the fluffy lumps did not necessarily prove that all of them were boulders. From the corner of her eye Mirajane saw one shiver and, just as she turned to look, saw a fluffy head poke up to the surface. She fell back with a surprised, "Eep!" as the snow-coated creature stepped forward. She missed his friendly greeting as she was falling backwards, tangling in her own limbs. "What the- Oof!" The delicate fae collapsed into the deep snow. Peeking back over the lip (cautiously because dude, what if it was a monster?) she discovered it was merely a wolf. She popped up, with a lump of snowy shell adorning the top of her skull, unbeknownst to her. "Oh. You're just a wolf." Gods, now the spirits were laughing at her with their annoying little churr. She pouted. "Ya know, you could warn someone before... just popping up like that." She rolled her eyes, but it was all in good nature. She was still alive, right? So far anyways.  "Talk" "You" Think