Theodora’s Reviews > Cold Wind > Status Update

Deer Woman ran like a rumor, like the wind, but I was made for this, and though I hadn’t hunted one of my kind for an age, had thought I had taken the last a lifetime ago, she had never run from one like me. I was older. Much older. And at short range, cats are faster than deer.

She didn’t understand. I’d been a myth before she was born.

The city was another world in the snow.

Music traditions flitted from one place to another acquiring heft and solidity as different cultures adopted them. Over the years they became majestic and apparently eternal. They never were.

The music, at least, did not make me feel like an outsider. It was an old friend.

It was one of the most pernicious fallacies, common the world over: old ways are best. But old ways can outlast their usefulness. Old ways can live on pointlessly in worlds that have no room for them.

You can tell a lot about a culture from its metaphors: the world is fragile, breakable, spillable as an egg.