This probably wasn't gonna end well.

A second soul appeared in the blizzard, far less adapted than Aspen was. Beast's thick fur provided some protection from the howling storm, but those hooves and nubs were completely unsuited to the temperature and skidded on every ice patch he came across. Frost crept over his tentacles and hung over his eyelashes, obscuring much of his vision to blurry shapes of white and grey. Here and there he stopped to shake his coat free of snow, only for it to accumulate the moment he started moving again.

Oh, he should've never left his den...!

Up ahead he saw another animal-- pale, sleek, and far more comfortable in the snowstorm than Beast was. "Hello?" he squawked from his stomach mouth-- on one hand, it's positioning meant it never got cold, on the other it made every word painfully hard to hear over the howl-- stumbling over to catch up with the snow leopard. The hybrid's dark eyes scanned the environment, and it appeared Aspen was doing the same. But nothing was to be seen.

There he was! The other-one! Beast smiled at their entrance, though it wasn't visible from the position of his beak. "Hello!" He echoed back. The hybrid almost reached out a tentacle in greeting but recoiled from the sheer cold of the air. Both of them had to find shelter, quick.

The hexapod followed Aspen's gaze around the perimeter of the glacier, squinting to see beyond the snowflakes. There were plenty of cave entrances carved out of the ice, some closer, some further. One immediately caught his eye from it's smooth, pristine appearance-- though he, unfortunately, would never notice it's odd scent with a beak. Such a smooth, carved entrance... did someone live there?

"This way!" Beast chirped, motioning towards the tunnel. He stumbled through the ice and snow until collapsed at the entrance, breathing heavily. It was so cold.

Beast gave Aspen a weird look, incapable of smelling the stench coming from the tunnel entrance. "Huh?" he questioned, inaudible amongst the howling winds. There wasn't anything wrong with this one. What even is a "smell"? Still, he obeyed, and stepped away from the gaping mouth to follow the feline. Beast did not like going against what other people said.

Traveling the short distance between here and there felt like forever. His hooves could never get a grip on the snow and whatever exposed skin he had felt frozen. Still, they made it, and he craned his head forward to see a dark, steep cave, as cold and desolate as could be. But hey, at least it's not snowing in there.

"Ooh!" the creature exclaimed, gingerly stepping over the overhang and shaking the snow off his fur. "Thank you!" his voice seemed to echo on and on down the icy tunnel. Ooo, spooky! It was terribly dim down here, though. He could barely see the tips of his frost-tinged tentacles. He wasn't sure what he could do to change that, unfortunately. He couldn't glow, or make magic lights, or see in the dark, or any of that business. All he had was his brain.

Well, at the very least he could tell how deep this tunnel goes, right? Picking up an icy pebble off the ground with his feelers, he gently lobbed it into the darkness beyond, praying he would hear it land.