Aurora Moonrise

Flash iv: To Drown With a Smile

The world ends with a storm.

Aurora is frozen, cold sinking into shivering flesh as fear and shock quicken her pulse. This fear doesn’t still her — she needs to move, to run and do something. But she can’t.

The waters of the circle pond turn to ice. Hissing as the temperature plunges to cast them in crystal, then cracking as Aurora struggles with flailing limbs. One emerges, then the other, and now the cracks travel outward, breaking off plates of ice.

Ice and snow fall throughout, first as stray flakes and drops, then as a thickening blanket. At the far end of the pond, the still​-​liquid skin ripples.

Aurora braces with one hand and pulls herself onto a plate of ice – only for her weight to sink the platform, water rushing in. When it meets the ice​-​draped girl, it freezes to form a new layer, locking her in place, half​-​prone.

She hears the splashes and pops of ice raining into the pond. She hears the rumble of thunder intensifying to a sharp tone, crying an ear​-​splitting warning. She hears air finally start moving as the wind whispers threats. She hears the storm, and she sighs peace.

Ice numbed her flesh — but it was not the pain so many described feeling in the winter; no, this soothed. Aurora twists her head to glance at the sky, and sees the lightning flash. The light felt so much like the sky waving back at her.

Trapped in the forest as ice falls upon her, the young girl isn’t afraid of the storm; she has nothing to fear from it.

But someone did.

Her father felt stiff pain in every joint when the seasons turned cold. Her father had called for her when she ran away — would he have followed after? Could he endure a blizzard in the middle of summer?

Wrenching with new strength, Aurora lifts her legs out of the pond, and rolls over the surface. A slow thing, leaving her black skin invisibly raw where ice is torn away, but she moves.

Enough of the pond is ice, be it in breadth or depth, that her weight doesn’t sink, doesn’t invite another flood of new water. Aurora takes unsteady steps toward the sheer bank wall of the circle pond. The ice holds beneath her.

But more frozen and half​-​melted snow is falling now. Water trails in streams from the edge. Tall and muddy, Aurora would need to climb. She hates the feeling of mud — but there’s no other way out.

When she presses her hands to the mud wall, brown water freezes along her fingertips, binding the dirt to her. Ick. But mud frozen won’t slip, and in seconds Aurora climbs back up.

Walking forward, she peels dirty ice off her hands, even as more of it falls on her. Her head twists around. Where was she, where was the way back? The sun had already set, and sky is clouded. Then her head stops. She knows she’s looking north.

She hadn’t kept track of her trail on the mad dash in, certainly not after the deer started hunting her, but if north is that way, she can feel she’s farther east than the farm. She turns and starts running.

First flakes had become a drizzle, then a steady downpour, and now a deluge as the new wind whips water into sheets. A canopy of leaves above her is a faltering umbrella, dripping lines where there aren’t holes outright. Where there are puddles, the constant impacts rouse them to an unsettling and furious visage, ripples like so many puncture​-​holes.

Aurora slips on a slick patch of mud and ice, weight throwing her across the ground. She slides and slides and slices — a rock in her path catches her in the stomach and carves her up to her breast.

Red weeps, almost unseen in the shadows upon dark skin — but when Aurora looks, her eyes still glow. She retches. Mud on her skin is one thing, but dirt in her wounds, pervading her life and being?

Aurora struggles to her feet — but around her chunk of ice had quick​-​frozen, and now even more rains down upon her, forming layer after layer.

Ice is numbing. Soothing. She didn’t have anything to fear.

The girl looks up, to where lightning dances like mating snakes in the night​-​dark sky — the only light left up there.

They will say the world ends with a storm.

All you can hear is the ever​-​louder roar of falling water beating down.

All you can feel is the cold deluge soaking you to the bone.

All you can see is those last flashes above.

A storm drowning out all other sound, all other feeling, all other sight.

But, she thought, even though you couldn’t see it, the sun and the moon and the wandering planets and the stars and even the comets were still up there. They were so far away from the storm. Safe and unbothered.

Even when the world ends, the heavens would still turn.

There were still other worlds under beautiful stars. Just like her father said.

Her father.

Aurora started moving for a reason. She couldn’t just freeze here, even if she had nothing to fear. Hands feel along her breast — but the ice had frozen over her chest wound like a cold scab. The touch of the storm on her skin felt so gentle, even as precipitation rages. Without warmth, but not without care.

And who did that sound like? This wasn’t a normal storm. Was it enchanted? By what will? The winter spirit claimed that it merely awakened her — no, it only said it wouldn’t be awake without it. So had that spirit called this storm?

Did it matter?

Aurora stood. The ice still grasped for her, but if this wasn’t mere dead water, but an enchantment from a will that cared enough to heal her… she wouldn’t bat aside, brush off the ice like obnoxious dirt.

Her mouth opened and inhaled air, like cold fingers reaching into her mouth and her throat and deeper. She felt the ice coating her like a new dress, but solid like bones. The ice was drawn toward her. And… she let it. The cold seeped in.

When the girl lifts her legs, the ice beneath the foot doesn’t break away, it feels her intent and simply parts. Slow, testing steps, then running strides.

The freezing rain never lets up. If anything, it get colder with her acceptance, becoming hail and snow. It tears through the canopy, and now leaves fall too. (Would a nature spirit call a storm that destroyed its own domain? Its very being?)

Aurora runs across a ground slick with mud and frost, crawling with roots and rocks and puddles and streams. Yet no step betrays her. When she slides, it only accelerates her along her way.

Lightning strikes behind her, a bolt of fire that casts the whole forest around her into daylight for one moment. The light reflects off of so much glittering ice.

For that moment, Aurora clearly sees the clearing in front of her. Trees are thinning, and her feet are stepping onto the familiar trail out from the farm.

She returns here and witnesses the sight, the site, of a lost battle.

If the world ended with a storm, it was supposed to bring a final flood. This didn’t look like the world had drowned — it looked ravaged. The wind had torn furrows through the stalks of wheat and corn. Fences knocked down entirely. Had this silo been lifted up from its foundation?

Sharp rods of hail have fallen and still stuck out of the ground, like so many javelines.

They had a couple pigs and chickens. Aurora walked past corpses. As if they had accepted the cold in them too, their flesh had burst, the blood within turned to ice.

“Blank? Sunny? D​-​dad?” Aurora wonders if the storm drowned out the sound of her voice.

There is a withered husk, green skin already turning gray. The face doesn’t look pained because there is no face. Curled into a fetal ball, staring toward the distant farmhouse, Blank lay palpably dead.

Aurora moves on, walk turning to a jog. “Is anyone there?”

Movement distant. But there’s movement everywhere, the world falling apart. Still, Aurora approaches. A dark form is illuminated as she nears; her eyes and hair still glow.

A sunflower shaped like a woman, one​-​armed. Sunny is missing petals from her crown, and there’s tracks running down from her lidded eyes. Aurora’s just a girl, but she looms over the spirit — because Sunny is kneeling.

The spirit moves aside. Beneath her, a man.

Aurora falls to her knees and feels it. The flesh is cold and unmoving. The face is still knit in concern. Mouth open — was her name on his lips?

Geller is dead.

And Aurora feels…

They will say the world ends with a storm. Everything drowned and falling. But celestial bodies still turn, in a soothing numb void beyond the world; no sound, no sight, no droplet falls upon them, unbothered by a storm some meaningless distance away.

The stars look beautiful from far on the other worlds, it’s just like her father said.

“He forgave you, Aurora. He still loved you, in the end.” Sunny spoke or enchanted the air.

Aurora flinches. She had doubted — she had let the pig​-​thing’s words crawl into her and make her doubt.

None of us like you. Maybe he doesn’t care.

Being wrong means going backwards from the truth. It means you’d be right if you switched things around. Sus couldn’t be right — it’d hurt too much.

But the opposite of what he said — if everyone did care? That hurt too.

Sus was wrong. And if you switch things around — “none of us like you” becomes “you don’t like any of us”. Is there any love between you two? The relationship goes one​-​way.

Blank was dead. Father was dead. Aurora had been to funerals, and Father took her to her cousin’s grave every year. You were supposed to tear up and cry. You were supposed to shake your fists at the world’s cruelty. You were supposed to wish it was different. You feel sad and angry and bad.

She looks over at the dead spirit​-​child and bites her lip. Blank had given her that toy sword, and now she’d never get anything like that again. Did she even use it? She’d never get to fight Blank again. Well, at this point she kept beating it anyway.

Aurora looks at the dead man and frowns. She thinks of the questions he’d never answer now, the broken toys he could never fix, the food he’ll never cook again. Then she thinks of the church she won’t have to attend, or the rules she won’t have to follow now.

Once, when playing, she’d rolled her ball down into a snake’s hole and could never get it out. She lost it forever. That didn’t feel good, but she got over it. She vowed to hold on tighter to her toys after that. Was that enough?

Sunny has grabbed her hand and now she squeezes, looking up at the girl with a sympathetic bend of her flower​-​lips. Aurora pulls her hand away. (The spirit’s arm shivers as it falls.)

Even if Aurora couldn’t feel what she was supposed to, she could at least do what she was supposed to. She walked towards the shed, where tools leaned against the wall. She hated using them, but here, it’d be necessary.

Sunny hasn’t moved at all when the girl returns. Could she?

Aurora tosses one of the shovels. It lands beside the spirit and slides in the snow. The iron head touches her leg and she flinches back.

“Aurora?”

“Come on. Let’s dig a grave.”

Her own shovel strikes the earth, sinking into mud like butter. She scoops it away, then looks up to where the spirit has left hers lying on the ground.

“You always yelled at me for not doing work. C’mon.”

“Aurora, I can’t.”

“What is it you always say about excuses?” Aurora stabs her shovel into the ground hard enough the wood handle slips out of her grasp. Her fists ball up.

Sunny doesn’t care either, did she?

Aurora’s voice is crackling. “You were here. You were here all along! Why didn’t you bring him inside?”

“He was calling for you to come back. He was wait—”

“It’s not my fault! It’s yours! Why didn’t you save him?”

“I couldn’t–”

“Why didn’t you take him back inside before he died?”

The sunflower opened her mouth, but every word was a wound, and Aurora needed to mend it with cold, numb, quiet. She launches forward.

Sunny doesn’t move, falling to the ground as the girl tackles her.

“Why? Did you even care about him?”

Sunny starts talking, gets interrupted by Aurora slamming her head against the ground, then tries again. “I’m— I’m dying too. Like Blank. I wanted to spend my last moments… with him.”

Aurora opens her mouth, but no words come out.

“Listen, he wanted me to tell you. The last thing he said. You’ll… You’ll be a good knight one day. When the next comet falls, you’ll give it a good fight.”

Aurora’s raised fist trembles in the air. She couldnt even fight a dying sunflower.

“He didn’t understand,” Sunny continues. “He never did, I think. Couldn’t. You were always your mother’s daughter. Didn’t know what to do with you. I don’t either. But, better them than us.”

“What? What does that mean? What was my mother like?”

Instead of answering, she says, “So cold. How do you stand it?”

And that’s the last of Sunny. Aurora looks down, and where her arm and legs pin the sunflower, ice crawls onto stem. Sunny has frozen to death.

A snort. “Ol’ Geller, Blank, now Sunny. How’s all the blood and sap on your hands feel?”

Aurora doesn’t look up. If she sees the wretched pig​-​goat​-​thing, she’d see red and charge.

“I didn’t kill them.”

“Old man was out here for your ungrateful sake. Then you attacked a spirit on her deathbed. But suppose I can’t blame the kid on you. Or can I? Do you know where this storm came from?”

“The winter spirit summoned it,” Aurora said. Her voice shook as she said it, which about reflected her confidence.

The pig spirit just snorts.

“What was Sunny talking about?” Aurora asks. Sus might lie, but did that matter if she got any answer at all? “You all knew something about my mother. Can’t you just tell me? Please…”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“I tried to figure it out and you laughed at me!”

“It is hilarious how stupid you are. At this point I really just want to see how many pieces you break into when you finally realize the truth.”

“Fine then! Go ahead and break me! Just tell me.”

“We’re all sworn to secrecy, kid. Mortals love their bloody pacts.”

“Who made you swear? Mother? Father?” At the mention, Aurora glances back at the frost​-​rimed dead man. He was supposed to be important, wasn’t he? “I— it doesn’t matter. Can you help me bury him?”

“No can do.”

“Right, of course you wouldn’t care.”

“You are stupid. Spirits don’t have hands, kid. Can’t use tools. Allergic to iron, too. Wait, don’t tell me snapped on Sunny just because you forgot?”

Aurora stood up. “If you can’t help me and can’t tell me anything, then go away! You’re useless!” Aurora stalked forward.

And with each step, the pig​-​goat​-​thing backed up, their wet autumn leaves quivering.

“What’s wrong, little piggy? Scared of the cold?” She meant to say ‘scared of me’. But she was cold, wasn’t she?

“I can handle a november chill. I just keep my distance from serial killers.”

“I’m not a killer!” Aurora screams. But the goat​-​thing has disappeared into the underbrush. She was alone, speaking into the roar of the rain. “I didn’t kill them. I don’t want to kill anyone… Knights are supposed to save people.”

But wouldn’t a knight care if their father just died?

She slowly walks back to pick up her shovel. She doesn’t even feel the downpour, ice cradling her like a second skin. A shovel blade stabs into a muddy hold, already a puddle.

Then ice cracks behind her.

Someone else had come.

And there’s a scrape, as of a shovel being picked up.