[Fanfiction] Heavensent ch. 2
A/N: 
will be here in the next chapter to give 
some much needed guidance. Thanks for reading.
Chapter Two: This is My Path
Freljord: where the stars are vestiges of ice-tipped arrows, holes ripped in the black fabric of the sky when the great arctic goddess hunted the world into existence. Where the gods, proud hunters, wield weapons crafted from wood and sweat and metal, where they decorate themselves with horns and teeth and wet blue war paints and cloaks of matted fur. The Land of One Season; the Land of Eternal Winter; the Endless White, where dressing fashionably usually meant freezing to death and where death often became a snowcap’s darkest secret.
Soraka, alone, made a pilgrimage across this land.
Having had the wisdom and resourcefulness to clothe herself in thicker fabrics beforehand, to dress in a way befitting perpetual winter, and having packed away five vials of blood-red healing potion in the pouch around her waist, she was considerate of death in a way she’d never quite been before. There was a time when she wouldn’t have bothered with cloaks and alchemy; there was a time when the stars and their magic would have sustained her without mortal safeguards.
But in that time, she would not have found herself in such a place. And so she was a stranger to those snow-furred mountains, disconnected from the path her footprints drew across the white.
“Why walk?” the shopkeeper had asked.
She insisted the caravans were fairly priced as Soraka exchanged a handful of gold coins for the potions and a dusty tapestry of a cloak, which smelled like campfires and yellowing leaves and the old country. No, she had not succumbed to madness; she would not be exiting the world in a tomb of ice. The woman regarded her as one might regard a small child who had expressed such plans. She saw her horn, her cloven feet, and judged her inferior, like the once-wild woodland creatures whose bones decorated her walls. She should understand, then, Soraka thought. The need to wander this place, mapless as a bird, and become less foreign.
“Well,” the woman had said, no longer intent to change her mind, “it’s not a long journey out of Freljord, but it’s not an easy one. The ice ends, as do all things eventually. And soon after, you’ll reach a bend in the river where the three ferries run, one to Demacia, one to Mogron Pass, and the one you need, the tributary that bypasses the Howling Marsh on the way to the Institute.”
“I know my path,” Soraka had told her.
And the woman said nothing more.
Hours into what promised to be a three-day journey, the cold had already infiltrated the thick cloak and numbed her to her heart. Her eyes adjusted to the cadaver-white, the salted bits of green. And the whispering cracks under her hooves, which had originally unnerved her, soothed her in the absence of sound, their splintered syntax a bit like a lesson in an archaic language. Before her lay strewn the crumbling, broken bones of the trees, boughs and branches and limbs long forgotten, lifeless and gray atop the sheet of snow. She lamented them quietly.
Once in a while, she would pass by patches of tiny black flowers, dotted like constellations among thorns and leaves the color of swamp-water. She knew enough about the local flora to know that these flowers were a mythology of their own, the striking symbol of Freljord’s death-goddess, who wore a thickly painted mask and a necklace of these black pearl flowers like obscenities around her neck. Alive, they appeared dead, like the goddess herself who would manifest on earth as the unanswered cries of blackbirds and the melted smoke-stain on the horizon after a storm.
She leaned in to smell them, only to find they had no fragrance.
In the early afternoon, a light snow began to fall.
It did not snow in the grove. The closest it came was when the stars became stardust and bled a rain of glitter-white. But it was not much like snow, save the way it fell from the sky; stardust was warm and transparent, like a dust of silk, and when you took a breath from air saturated with it, you exhaled diamonds.
In the dry air, her exhalations eventually became deep coughs. She sipped a vial of the red health tonic, which she was surprised to learn tasted more green than red; like blackberry leaves and eucalyptus and earthy oregano. The effects were so slight that at the edge of night, as the cold became ever sharper, she was forced to use another vial just to stave off fever and exhaustion. Her ankles ached. But to rest in the night, without the guardianship of the goldsmith sun and the small warmth he offered, would be to make ice caverns of her veins and invite winter into her heart.
Would the stars let her die in a coffin of ice? Or would they, at the end of her last breath, flicker in head-shaking and sing blue healing down to her? Would they catch the streaks of her soul in the sudden hush of her death and admit their mistakes?
As she contemplated this uncertainty, she saw movement among the skein of trees.
And then, the howling; the hot glow of yellow eyes as all other light disappeared.
They had probably been pacing alongside her for most of the day, traveling in pale chains along the wall of frozen trees, but wolves are useless hunters without the moonlight to make them bold.
Though she was a horned beast, she was not afraid of them. Wolves, she knew, were often favored by the gods as sentinels of the wild. The ancestors of those wolves would have written the earliest paths through the woods, before the land went white with age. And now, in packs like galaxies, their childrens’ children would never lose their way. At night, they were nature’s sleight of hand, patron saints of the shadows.
It was by this assumption, this organic rationalism, that she became lost.
Tracking the snowdrift creatures, who she took for the mapmakers of those woods, she wandered off the path and tangled herself in the weavings of the trees. She began stepping blackly into the shadows of their pawprints, the damask of staggering patterns they left across the ground. Shivering and afraid to risk her life on the slender threads of power still offered to her by the stars, she reached for another vial of red potion, one of so few.
A stray wind stomped its feet across her, and the bottle tumbled to the ground. In darkness, the liquid spread like a black mirage at her feet.
And then, there was a crescendo: the howling wolves, the shuddering boughs, the screaming wind. She drew a breath and it raked like fire through her lungs.
Was this what they wanted? She practiced lightning in her mind, clenched her hands into fists, and she almost asked them: was this balance? On the frontline alone, her destiny unravelling before her eyes, was this balance? Was this their real face, the lies that danced like molten fireflies across the sky?
It hit her slow and achingly like a shot of liquor, the revelation. For the first time since she’d felt the blade like ice in her flesh and the terrible heat of blood like a river between her fingers, since the tears had blurred his eyes into red haloes and the stars had sung her their last gentle lullaby as she trembled there on the ground, Soraka felt alone.
Truly alone.
And like jars of wind, the questions she would ask them now were empty. Irrelevant. Answerless, even. She had made adversaries of them in the days that followed Warwick’s betrayal, wounded by their unfairness as much as by his knife. And yet...they had forgotten her. She felt shamed by her expectations, by her hope that they would forgive her the sins of compassion and trust. In these woods, snow-drenched and tired and lost in every sense of the word, it became obvious to her that this, her new life, was permanent.
In that moment, she vowed: she would put them from her thoughts, erase them and their invisible answers; she would ask them nothing, she would expect nothing from them.
The expanse of her sanctuary extended only as far as her skin.
And the road ahead, among all other things, was her burden.