Welcome to Gaia! ::

It sounded nice enough. A simple, manageable two syllable concept. Prior to experiencing it, Ysalda understood it only in description by reference. Words like ‘white’ and ‘soft’, ‘cold’, ‘quiet’, ‘beautiful’, and ‘peaceful’ dominated. She heard that it would glitter. That there would be blankets of beautiful crisp and clean white color all about and that the rain would fall slowly in elegant shapes instead of the usual happy little round drops. Ysalda liked rain as it was. But the thought of it taking a new form was not strictly unappealing.

She liked it already, after all, so what would be the harm in seeing it take another form?

Then, winter came.

Winter came, and it redefined ‘cold.’ Previously, cold was whenever an aiskala khehora played an awful trick and tossed atrocious ‘frozen’ things at her or when an unpleasantly less-warm breeze ruffled her scales the wrong way.

Now, cold was life. It was the floor of their beautiful nesting grounds being always akin to an atrocious frozen trick, frosted over with nasty, nasty crinkly hard, frigid components. It was a wind that made her scales stop moving and a curse that made her own breath bristle up and become white and still in the air before her. Cold was the death of all beautiful green things. It was the absence of all lovely hopping colorful bugs. It was bitter winds that howled in the night like monsters.

It. Was. Horrible.

Ysalda hated winter.

She coiled up, tucking herself into the furthest corner that her mother’s nesting cave would permit, and refused to wake. Perhaps if she slept long enough, the cold would forget how to exist.

Ysalda yowled.

Cold paws. Cold air. Cold everything.

She did not want to wake. But, in the face of all her most fervent desires, there her brother was anyway, kneading atop her, paws on her body, weight pressing and snout chewing at her tender antennae. She twitched them away from him, keening and squirming with a disgruntled and muddled hiss of a sound.

“Cold, cold,” she fussed. “Don’t like it. Allll nasty, nasty. Ground bites you like gross. Rain isn’t even rain no more.” She shook her snout fervently, re-emphasizing her point. “Don’t like it.”

Ysalda groaned, dragging the sound out and shooting her brother a narrow, yellow-eyed stare. “Don’t like it. Cold.”

But, he had distrupted her warm spot. Disrupted her attempts at sleep — even though they had been failing anyway — and seemed to be insistent. So, for the moment, she shivered, shaking herself violently and glaring out at the cave entrance with flared nostrils as her scales rippled with indignation. This was definitely an unacceptable temperature and way for nature to exist in general. If she was going to be up regardless, however, she might as well move about and complain about it.

“Rocks cold. Dirt cold. Air cold.” She licked out, making a face as she trotted towards the edge of the cave and paused there, wary again. “What games?”

Ysalda watched intently. Her antennae flicked in the frosty air, yellow-green scales rippling with the occasional shiver. But her wings, she kept tucked close, her tail stiff, and her large yellow eyes locked on her brother as he leapt out into the accursed cold. It did look inviting, she could admit that. All sparkling and buoyant and deceptively fluffy from a distance.

But it could not fool her.

She had felt it before and—

When some came sailing in her direction, she shrieked, scurrying to dart away but not doing so quickly enough because ice provided too little traction—how the ground betrayed her! Barking her objection and more focussed now on revenge than the cold, Ysalda dove out into it, hissing at how it swallowed her but bounding through it just the same in order to take after Kuasu. “Gonna, gonna—smoosh you in the cold!”

“Nononono—”

Ysalda scurried, making all manner of squawking, huffing, barking and yelping noises as she and her brother rolled through the cold. It wasn’t ideal, certainly. She still didn’t like the cold white, cruel as it was and much as it tried to stick to her scales. But it was rather fresh and soft on first fall, and made for decent rolling material when it came to wrestling, so for some time she did manage — without even truly thinking about it — to forget her woes in regard to the winter season and focus on playing with her brother.

Then, they came to an embankment. Though it wasn’t large, the snow there was thinner and the ground browner, the ice colder and—

Ysalda perched forward, sniffing tentatively. Where the little brook that used to run through ought to be, there was nothing but a chilly flat sheet of something else. She squinted, hunkering down and sidling warily closer, belly low to the riverbank. She tap-tapped a claw to what was once a babbling brook, and immediately drew back, shaking her snout and snorting.

“Ate it,” she declared. “Cold ate the water. Made it rock.”

Puff.

Challenge.

Ysalda stood a little straighter, chest jutting out and scales rippling as she flicked her wings and drew the tip of her forked tongue along her snout. Her brother was challenging her. ‘Didn’t eat it.’ She huffed. Squinted. Edged closer. Tapped a talon to it again, then scoffed, twitching her head. Did eat it. Did eat it. Wasn’t real water anymore, she could feel it was different. It was a lie. A water of lies.

But then, Kuasu was out on it, so Ysalda couldn’t not go out on it, or she would be a coward. And she wasn’t a coward. So, gathering her nerve and trying to make herself look as big and not intimidated as possible, wings and tail and legs flicking as she strutted out, she moved towards the rock-water—

—and promptly lost all traction.

She squalled, yelping and scratching with her talons as she skidded like a hopping stone along water except decidedly less comfortable—not that she actually knew what hopping stones felt like as they hopped on water, but it looked nice—until finally, finally, her talons managed to dig grooves deep enough to bring her to a stop. There, she lay. Belly to the ice. Yellow eyes blown wide. Tail stiff and prickled as a feathered log and nails buried deep in the lie-water.

“Hates me.” Once her pulse slowed back down to a more manageable pace, her eyes narrowed, talons burrowing deeper. “Gonna kill it.”

She pushed upwards. Carefully gained her balance.

And then promptly proceeded to bark, attempting to ‘claw’/kill and dig at the ‘lie-water.’

Ysalda narrowed her eyes at the lie-water, tossing her head irritably and continuing to emit soft, rumbling growls even as Kuasu nudged her along and away. “Was gonna,” she insisted. It was there, therefore it could be punished, and she would figure out how. Except that the falling ice flakes were rather distracting, particularly when they dusted down onto the lie-water and got blown about by the breezes.

It didn’t take a terrible amount of time or encouragement for her to be sufficiently distracted by this and focus — instead of on the frozen river itself — on the twirling snow, which she proceeded to chase and leap for as it flit down through the air like tiny whirly white prey-bugs that melted and disappeared under her paws whenever she did catch them. It also, eventually, became evident that these falling droplets of strange rain came so slowly from the sky that they could actually be caught on the tongue, and that was a game in and of itself.

Once over the cold, she supposed she could concede in the end that there were some traits to ‘winter’ that were not abjectly evil. But she still preferred summer.