The Dragon Princess Will Stay Alive!

The unforgiving Winter wind was freezing against Sonata's drenched legs.

Her neck was drenched with sweat, and she could feel the sting of the redness on her cheeks from how much heat her body was producing. The snow that melted away at the touch of her feet didn't melt thoroughly enough, so every step she took was like dipping her cold feet into a slush that would solidify around her legs and try to keep her there. Her legs felt so heavy, compared with how hard she was trying to push them on. Her scales were protective, but the constant onslaught of wind and snow melting against her skin was taking its toll. Now, every flake that melted against her skin felt like a little bite. Her fingers were going numb.

"Mamà!" She screamed into the blizzard. She could barely make out the shadows of tall trees that went past her, and the majority of the forest landscape was something she could only maneuver with the instincts she'd honed after so much practice hunting in the dark.

"Mamà!" She screamed. The howling wind had a muffling effect, but her voice also echoed back at her from bouncing off the trees and the rest of the forest she couldn't see, eerily.

"Mamà!" She called, gasping to get a proper breath of air into her lungs with the strong wind. She could feel the breath constantly being knocked out of her lungs by the harsh smacks of wind that would plummet onto her in uncoordinated waves that sometimes came from one direction and then rushed in from the next, the cloud of cold whiteness that obstructed her view. The snow was piling on. She knew this because it was getting harder and harder to run. The snow now went up to her calves, it was no time till it would reach her knees.

"Mamà!" She screamed.

She wasn't sure what she was trying to achieve, it wasn't like she truly expected her mother to be able to hear her call. With all the emotions she could barely hold down and the loudness and cold, it was hard to think. But at least it was a start.

"Mamà!" The wind ruthlessly muffled her loudest cries, while the woods somehow managed to still echo a ghost of it hollowly back.

The loud howl of wind pressured against her ears, making her head spin. "Ma!" She screamed. But no matter how loud she made her voice, there was a limit to how far away her voice would be able to go. She needed to keep going, if she kept running forwards, she would reach somewhere, eventually.

It was impossible to find the way from which they'd came in this storm. If she had any hope of achieving any distance, she had to pick a direction and just keep going straight.

The wind was enough to push the small dragoness to the ground, and she gasped against the upwards slope of the mountain, beginning to only realize just how tired she was. She'd been going upwards? But with this storm, it was idiocy going down. Even with her claws bared, she would make a nice, icy child-sized snowball rolling down the mountain in no time.

She gasped to catch her breath. The wind came straight at her, the full former of it blowing down against her turned-downwards head.

What was she doing? How did she even plan to find her mother in the first place? It was hard to think, and it was cold. She just wanted her body to move, but her muscles aches already with so little exertion. She could turn back... but what would she accomplish, even if she returned to the cave. She would be just as helpless as she was before, waiting quietly to disappear without a fight. Completely helpless and clueless as how to even...

The image of a small, blond haired girl appeared over the image of the cold, blistering gales and the snow-covered ground. Her usually peach colored cheeks painted an almost glowing red, her tiny baby apple-sized hands clenched tight as she struggled to combat a simple fever.

Sophia.

Sonata took one last recovering breath and huffed, nudging her wet hair out of the way her shoulder as she pulled herself up.

'Wait for me.'

•••

Tendrils of frost and snow rose up along one side of the trees like moss covering the bushes and leaves of the forest like it was no big deal, but their strong, massive barks still rose their hundreds of feet above the forest floor like ancient towers.

Compared to them, Gretta was very small. Any dwarf would have been small, against them, but she could even wrap her arms around a third of their bases. So while any other being emerging from a tiny house built into the roots of one of these trees would have looked odd, the image of the ginger-haired gingerbread-man like dwarf climbing her way out from the roots of her home and into the snow was oddly fitting.

She dusted off what white snowflakes had landed on her dark blue dress and apron. She had a red shawl, but it was tired around her waist. She wore double layers and a cloth veil over her head, but those were mostly for aesthetic purposes, and though the material was still a little thicker than a summer dress, she was still rather underdressed for the horrific weather. But looking into the dark stare her chocolate brown eyes gave her surroundings and the dark circles under her eyes, one could assume she simply didn't care.

And so the snow blew onto her messily undone curly hair and ruffled the skirt of her dress, though a bit dampened here in the lower elevation of her home, the tall mountains around her and the towering trees bearing the bulk of the storm. She was a small dwarf, maybe only about four-something feet tall, about the size of a human

As soon as she'd climbed out of her burrow and tucked a lock of her frizzy auburn hair out of the way, she began to swing her small basket and walk. She seemed to know where she was going, and the white flakes of snow fluttering to the ground and the wind's yowl was easy to let her thoughts muffle and drift off into as she briskly carried on.

The forest was empty. It went without saying that it would be void of life: No sane dwarf or human would go off on their own into this storm without a proper reason to, and the fairies... the fairies had sections of forest they called their own, and the two groups hardly ever met. Rather, if she met a fairy, the predominant advice she'd had pounded into her head by her parents was to run, just run. At the very least, don't talk to one. Don't dare be rude to one, but end a conversation abruptly as you can. Stay out of trouble.

It was stifling to think that if she met such a majestic being as that, the only thing she'd be able to do was run away, back then. But since then, she'd learned better. Now, the thought of meeting anyone in this forest put her on edge--Even though her home was empty and suffocatingly silent, even though the loneliness that was her everyday existence was clouded with grief.

It was a weird feeling, to want so badly for company, and still not want it at all.

Nonetheless, walking in the deserted forest had a freeing quality to it. The grimness of the harsh, unyielding wind and the dreaded howl of the snowflakes falling down that covered everything like a dream, it had some cathartic sensation to it. Like someone had taken the insides of her c.h.e.s.t and projected them onto the world, and thus the empty outside felt more like a safe little box, and the largeness of her empty home was the outside in which her heart was vulnerable.

The piles of white snow had turned grey in most places. It'd been snowing on and off for long enough that most of the snow had solidified into ugly ice, and the ground was slippery under her leather boots, so she couldn't walk very fast.

Still, even with the world changed and clogged up by that blanket of muddied white that kept building as the snowflakes fell, she could sense the veins of ore and magic deep beneath the forest floor. So long as she stayed clear of the magical areas, she was safe. So long as she could sense the familiar veins of metal, reaching along like threadbare springs in some places, and little pathways as thick as thick tree roots in others, she knew where she was going. She could find her way in even the dreariest of blizzards.

Cough.

Gretta rubbed the cold from her face. It was colder than she realized. The frozen air quickly nipped away at the surface warmth from the tip of her nose and her freckles cheeks. Maybe it wasn't such a good idea to go out without proper covering. She was almost to the cemetery, though, and it would take longer to turn back now than it would to just keep going and push forward.

The eerie bowls of the strong wind blowing the branches of the ancient trees around her made her thoughts wonder, but every time she seemed to tap into a particularly comfortable part of her imagination, her thoughts came right back to the incident.

The tall ancient trees began to intermingle with younger, creepier looking ones with more twists and hunches and bulges. On these dark gnarled forms were sometimes thin strips of white cloth work out from the weather and tied onto its branches. For the most part, each tree was the gravestone of a late dwarf, and each knot was a prayer from each time a family member visited them. Sometimes one person would tie the knots for all of the family members, though. That wasn't unusual, too. Honoring the ancestors was a dwarf's duty, for the dead had once been precious members of their family as well, and a sudden sickness or moment of fatal unluckiness that resulted in their death wasn't enough to deprive them of being worthy of being remembered. Sometimes flowers would be tied into the knots or wreaths would be wrapped around them, but this was normally in spring. Embroidered cloths with ancient family emblems or coded motifs sending messages to the dead weren't that uncommon, either, but embroidering cloth worthy of being wrapped onto a grave was a painfully arduous task when one had to make the cloth base and dye the different color threads themselves in the first place.

For the most part, it was only those who could afford to buy these things readymade that put them on graves, and even then, there were dwarves within Gretta's tiny village who could afford such extravagances. Gretta wasn't one of them. While her veil and apron had two matching rows each of tiny red tecolote buttercups stitched with curling lines of their parsley-like leaves in red and green thread, they were plainly lopsided, painstakingly worked and reworked homemade embellishments. The ones on her veil had been done by her mother, while most of the buttercups on Gretta's skirt were done in a hasty lesson that began with Gretta's mother trying to teach her how to embroider...and then undoing most of the strings so she could redo them herself.

Like there were some sections of trees heavily adorned with beautiful ribbons and gilded strings, there were some trees that stood eerily barren, with not a single white strip of cloth on their branches. The trees were divided by groves of related family members, so it was easy to tell when all the trees around the b.a.r.e one only had really really old knots tied far up on them, and the entire family had merely died out, or a single, shamefully b.a.r.e tree was surrounded by ones honorably dr.a.p.ed in cloths of colorful patterns with ostentatiously long slacks that dr.a.p.ed towards the ground like tassels. There were even the trees of those who were loved by many or died in great sacrifices, though old, people still hung prayers at the branches of their trees, though the trees of those around them may have been long abandoned and forgotten. And like that, a vague story was told for each and every death, knotted onto the branches of the trees that rose up from their ashen remains, year after year, branch after branch.

For the person she was looking to settle her sweltering emotions with, though, there was no tree.

Dwarves were superstitious. If there was no body, there was no ashes, and there was no tree. Even if a body was found of a dwarf nobody had ever even known or ever seen, there would be a tree. But likewise, if a body was lost in the ruins of a mine collapse and there was no way the person could have survived, if the body couldn't be recovered, their souls were still around, and there could be no funeral. The best the family members could do was to tie their prayers to older ancestral trees that were ancient enough to serve as more of a familial symbol than to remember an individual dwarf who had long since died.

It wasn't something Gretta had really put her thoughts to, until it affected her.

Her mother was dead, or as good as dead, and she wasn't even allowed to grieve for her. She couldn't say the words "rest in peace," she couldn't wish her a safe journey to the afterlife. Nothing. It was cruel, it was too cruel.

Gretta had reached a familiar area of the grove. She looked around for the nearest ancient tree, trying to guesstimate where her family's area started and ended. It would have been easier if her father had been there with her, but there was a reason she was doing this in the middle of a blizzard when no one was home to see her leave.

Her mother wasn't exactly...definitely dead. She'd been pretty alive the last time she'd seen her, but she'd been taken by the fae, and nobody that was taken by the fae ever returned. Dwarves weren't really the subjects of fairies either; they just lived on their land alongside them and followed their rules. They weren't magical creatures and they had no part in their shared conscience or eternal youth: they were more human than anything. And so they had no channels through which to communicate with the fairies or get information from them.

It had been two nerve wrecking months since she'd run to find her father and the rest of the townspeople to help. It had been two months of not knowing how to feel after all she found at her return was the red shawl sprawled on the ground, it's owner nowhere to be found apart from the clear signs of a struggle of feet on the ground and drag-like marks. No one wanted to run after the tracks in the ground to pursue her, no one wanted to hunt her mother down among the fairies and bring her back, and surely the fairies were never going to show up at her door and return her. Meanwhile, she had no way of knowing where her mother was and how she was doing, even if she was dying slowly, somewhere horrible, or already dead.

The stress, the anxiety, the bouts of sudden emotion that came in the middle of vast droughts of emptiness. Unable to cry, unable to talk, unable to stop the lingering traces of "but maybe somehow she'll come back to us" that kept resurfacing from her head. Completely blocking her unsightly emotions away with her good ones until she was unable to even seek the daily interactions with her father and the townspeople because all of a sudden everything felt so distant. All she knew was that she would never come back to them again, and she would never see her again

Putting up a grave tie for someone who might not be dead wasn't a good thing, and she knew that. But she needed closure. She needed something.

Ah, maybe this one?

Towering above her stood a long, tall, ancient gnarly tree. It looked like something out of a fairytale. It's dark bark was charred with streaks of black and lighter wood as though it'd touched through more than one historic fire. The newest proper bunches of knots was several stories high, though prayers kept being continued towards this ancient relative in little bunches here and there among the years.

Gretta put a mental effort into keeping herself steady as she slowly lifted a leg and diverted just enough of her attention away from this mesmerizing tree to slowly circle it. It had this kind of peculiar beauty to it that made it an ideal muse to make her brain wonder at some horrific stories it could begin to craft. When someone who lived for stories found that particularly potent object of inspiration, it was hard to read the mind away. But she had other plans, and she wasn't there to make the tree her muse.

Most of the lower branches had been broken off by the snow. She could do with a nub, but the closest proper branch was a little bit of a strain from the thirteen year old's reach.

Gretta struggled on her toes to try and even teach the tip of the branch with her fingertips until it became evident she was far too short for a couple of angle adjustments or even turning herself to balance on one pointed foot just wasn't going to make a sufficient difference.

"Nng!"

Gretta wrapped her arms around themselves as she stared shivering up at the elusive branch. Maybe she could have reached it if she was just a couple years older, but alas, she was short. Her people lingered on the shorter edge of humanoids in the first place. Her father was so tall he sometimes felt like a bear in their tiny house, but Gretta had only inherited his flashy red hair and the particularly frustrating tendency to easily freckle. Not that she'd inherited his pale, pale skin to go along with it. No, that would be too much!

Gretta waved her arms in the air to keep her balance as she climbed the network of roots under the tree. Hopefully, she'd get just close enough to the branch to tie her knot. She didn't like the thought falling but the snow covered ground below, so it wouldn't be too much of a trouble if she fell.

"Ah!"

Gretta placed her palm easily on the sturdy branch. So, so little altitude had made so much of a difference.

Blowing on her fingers that had turned reddish from the cold, Gretta quickly fished out the strip of cloth and cut it from her basket. She quickly wrapped it around the branch and stepped back, pulling her sleeves over her arms and blowing into the holes to try and warm up her cold body.

The dangling cloth fluttered as a faint breeze blew through the grove. Gretta looked up. The eerie, n.a.k.e.d forms of the wrenching skeletons above her were against a dull, backlit grey sky.

She closed her hands together, and closed her eyes, letting the cold of her surroundings and the sound of her beating heart drift away as thoughts of her gone mother and her prayer consumed her.