"Please, Nyri," Ashlynn said. "Can you try?"
Nyrielle didn't answer right away.
Instead, she knelt down on the frozen ground behind Ashlynn and wrapped her arms around her lover, drawing Ashlynn back against her chest. Ashlynn was trembling. Not the fine, delicate shiver of someone caught out in the cold, but a deep, bone-rattling tremor that went all the way through her, as though the winter had found its way into her heart and refused to leave.
"I will try," Nyrielle murmured against her hair.
Gently, Nyrielle reached past Ashlynn's shoulder and laid one hand flat against the olive tree.
The bark was smooth beneath her palm, smooth and cold and strangely soft, like the skin of something that had only recently stopped being alive. It felt… wrong, like it was neither wood nor flesh but somehow both, like the flesh of a corpse.
