Solstice
She remembered blue skies and nights glistening like jewels caught ablaze in fire. Of worlds spanned over a thousand years in her eyes. Before woes fell like a landslide, engulfing the world in questions blight.
Until the world forgot how to fly.
Nobody remembered the light that once so naturally graced the earth from the heavens, nor the glimmers of light that speckled the skies. They chose to close their hearts off from the world, to lock themselves in a world encased in four walls and a ceiling. And she, who chose to stay outside those walls, to wander the frozen world instead of remain imprisoned, had forgotten what it was like to speak. To hear her name spoken by another.
Faces faded from her memories, each one abandoned with the breeze.
In the dark there was nothing to see.
In the dark, there was no way to be free.
Stubbornly, she held onto her memories of colours free from the sepia of fireside light, clutched her remaining pieces of another smile, another caress of warmth from a lifetime ago.
In hopeful habit, she reached for the ebony skies, for the invisible shards that once blemished the inky dark. For the fires that were so far away, the souls of many, she feared were forever gone. Trees of ancient worlds stood unchanged, etching the presence of time upon a listless world. Lifeless, yet ever-present, they stood trapped within the confines of the dark.
The hum of the forest was her only companion, the cries of Winter circled in spiraled lies. It caged her heart like the skies above, left alone in an endless loop.
Creatures hid in their burrows and hollows, whiling away the endless cold in wait for their Spring to come, slumbering peacefully with no concern for the feet that wound the way through the forest. No qualms to the faint lantern-light that intruded through the dark, they slept as her presence faded away.
Cold eyes traced the familiar route through the trees, steel grey in the colourless world. Strands of ebony locks swept back in the chilly wind, tangling in the loose threads of a coarsely woven shawl, mixing, in an ensemble of blacks and purples. It felt like it had been years since she had fallen to such deplorable standards. She clutched her wide-rimmed hat as the wind threatened to sweep it right off of her head.
Her dusty lantern cast golden light across the snow-veiled trail back home, illuminating her heavy footfalls through the deep trench of crystalline water.
Midnight’s embrace gripped the forests as she neared a small shack on the edge of a lake, roughly built of aged pine secured with treated vine, and held together with rusting nails galore. No windows graced the walls, nothing to let in what little light existed within the world. Simply a door to come and go, and a rough-woven ladder of wearing rope leading into the branches of a large, ancient oak that towered over the shack.
The door was ajar, she discovered as she let herself inside with a frown, with snow flecked over the floor and nearby baskets of plant cuttings she kept inside. Large owl eyes stared her form down from within unblinking, unmoving, as frozen as the plants and stones that filled the shelves. Their eyes remained affixed in place, even as she stepped into the centre of the shack. They slumbered like the rest, frozen in this hellish wasteland of snow and ancient trees.
The shadows loomed and danced through the room as she hung her lantern up in the centre of the shack, casting glimmers of fractured light through the crystals that hung from the ceiling. With every step she took, plumes of dust and scattering snow swirled to life in the air.
She paid no heed to the thousands of tally marks carved into the furthermost wall, no thought to the crystal pendulum that hung over the mantle of a soot-caked fireplace even as the wind slammed the door of the shack shut. Beneath the lantern light, she gathered fresh cuttings of herbs in a clay bowl, a handful of coloured gemstones and a worn glass jar of fire salts and sulphur before she returned to the frigid cold outside.
Her journey onwards lead her through snow and marsh as she followed a trail so familiar it was subconscious, spiraling upwards to the top of the tallest hill, where the ancient trees were sparse and the ground sturdy. Her rough-sewn boots clacked against stone as she reached the crest of the hill that overlooked the forest.
She knelt there on the snow-covered floor of cobblestone bricks, aligning her crystals in place and tracing her circle into the snow with lines of sulphur.
With everything in place, her preparation work in place, she cast one last look up towards where the midnight sky was supposed to reside, and prayed.
Prayed that her wishes would be answered. That her years, her millennia of efforts would be graced with something. Anything.
She closed her eyes as she raised her right hand to her lips and blew a slow breath against the tip of her index finger, breathing the warmth from her chest into the air, creating a small orb of scarlet fire at her command. The flame flickered boldly, unaffected by the frigid wind that threatened to blow the pointed hat from atop her head.
’Please...’ A voice hoarse from disuse whispered into the air as she lowered the flame to the sulphur circle she had drawn into the snow. ‘Let this work!’
Immediately, with the contact of her created flame and the sulphur, her circle burst into flames within an instant. Marbling greens and gold with her scarlet fire, the flames grew to engulf the herbs in the centre of the circle and send plumes of purple smoke into the air.
She waited, with bated breath she stared up at the darkness above her, desperate for any sign her spell had worked. Minutes passed as she blinked away the building tears in her eyes with no result in sight.
Until through the smoke, she saw flickers of life swirling in the distance.
Galaxies and shooting stars, spring flowers swept through the breeze, of nocturnal birds actually gliding through the sky, alive, instead of their frozen counterparts in the perpetual darkness.
Glimpses of life she hadn’t seen ever since the world went dark.
The tears swept down her frost-bitten cheeks as a voice graced her ears, one she had wanted to hear for all her time in this darkness, filled with warmth like a bright Summer day. The darkness above began to fade as she rose to her feet to step into her magic circle as she heard the voice call out her name.
And then, the coloured flames went out.
A gale of wind burst from the center of her magic circle, blasting snow and burnt herbs away. Her pointed hat had been swept away, her shawl and clay bowl claimed in the explosive force of the fallout of her spell, leaving her standing frozen at the peak of a snowless hill.
A gentle caress of warmth grazed against her aching cheeks, as if a hand had reached out to wipe the tears from her face.
’Don’t go...’ She whispered as she reached out to the warmth, grasping in vain for a hand she knew she couldn’t reach. ‘I’m still down here...’
But no answer came, and she was left alone in the endless dark.
