It felt like home, a feeling that the child had taken for granted, until it had gone away. Now, however, her small nose gently turning over this frigid stone and that, she lets herself live in it; a moment that felt almost normal, despite the freezing air, and the strange layers of ice that held the world captive. She had never seen winter in the Basin, after all, only the last days of fall, when the trees were bare, but for the dark, round buds that promised the leaves would return, and the quiet, ever present emerald of the watching pines. Gwyn did not know snow as more than a few inches that melted away within days, and she had no idea of what normal was, but she did know that the Rift was not normal. Her father complained about it often enough, after all.
She wonders, then, what home was like during the winter; she tries to imagine its wide valley white with snow, like her parents told her, the lake a blue mirror that reflected the blue-gray, winter sky above. She's about to look up and out across the lake when a growingly familiar, heavy set of footfalls draws her attention, instead; her plain, almost wistful expression becomes the slightest of frowns, and she quickly diverts her gaze back to the stones at her hooves.
She was sure he meant well, this big fellow, but Gwyn already had a father. Though she was small, she had gleaned enough from Roscorro's behavior to have figured out that the large man wasn't as tough as his scaly exterior would lead one to believe, at first. She also had noticed that he followed her wherever she went, and that he seemed... concerned about her. For some reason, no matter how she tried to just accept the man's well-intentioned company, she found his knightly, paternal attentions toward her gravely irritating.
“No,” she says, moving a few stones about glumly before moving on further down the beach to continue her search, looking out at the lake wistfully as she adds, “just a bunch of normal rocks. And those fish out there, splashing.”
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Siren's Summit
