Gryphonia Freezes

My country wasn’t always like this. Today, flying across the steppes isn’t…

Well, it isn’t that anymore.

Thirty years ago, these plains were baked golden-brown by the high noon sun.  My mother’s tribe wandered north near the glaciated seas in the warm season, and as far south as the Crystal Mountains in the cool, following the seasonal grasses that sustained their cattle; Islands of life-giving vegetation in a fruitless scrubland.

I haven’t been north to the sea in over a decade, but now even the summers at the feet of the mountains haven’t let me forget the cold; the high sun hanging low in the sky begets little warmth.

Today, the flight across the steppe is a flight across a tundra, a wasteland, a frigid pit that claimed the lives of my herd and my clansmen, and took my sons from me.