Cold (Section III)

All there had ever been was a shape, the suggestion of a form moving through the dark. However, that is not what urged her to freeze and set her heart beating from utter fear. It had eyes. The eyes of a thing driven mad from pain and the inability to understand the changing world. They spoke of a deep nothingness that consumed any hint of thought or awareness - stripped away everything and left only a single desire: the utmost need to continue regardless of the horror requisite in its progression.

Yet that was not all there was to the shadow. It had teeth; teeth fashioned for the very purpose she served in the darkening world - but they were at the same time wholly different. They had been changed by the strange light of the past, turned into things dark from heat - much as the flesh that housed them. It was as a thing dead for too long - and yet it still walked. Still it drew breath through tortured lungs - and drew ever closer to her. She could feel its hunger as vividly as the chill that drove the great heards far from the lands. She could see its dreadful form advancing through the dark - billowing the horrid odor of flesh made black. This was a thing from which to flee, yet she could not bring her muscle and bones to move in the slightest. Fear had pinned her, and she closed her eyes and trembled as the shadow leaned close to raggedly breathe in her scent...

She awoke from the strange thoughts with a frantic grunt, her breathing shallow and swift as her eyes darted about. The changed thing had vanished - somehow gone with the odd moments of strange thinking. Calming slightly, she allowed herself a moment to glance about without fear of the shadow. The strange rain had begin to fall once more - fluttering down in great grey and black sheets that stole the sun from the sky entirely - made the world smell of heat and cold.

The air had grown still and filled with a terrible chill. She shivvered, throwing off a thick blanket of the strange rain that never ran from her pitifully thin form. However, there was comfort amidst the falling grey and biting cold. Her son still slumbered deep within his egg - nestled carefully beneath her chin. Lying there upon the slopes of the nest, she could feel the warmth from the tiny form yet hidden to her - could imagine what it would be like to finally have him to see and smell.

She wanted nothing more than that; to at last know her child with her eyes. Yet, her distant musings were abruptly disturbed, for in the span of a single heartbeat she caught the scent of something vague upon the wind - a smell that immediately drew her mind to a sharpened focus. She knew this smell. It was a thing she had known before - and like all mothers, she both hated and feared it in equal measure. Nest thieves. The small ones that stole children even before they had seen their first day.

The faintest hint of a sound suddenly issued forth from the dark haze of the strange rain, forming on the wind not far from her nest and sending her mind into a desperate chaos. She was starving; what little energy she held within her wasting body was precious beyond measure. To squander what little strength still clung to her body was to sentence both her and her unborn son to death. Yet, she could not, would not, allow nest thieves to steal the last of her children. That, beyond all other things, would not occur - not this day.

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