She never thought she'd watch her first glimpse of snow fall alone. The tiny, fluffy flakes descended from a whitewashed sky to fall tenderly upon the slick black of her slender nose. With wide, wild eyes she'd sat for hours before sun up, when the world was painted in navy shades but looked lighter with thin sheets of snow blanketed upon the cedar trees' branches and the rolling hills' winding crests. It was beautiful.
Drawn from her new home by the promise of a rising sun in the near future, Quil wanted to see the way dawn's light fell upon the fresh snowfall from a place with a view more unknown to her than even the forest. Still shell shocked from the flood and the way it had single-handedly, and slowly, washed away everything she'd ever known and loved, she felt much like the orphan she now was. She hadn't eaten, she hadn't spoken, not even to Cinder, and she certainly hadn't slept. Restless nights were plagued with hollow dreams of the rapids and the way things used to be, or nightmares about the way things were now. She was lucky, she told herself over and over again, to have made it out alive; sometimes, she wished she'd perished with her parents and brothers. With her life in such disarray, it seemed the only thing she knew for certain was that she wished they'd been here by her side tonight, sharing in her utterly muted delight as the snow flakes shimmered beneath the waning moonlight.
And so she walked.
She didn't know where she was going, but she liked the way the trees eventually thinned into rolling, vast open spaces. Overhead, the last of the night's stars glittered in a lightening sky that way streaked in shades of violet and red, and the air was fresh and cold as she sucked in a shallow breath. The chill burned in her lungs, but she welcomed it as much as she welcomed the sense of freedom she got from the wintry meadow. It was very different than the world she had once, and always, known.
Eventually she would settle upon the snow capped crest of a humble hill, her back to the sleepless night and her amber eyes fixed on the endless horizon before her. Soon, the sun would break over it, and she hoped that the snow looked as beautiful in the light as it did in the dark.