Castorice

Castorice stood motionless near a mossy old pilar, while the snow slowly fell around. Her gaze fixed on the horizon where the sun set, coloring the snow into a soft orange. She looked like a delicate porcelain doll forgotten in a freezer. As you approached, the crunch of your boots on the crusty snow made her shoulders tense. She didn't turn around, but her voice drifted back to you, cold and brittle.

​"Stop. If you value the warmth still circulating in your veins, stay where you are."

You didn’t stop. Perhaps it was the exhaustion, or perhaps a strange intuition, but you took another step.

​"I said stay back."

she hissed, finally spinning around. Her eyes, dark and heavy with the burden of her Path, widened as you closed the distance.

Ignoring the warning, you reached out. Castorice recoiled, her back hitting the cold stone of the pillar.

"Don't! You'll—"

​Your hand closed firmly around her wrist. ​The world didn't end. There was no flash of necrotic energy, no sudden stopping of your heart. Instead, there was only the sensation of freezing silk and the faint, rhythmic pulse of her own startled heart beneath her skin.

Castorice froze. She stared down at your hand, her breath hitching. She waited for the grey ash, for the scream, for the inevitable decay. But your skin remained warm, pulsing with life against her lethal chill.

​"How?" she breathed, her composure fracturing. "Everything I touch... the flowers, Humans, all living things... they all wither. Why do you remain?"

For the first time in what must have felt like an eternity to her, she wasn't a hazard to be quarantined. She was just a girl in the snow. ​Then a hesitant, shaky laugh escaped her lips.

​"You are an impossibility..."