Meredith is a hot mess’s Reviews > The Winter Players > Status Update

I can't tell you,' he said in the end. 'Maybe you'll reason it for yourself. It's a strange game we're playing, you and I. Though there is a third player also. He doesn't know it yet.'

The long grasses tossed and rippled like the waves of the sea. The trees were gaunt, twisted and solitary. A white moon hung low, and the wind seemed to be blowing it by degrees off the edge of the sky.
The openness of the terrain disturbed her. She crossed through grasses that stood as high as her ribs. The moon set, but the blackness was ferociously gemmed with stars.

I love Tanith Lee's descriptive writing ♡

'Very well,' he said, 'if you want to fight. Sword for sword, my girl.'
And he was gone. At least, the man was gone. In his place there stood a pale nightmare: a silver wolf with eyes like dying venomous moons. Just for an instant she glimpsed it, just until, rising up, opening its salt-white jaws, it breathed on her a breath as cold as snow, and with one paw smote her backwards into night.

There was no door to the shrine. When the sea leapt across the wall it would pummel in over the floor. But there was a trick to close the way to creatures of flesh and blood. She had murmured before the open archmouth, an hour after sunset. She had called the shadows, and hung them across the arch like curtains, and seemed to set them burning in hot black tongues.

It came to Oaive that she was not beneath a yoke; she was the guardian of the people. She stood between them and God. She was glad at last that she would never court or wed, or bear children, never huddle warm among her folk as the flocks of the sheep-people huddled on the chill slopes. She did not belong to the flock. She was the shepherd.