High above, a lone woman veiled in gossamer blue.
She watches the crescents of light rolling across the ocean
She cries to herself
The moonlight striking the waves is the only sound she hears.

Dead Blue December had walked for seven and seventy miles upon bare skin. No company save her own thoughts. No voices save for the child-voice in her head, whispering. She watched the waves and she thought for a moment that...no, just shadows. Two night past, she heard the hunting calls of the Red Women. She idled there, by the shore of the sea, and cast rocks out into the open water. The Red Women coiled up on their rocks and fed upon the transulcent meat of a sea venom. December envied their wild ways and their savage hearts. They would never fear or feel loss. They just "were" and were content "to be." Now, standing on the edge of the bluff, she sighed and stared at nothing.

She had four pieces of tarnished silver and a single ingot of blood-red iron in her purse. No food. A flask of water squeezed from some spiny fruit she found growing alone in a dead tree. December fished out the lump of iron and turned it in her fingers. Blood iron, forged from some warrior's blade or helm. She held it to her cheek and closed her lunar eyes, remembering. Of the man she had let into her tent, into her bed. The strange feral wanderer with the blue-steel knives and the scars. With one hand he had pressed the ingot down into her palm and with his other, he had unfastened the clasp on her gown. That was near two turns of the sun and the moon. She still had the lump of iron. He was still alone.