It wasn’t so much a break in the weather as it was a breaking point in their home; there was only so much more time they could spend in close quarters without being at each other’s throats.It was cold beyond brisk, the kind of cold that gets in your nose and sticks. Small, powdery flakes dance on the breeze, turned into ghosts by a chill wind. The flakes looked like the stars, she thought, come to earth. Frozen and fallen. Saddened by distance, but joyous in their freedom. She borrowed from them, pulled the burning air into her lungs. Threw her head, exhilaration warming her up to the tips of her cold ears. Her legs flailed, knocking about in the dark, careless, fragile chimes carried by the wind. Her laughter was as fire. She became the snowflake. Somewhere in this same darkness, her sister was her mirror; a tempest thrashing about in the snow. They twisted like fireflies, dancing through the night, leaving a glow in their wake as their hollowed-out footprints caught the moon’s light and reflected it in little, frosty teacups. Crossing and crossing, serpentining across the frost, a helix of giggles and panting breath, running in the same current, but never truly seeing each other. Reflections, reverberations. Never one without the other, but never the other with the one. It felt appropriate, given their relationship, though Melinoe didn’t have the wherewithal to put it into words, at the time; so much of her was being given to crashing through the snow. But she did have this feeling, this far-down itch, that Mara was always distant. She was laughing, but there was less joy in it; she was careening through the drifts, but it was less jovial; not purposeful, even, but erratic. Melinoe curved and crashed and cackled, but each tree she rounded carried the threat, the clear danger, of running into Mara. And she did not want that to happen. So they gallivanted together, but an arm-- and a leg-- and a few trees-- length away. Mara was a black shadow save for the flashes of white in her illusionary, false eyespots; Melinoe’s golden sigil glowing burnished in the moon. They ran and ran and ran some more, exultant in the snow, knocking down wet clumps of it from the trunks they bumped into, two veritable wrecking balls of frigid thrill and cooped-up joy. Mel didn’t recognize the silence until it was too late. She’d spent so listening to the snow churn under Mara’s feet, mapping her own direction in kind, that she couldn’t differentiate it from her own breathing until a moment before disaster. Her ears flicked, and she tried to pull up, but then she was hurled off a small bank by her own forward motion. She was in the air, legs flailing, and then she was crashing down onto the cold ice of the frozen river. She hit, hooves digging furrows into the icelocked water, rear end spinning around and around. For a moment, when there was no thunderous crack, she thought she’d be okay; and, in her spinning and whirling, she could see the trees on the other side, growing closer and closer. What luck, she thought. She’d spin, spin, spin right across. Then, a shadow parted the darkness beneath the treecover, like the night itself was reaching out some long appendage, its sharp teeth gnashing in the cold; it drew in the moonlight, darker than dark on that cold night, distant and yet dangerously close, pinpricks of light puncturing the dark like needles. In her dizziness, Mel didn’t know what they were, at first. She thought of snowflakes, and stars. It was only when the cracking started that she realized: They were reflective, white, false eyespots piercing right through the frosty air. Mara had stepped down onto the frozen river, and a moment later, the ice was gone from beneath Mel’s feet. She plunged forward, chest submerged into frigid water, the air pulled from her like a serrated blade from deep within flesh. Her chin hit hard on the fracturing ice, cheeks crushing into the weaker slush there; it jarred her and clacked her teeth together, but it stopped her from going all the way in. “M-Mara!” she shrieked, panicked; her legs, she was sure, were flailing, kicking for all she was worth, but she’d lost feeling in them almost immediately. “Mara! Help!” Her sister had been right there! She’d been right. There. Mel floundered for a length of time known only to the river. It could have been three minutes-- it could have been an hour. Or, maybe it couldn’t have been, because she’d be dead. The only truth in that time was: she was cold. She didn’t even feel the slightest touch of the teeth buried in her scruff, the hard tugs to pull her from that watery grave, dragging her up onto shore; she didn’t smell the pine she was laid out on, nor the crush of the body on top of her, for warmth. The next thing-- the only thing-- she knew, after screaming for her sister, after realizing her sister wasn’t there, after feeling foolish for believing her sister might save her-- was her sister, grooming her hair, pulling out the icechunks and spreading it out to dry; breathing on her face and lips to warm them with her own breath; covering her with branches, switching them out as they became wet, or chilled; and tending to her all through that long night, until she began to shiver again, and her body once more pulsed with life. Eventually, they made it home, Mel leaning on Mara the whole way. Mel felt on pins and needles, and not just because of the lingering numbness in her limbs. She couldn’t shake the feeling that Mara could step away and let her fall there, alone in the wilderness; it hunted her like one singular, vulturous wolf: that this was her fault, and Mara helping her was a gift. The guillotine strike Mel expected never came. They crossed the threshold of their home, into their parents’ worried orbit, and everything became a little blurry after that. They received a sharp scolding from their mother and father, as both girls were wrapped in warmth and care. “Mel was lucky I was there,” Mara had said, haughty and beautiful, even as she stood there shivering and bedraggled, smelling like pine, and dirt. “If I hadn’t been there to help her when the ice cracked, she would have died.” Her parents agreed this was a benevolent turn of events, their younger daughter being there to save their older, more foolish sister. And Mel didn’t say anything to disprove it. Even sitting there in front of the fire, clad in a heavy, woven blanket, warmed by soup and tea, Mel’s lips and tongue could not move. It was assumed she could not speak because of the cold, but Mel knew the truth: she did not speak because she did not want to share what she knew. Marakorum stepped from the bank and broke the ice beneath her hoof. Marakorum watched from the shadows for long, long seconds, while Melinoe thrashed and cried in the frigid water. But Mara had also saved her; conjured the physical might to haul her bodily from that cold box; Tended to her. Made her hale enough to get home, and helped her do just that. And this was enough of a balm that, after a few, discomforting days, Mel accepted that, just maybe, this had all been a tragic accident. Maybe Mara stepped onto the ice to help Mel up; maybe the ice just happened to crack then; maybe Mara panicked, backpedaled, and fell into the snowy trees; maybe she hesitated in pulling her sister to safety because she didn’t, immediately, know how. So Mel crushed this lingering doubt, this creeping dread, down deep inside her, enough to ignore it for a long, long time. She didn’t know it would fester, down there in the dark; that it would gnaw, demand to be fed, grow teeth and limb and heart, and rip through her to crawl back up her throat in a vindicated spray of blood, just cranial to where her sister’s horn pierced through her skin, narrowly missing her trachea, as the two struggled and fought, scattering red drops in the snow like burning, fallen stars.