Terracotta

chapter ;Frozen Trails: Navigating the Cold Depths of Inquiry;

The ice bit at our heels and pushed us forward to the edge of the river, Icicles lay strewn in this wet and provided something to look at while summoning my thoughts. I turned round and saw Leo trotting, hand on his neck, over the white pages of the snowy knolls. With his speed you could barely see the trails of air escaping his nose, he slowed down his pace as to not go over the icy wet hill and into the stream of dying leaves,

"So! We found some sort of an answer, let's go to the...shop again?" broke out of the sharp air. We needed our compass to point A different course or prong at this shop on a busy street. "shall we think about this for a moment; This is an assault course of small attractions and at their back, faces a façade: the supply. If we are to see, if we want to, how he died we need some insight on where he lived as the Policia won't help us. Working our way through the back of the shop? Buying some food from another internet café?! I will stick with the first option at least."

A shard broke off; as happened a lot in the stream, A spinning ballet, or a dagger. We fixated our views on one, it ambled through the curve on the green muddy bank and the white curb, held back by a wooden palisade that upon perched an upset looking duck. After these watery events my gaze shifted to Leo, he was an average height for his age; that we shared for most the year as our birthdays were remarkably close, I believe he took some silent happiness in that fact, as of the winter months he was twenty-one and I but twenty. He had vastly dark blue eyes that had to let you in to see their hue and he wore a tan and fading coat with silver pebbled buttons arranged nicer than his collar.

Snow made its way down a vertical range and onto the raven hair of my companion and mine; dirty fairer. Out there off the hill now we were, the rooftops of shorter buildings shone out in charcoal and concrete grey, soon the windings and inter Twinings of the dead forgotten roads lay lit with a thick fog in the trough of the plain, rodents scurried to-and-fro a circling mad bush complex. The busier part of the city was not in full grandeur and the cold made it harder and harsher to try and think but eventually the strenure was made

The lights blasted in our face from the façade doorstep of the bustle and applause to local busks, instruments captivated the surrounding and more displays were given as a gratitude to these folks who's music erupted the streets, almost as a communion of gratitude for the brief start to the city, the crowds surged and swivelled, belly up and down facing silver skies, We weaved and hurried through the rustling mass and towards no seeming destination in an adventure straight arrow; a constricted path towards greatness, "enough we have waited", the humble chorus of the city sang to us in a rumbling deep. Our footsteps sounded and took flight our legs and the light of the city as we made way to the best the city had to offer us, busy squares, characters' busy lives and something we needed to find out, we skirted a grey curb and overflowing patches in the crowd where the sewers gave in to the precipitating city. The fog had cleared from the heat and sheer buildings. We encroached on the tan walls of a nearby plain clearing, the dulled and nulled stature of the lower half of this place had been tried by the chips of vans and lorries on one of the only straight roads the eye could see, and ripples of smoothened ash bricks lay even flatter to the sign with the road name 'Winter Veil Street', roughly.

In arrived a shipment operated by a group of men and women, the men heavily bearded in a sheath of brown woolen scarfs and hair, blue striped barrels shone with the glow of the strengthening wall lights, uniform and sphered by their plastic protectors in the areas not lessened by the coarse drill of wear and tear in the alley. A little bit too loud contemplating our presence in the bleak way, "This should be the back entrance to the bakery, I think I needed this today. We will not be stopped by who we were last time considering the time of the day!" Leo certainly did not mutter. After looks of concern from the group with ambling working limbs bearing the goods Leo slipped his hand over mine for the time needed to enter the glossy red bevelled back door of the kitchen.