When the monsters came, he sent forth the white beasts one at a time; they roamed the landscape in silence, passing through like ghosts, and with their eyes he witnessed each visit. They did not turn back to him, but lost their shapes and returned as mist to the air.

Since his arrival the prince has dwelt among the trees in the north, silent as his cervine apparitions, moving with the fog's slow approach and recession. Not once has he left the chill of its vapour. Not once. The moisture saturates his hair and his garments. Each morning he shakes off its dew. Day and night he breathes it, blinks through the condensation, licks it from the corners of his mouth.
Weeks of suffusion.

In the dream, his presence is an unfurling, its emergence like the slow reach of a vine. A shadow skirting the edges of stars. Nuala, it breathes, silent to all but them.