You run through the snow, evading their cries.

‘Scorpius, come back,’ their obstinate voices sing.

Dashes of black stain the fields of white. You will be found, your path traced. They’ll drag you back, yell at you for running away, ask why you did that, but you’ll simply shrug your shoulders and give them the look which they always label as an impertinent one. They should know why.

Run, run, run, you carry on pounding through the white mass. It’s seeped into your shoes now, dyeing the brown leather to ebony black. You flick the snow out of your way and start to run when its mournful cry echoes across the woods, a solemn lament for you.

Looking up you see it, the lone thestral.

You’ve been able to see it for three weeks now. Three weeks since she, your mother, died. Three weeks since her alabaster skin faded into ivory. Three weeks since her ochre eyes failed to burn.

The ground slips away beneath you as your pace fastens in the approach to the creature. The thestral makes no moves. You let your feet slide over the snow until they stop before it, hands shaking as they dangle over its frail wings. Like you, it’s broken, fragmented. Like you again, it’s alone, left to roam the world in a never-ending solitude.

Its outline is jagged, angular, from the protruding bones which have been weathered away to an argent hue. The translucent film covering the skeleton conceals nothing at all. The thestral seems incomplete, as if something has been lost and can never be retrieved. Even the wings, its supposed sign of power, look as if they’ll simply flutter away in the whirls of wind.

Thoughts of Mother tend to fade away then. It seems as if when you look at it you realise that you are, perhaps, as insubstantial as everything else in the world. One day, you will be lost in the obscurity of infinity, a mere blot in the world’s life but for this second you are something more than that. Something eternal.

The thestral gives you a glimpse of infinity, of what could lie beyond the land of living. It gives you hope that life is not simply a thing of darkness and decay but there's a thing which is above us, transcendent, and seeing the thestral reveals part of the answer to everything. It shows you that Mother can’t really be dead. That though she might be an illusion, she is part of the lone thestral for why else could you suddenly see the thestral?

The last idea isn’t yet a lucid one but there is some truth lying beneath it. If truth is there, everything else is too.

You drop your hand onto its barbed spine, brushing the tips of your fingers against the curves of it. It’s almost hauntingly beautiful, the thestral, with the serene air it emits. Your finger moves down, tracing the wings now. The thestral lets out a low moan.