Tracery

(Kai's POV)

-

I hate snow globes.

They lie… Snow doesn't fall like that, like the whole sky above the world is embracing its presence.

Snow falls inside the tallest colonnade of downward air, imprisoned in a bar of cold somewhere.

In the great pine forests here, it takes over, covering everything up in a white shield of purity. It covers the buildings, the people, the trees. It covers the ruins of the Old Abbey, where the haunting laughter of children wells up only to be muffled beyond recognition under layers and layers of snow.

Moscow has always been associated with snow, at least for me. There isn't a day that passes by here where I don't feel cold flake kisses on my forehead, or the sting of coming snowfall numbing my skin. Moscow has always been snowy… Moscow is snow.

The knife is icy cold in the gray, still air of the morning. Nothing has changed, it seems.

Slowly, I push the tip of the knife into each of the fingers on my right hand; the needling cold has numbed them so I don't even feel the pain, just the sharper, colder touch of steel.

As the first red blood pearls at my fingertips, I lower my hand to the snow, and begin my work. The clearing is vast, the snow still falling, and there is only me to fill this white, obscene canvas.

Yuri stands a few yards behind me, just outside the clearing.

This was one of our rituals as children, painting blood patterns and pictures in first snow, to prove we were still alive and that we were still human. We figured as long as our blood didn't turn purple we were fine.

But it is no longer the time of first snow, and Yuri's blood is no longer pure.

He closes his eyes when I take his hand, squeezes them tight as I lead him into the clearing. Normally, he wouldn't even give me that. But this is Moscow. This is snow. I press the knife to his index finger, gently, gently. With a convulsive movement, he presses his finger up into the tip of the blade, and I can see the shivers coursing through both our bodies.

My God, the blood is red.

Somewhere far away, children are laughing and playing in the snow, but here, no one makes a sound.

He kneels in the middle of the wintry forest, and draws a blood-mane wolf around the remains of an old snow globe.

-
end

((Blood-red is sweeter than happiness.))