#ssssorta

They had brought plenty of food, bundles of salmon and chicken and bread. That wasn’t the issue. The issue was the cold. The issue was the snow. The issue was that as the sun rose they barely made it to where the spruce trees went out of sight, and as it set, its warmth hid, and they were cold and they were slow and they couldn’t move and they couldn’t think. Not well, anyhow, not enough.

They curled closer to the meager campfire, inch by inch, minute by minute. If they didn’t know it would burn them, somewhere where they could still understand things, they would’ve crawled right into the flames. The wind still tore at their face so gently. They’d blocked up the cave entrance with the stone they’d brought for tools - as much as they could, anyhow. Once the sun was gone they needed a fire; they needed a fire and they were too sluggish for stone stacking. So instead they’d honey-slow stacked sticks and wood and coal and tried and tried to light it and finally they had. 

It was still too cold. They were still too slow. Their leather blocked too much fire but they couldn’t get their fingers to undo the laces, and they weren’t even sure if they wanted it off or needed it off or needed it on or wanted it on. They just wanted the snow to stop blowing through the cave door gap. They wanted the fire to be bigger. They wanted to stop being so tired and so slow and so alone, too.

Could they do that? Make the fire bigger? They’d run out of logs, but they still had some sticks and saplings. They didn’t like burning saplings, but the sun was still gone and they needed fire. They shouldn’t have come here. They reached for their pack. It took their arm too far from the fire, for far too long. They pushed themself to do it anyway. No one else could. One birch sapling went on the fire. Two sticks. Their arm fell to the cave floor; that would have to be enough. They were tired. They were so tired. So slow.

They wanted sun. They wanted home. An ember crackled against their face, and it was hotter than even fire should have been, and they didn’t want it to go away.

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A mesotherm (from Greek μέσος mesos "intermediate" and thermē "heat") is a type of animal with a thermoregulatory strategy intermediate to cold-blooded ectotherms and warm-blooded endotherms. (Wikipedia)

This takes place well before the main events of @for-quill-with-love but I wanted to play with Pix not being fully warm-blooded. They can and do produce heat via metabolism, but... well. Not enough for cold weather survival :D