He stood back at the edge of the verandah, boots half-buried in the drift that had crept up overnight, hands shoved deep into his coat pockets, breathing. The wood beneath him creaked as he did so. As he exhaled, he could feel his breath wrestling against the wind, fighting to direct snowflakes. The snow was moving slanted, flung about in thin, angry sheets, and in that white blur his eyes were tightly shut, focused entirely on his breath and by extension, the shape of his thoughts. He swore then that in that moment he could feel all at once the movement of the air within and all around him. His inner world was brimming with such intensity, as if to make his thoughts themselves material, visible and tangible— perhaps as some pattern in the white wild winds that could provide meaning, to explain why his chest felt so winded, some pattern that could decipher the mystery of the dream that he had had.

Though James was born in the Dwar, and he identified himself as Dwarini, that is, of the Dwar– he was not from it. Yet, the Dwar, or the Divine Gates, was all he knew, and he thought he knew it well.
Of the ferocious bite of the Dwarini wind that cracked skin,
How, if you stayed out too long, your eyelashes would freeze together.
How, some mornings you would wake up to find yourself snowed in,
And the slow, groaning sound of the river as it froze over.

He knew of the way people walked here in the Dwar, shoulders hunched, heads down, refusing to acknowledge each other. You would think the cold would’ve incited a longing for familiarity, a communal desire to huddle together.

“But they’ve only learnt how to shoot somebody who outdrew ya.” He muttered out to no one in particular.

To look away before being looked at, to win the cruel duel of indifference by firing a cold shot before anyone else could. Here, the frost had taught them to withhold what little warmth they had; had taught them the art of solitude.

And in true icy fashion, the Dwar held on to its secrets. James, for all he had learnt in his time, had only gleaned familiarity. The cold had learned James better than he had learned her. She had found all his vestige extremities—his fingers, his ears, the gap between scarf and collar—and worried at them, sharper and more insistent than any memory. She tore at them as a fervent reminder, that she would always know you better than you knew her, that she would always hurt you before you could ever hurt her. Yet still he stayed where he was, out at the wind-whipped emptiness, letting the frost bite at his cheeks. His dream felt closer out here, somehow, as if the world he’d woken up from and the world he found himself in now were separated only by a thin veil that the next violent breeze might just split asunder.

““James, mate, get the hell in. You're gonna freeze to death at this rate.”

Dave’s voice arrived before Dave himself did, pushed out from the doorway behind him.

James didn’t move at first. He opened his eyes and blinked once, twice, rubbing saliva on his eyelashes to unstick them faster.

“Sorry, yeah, coming.”

He tore his eyes from the white and turned.

Dave stood leaning against the doorframe, one hand braced above him, the other clutching a chipped mug that steamed into the dimness of the lodge. His hair was a mess of flattened curls, hat abandoned somewhere near the hearth. His cheeks were flushed a soft red from the heat inside, and his breath clouded only faintly in the gap of the open door.

He looked, in that moment, like he belonged to a different world entirely.

“Seriously,” Dave said, squinting at him. “You look like a corpse they dug out of the Kala. Get in before your nose falls off.”

James scoffed despite himself. “Thought you liked the silence of my absence.”

“Yeah, but I like your steady presence in my frontlines more.” Dave jerked his head towards the interior. “Move it.”

James stepped inside, and the change hit him like a second body. The warmth rolled over him, numbing his face in a different way. For a moment he felt disoriented, as if he’d walked from one season into another. The heavy smell of burning wood, damp wool, and oversteeped tea closed around him. Snow melted in quick pinpricks down his neck.