The prelude to even the grandest song is utter silence. In the vast gulfs where even the nearest light is but a small fraction of the panorama, the music of stars and spheres is a dim murmuring. In this black empty quietude, a player composes their next movement.
A comet flies through the void between the stars. She has no stellar light with which to dazzle, and no celestial body to destroy. The comet is alone: no one to shine for (as she melts to gaseous nothing) nor dance with (unto their obliteration).
But the comet does not drift through space: she flies like an arrow towards her mark. Among the uncountable multitudes, one star is growing ever larger.
Radiation sears against her black shell, internal heat mounting. She’s outgassing, her hair unfurling as mist behind her. This isn’t a mere physical process. She feels the will of the sun she nears, the cacophony of a billion patterns of lux, thoughts of countless radiant nascent minds just an incoherent babble washing over her. The sun has a will, and so does she, (it a gestalt, hers a refined unity). Will and purpose is written in the crystalline structure of ice frozen within her. This is enchantment. When purpose is cast with will, the world bends toward it: like this, the comet sings.
Then the song falters, as if a player missed a note. The crystalline structure, the lux within her, is isomorphic to a grand, infinite pattern unfurling. A fractal web, but a flawed fractal, this web hangs with tattered edges, threads torn apart and only partly sown back together. But the comet still sings, and her trail of sublimated vapor still conforms to the pattern of her imperfect will.
Her coma becomes twin wings unfurling behind her, and she rides the solar wind.
That great stellar mass pulls. Her path into the system is twirls and spirals, stealing momentum as she accelerates to her destination. That planet spins around the sun, a blue jewel deep in the innards of the system. It was terribly close, and terribly hot this near to an ever-screaming explosion of radiation. Why was this her destination? What comet would ever fly this close?
The question echoes in her mind. It is the fate of comets to dazzle, and their song could be heard many clusters away if you listened closely. She had heard seven comets dancing destruction upon a planet here (already deep past, by the time she had heard it) — but what brought them here?
And what brought her here?
It’s so hot so close to the star. But her last twirl around a planet spent momentum instead of stealing it, and she was on course to spiral toward the blue orb that had witnessed so many comets. It had lured in so many comets.
It had trapped so many comets.
It’s so hot. She feels the planetsong calling to her, pulling her in. A small white moon gyres around it, and why did its light look so ugly? She spirals in. She feels the thick brush of an atmosphere, and knows this is going burn. All her velocity will be friction, now
It’s so hot. It’s too much. Her song was still missing notes — her light had nearly gone dark, a mere billionth of a galactic spin ago, and that was hardly enough time to shine clearly again — but she didn’t have the luxury of convalescence.
She didn’t know what brought all those comets to this world. She didn’t know if she’d need to dance destruction with them. She wasn’t expecting it to be so hot. But it was worth it. She needed to do this. She didn’t float, she flew like an arrow towards her mark — because all of this was for—
For what? Why was she… it’s slipping her mind. She’s missing notes. (She remembers how ugly that moon looked, but even that’s slipping away, like it were a dream.)
It’s so hot. She’s burning up on entry. She’s losing mass. She’s losing her. Losing her mind. It was her fate to dazzle and be destroyed
A world of unending gray, so lonely the distant stars seem like companions, so empty not even a wind disturbs the all-encompassing dust. Closed eyes see hidden light.
Aurora awakens in a small room with sunset’s golden light streaming through empty holes in the wall. The girl stretches in the small bed, rubbing against the silken soft sheets beneath. A blink, a glimpse at how late it’s gotten, and she frowns. Sitting up, then carefully she slips her feet into some slippers, a layer between her and the stone of the floor.
The floor isn’t just dirt, not anymore — they had paid to have stone laid throughout the house — but dirt accumulated between cracks and Sunny hadn’t cleaned her room in a few days. She checked her dresser to find a shirt that didn’t have a layer of sweat soaked into it. On top of it sit toys (dolls, balls, game pieces), all coated in a layer of dust. There’s a clay sword, shattered in three pieces, and a wooden sword Blank had subsequently grown for her.
Aurora gives that a second look. It meant that Sus was wrong, didn’t it? Blank wouldn’t have done that, if it really thought she was annoying.
Thinking of Sus is a flare of remembered anger. It wasn’t the first time her ambitions had been mocked. When she voiced it to folks in town, it was dismissed as silliness. Like a fool wishing on a shooting star, one lady had said. (It was a reference to an old saying, but Aurora didn’t know that, had to ask and ask and ask until someone bothered to explain.)
With a new shirt, Aurora is walking out of her room. Her father’s in the sitting room, looking over a ledger in the warm waning light. He looks up to her with a smile and sad eyes.
“Ah there you go, finally up. You’re alright?” He sees her nod and there’s some relief, at least. His eyes turn thoughtful. He’s frowning, angular jaw working, chewing on his next words. “You get into so many fights, Aurora. I’m worried you’re gonna get hurt, one of these days.” His jaw chews a bit more, than he finally spits it out, asking, “Can you tell me why? Why do you have to fight so much?”
Because it was fun? Because it was the only thing she was good at? Because— the words didn’t seem right. She couldn’t say it.
“Is it hard to get along with the spirits? Do they bother you?” He’d asked before. He keeps asking.
“I like the spirits,” she says.
“You,” — the words are interspersed with a laugh. Nervous? Worried? (She couldn’t tell; Father seemed solid no matter what) — “you have an odd way of showing it.”
Was it odd? She had seen other children run at one another, laugh and flee, playing chase. Likewise, she throws a fist, and they avoid it. It was the same kind of game, one of evasion.
Why wouldn’t you fight people you liked? To land a hit, or avoid one, you had to be paying attention. All of your focus on that other person. If you didn’t like someone, you ignored them.
It wasn’t like talking, where you could hold a conversation without really caring or trying. Where people didn’t understand the things she said, where they didn’t understand the things they themselves said, and couldn’t explain it to her.
But a kick, a grab, that was very clear. No ambiguity who won when you pin them to the ground. She could easily tell apart a laugh of joy and the look of fear that meant she’d gone to far.
The tactics, how to get what you want, it’s so straightforward. It isn’t at all like talking.
How is she supposed to explain any of this with words? Like trying to fight while tied up, she’s helpless.
Father’s patiently waiting for a response, but what left her mouth isn’t exactly words. So her father pats her on the head. “It’s okay. Come on, sit with me on the the porch. The stars are about to come out.”
She didn’t mind the pat, though she was almost shoulder height, making the motion awkward. Despite following his lead, Aurora rushed out of the door before him. (Though she pauses to swap her slippers for proper shoes.)
Their ‘porch’ is a plot of dirt where grass doesn’t grow. Father is closing the circular door behind him; it slots into a dirt hole in a hill, their hill. He’d raised and shaped it himself, a milestone of earthcanting.
Likewise, in place of chairs there sat soft, shaped mounds of earth he’d uprisen himself. Cloth covers Aurora’s seat, but not Geller’s.
Above, the eveningstar is first to appear in the darkling sky, lonely in the west.
“The eveningstar isn’t like other stars,” her father says. “Do you know what it really is?”
He’d told her, she did know; but he speaks now in a tone of retelling a story. He has a solid voice, even when speaking of celestial matters. She could stand to hear the stories again.
The truth, he say, is that the eveningstar is a wandering world, not unlike our own, with the sun rising and setting in its sky just the same, and a moon all its own. It wanders among the six kindred worlds, the most favored of the sun.
Her father can name all six. Not uncommon; there’s a rhyming verse recounting the mythic creation of the kindred.
Aurora interrupts to ask an odd question: “If those are worlds like ours, what do they look like? Do they have mountains and rivers and clouds?” She watches him carefully.
They’re all different, says he; Father tells a story of a world of endless ocean and ever-hanging fog, and then a world covered in tarnished copper, a world with no land at all and one where the sun sat unmoving and one where the stars could always be seen. They’re the one constant, really. Every world turned under the stars.
He tells of more worlds than the six kindred. Beyond them lies three strange outer worlds, tracing far-ranging paths in the sky. He could name the outer worlds, too, so rarely seen; and no one else in Willowind could do that. According to his tales, the lands and skies of the outer worlds are even stranger, escaping mortal description.
Sunset glow now fading, the brightest stars deign to be seen, and he continues her journey through the system. Beyond that, there spin the hidden worlds, wandering cloaked in the black spaces between the stars.
But they aren’t really cloaked; but only highly trained eyes can make out the nearest hidden world. Another hidden world was supposedly known for centuries to the mystics of the Nistran desert tribes, and the third discerned in his own lifetime by the scrying of royal gemsingers.
Six kindred worlds, three outers worlds, and three hidden worlds.
“But I think there’s more. Each world is more hidden than the last… who’s to say there aren’t more of them? Some say there’s as many as five hidden.”
Aurora hums though. “Do they ever end? Maybe there’s more worlds forever.”
“Oh, they end. Because in the darkness beyond the hidden worlds… there be comets.”
Aurora tightens at the mention, tension from excitement or fear.
By now, twilight draws to a close, and the sky lies properly gleaming with stars.
The shadows around her shouldn’t be menacing; no comet would come creeping from the dark. Comets arrive in meteoric fire, and roam the earth dazzling with alien light. Still, it’s thrilling to wonder. Could there be a hidden comet, like the hidden worlds?
Her father points up, and at last, they stargaze. He names the stars, traces constellations. He speaks of the milky cloud across the sky, describes galaxies and nebulae.
“Sometimes the stars dance in pairs, and sometimes they explode, and sometimes they are… yet stranger still.”
Aurora frowns. Opens her mouth, but doesn’t form the words. Her eyes drift, and she catches a hint of motion. A streak of light across the sky.
“Only a fool wishes on a shooting star,” she repeats. “I heard someone say that. What does it mean, daddy?”
He gives a long blink, as if closed eyes could hide his reaction. “Shooting stars are small bits of the heavens, so feeble they disappear in moments. Wishing on one, it’s placing your hope in a brief, dazzling flash of light that will only turn to nothing.” The emphasis, the trailing off — a hint of bitterness laced those words. “But that’s not what you really wanted to ask, though, is it?”
“A fool wishes on a shooting star,” Aurora echoes the full saying, “but only a madman wishes on a comet.”
He doesn’t respond.
Aurora looks at the sky, sees the streak. “Is that a shooting star, or a comet?” She only receives silence in response. “What happens if a bit of heaven falls and doesn’t turn to nothing? Is it always a bad omen — a comet?”
At length, he murmured. “They say… if you wish on a comet, then it might come to you. Comets… They say when one touches the sky, it dazzles. When one touches the earth, it destroys. If there’s an exception… well I couldn’t say.”
“I’ll stop them.” She sees her father look at her, perplexed, no words in his reaction. “I’ll become a knight and if evil spirits fall from heaven, then I’ll fight them and win.”
Comets were so very far away, farther than the outer worlds. If she wished on this comet, would she be strong enough to fight it when it finally came?
Her father laughs with a stutter. “So it’s practice for you, then? That’s why you pick a fight with everything that moves?”
Really, it was the other way around.
This time, rather than not knowing how to put that into words, Aurora didn’t know if she should. She looks away. Eyes going back to the sky.
She knew she hadn’t figured out the right words to say it, but she had to. She had to prove Sus wrong.
“How do you know so much about the heavens, daddy?”
“Oh, I’ve heard many stories over the years, read even more. I have a good memory for them.”
Heard them where, though? He doesn’t travel, and he’s far more knowledgeable than anyone she met in the village. (Well, except for that lady, who gave her strange stares she didn’t like, who had a metal hand, whom no one else seemed to like. Aurora’d never asked her and didn’t want to.)
He doesn’t travel, and Aurora had already read every book in the house. There’s some books about astrology, but again, nothing like the stories he’s telling. He just told her there were volcanoes on the eveningstar!
She asks a question that really, is more of an answer. “You learned this from mom, didn’t you?”
Of course the daughters of the moon would know far more about the stars than anyone else. They had hidden knowledge to fight comets, secrets passed down from great Uluna herself.
Aurora watches Geller’s face. He frowns and furrows, he looks away, he sighs, but he never admits it.
All he has to say is that Sus is wrong, that he cares and mother cared and the truth wasn’t just a disappointment.
It gets cooler at night, so why did she still feel hot?
Her fist hurts, and she realizes she slammed it against the dirt-chair. She wipes the dirt from the edge of her palm, then gives up because she just wants to slam it again.
“A farm boy can dream of the stars, can’t he? I may not be a scholar, but…”
Aurora’s shaking her head. “You can’t see all that stuff. Someone had to have told you.”
“I’m good with spirits, you know.” It was true; most farms didn’t have two, let alone three spirits in the flesh. “Their memories are longer than any record.”
“You aren’t saying it.” He knew she could feel the deception, if he simply lied outright. Her father dancing around this much, it’s odd. “Please! Just tell me the truth!”
He sighs again. “There are things you can’t understand until you’re older, Aurora dear.”
Aurora’s hot enough she’s surprised her breath doesn’t come out as steam.
It’d be easier to think through her words, plan things out, if the night air would just cool. Sure, it’s summer, but it’s also night. Come on! Even a little breeze would help…
“Why are you always like this?” Her volume is too close to a yell. She reels it back, says “Why can’t you just tell me about her?”
Why did you have to make Sus right?
She stands up, looking down at him.
So he stands up, still taller than her. “Aurora—”
“No.” She doesn’t want to hear it. She can’t hear it.
She—
She turns to leave. She runs. There’s footsteps behind her. There’s her name being called again and again.
But she doesn’t stop running, and at some point, he just lets her go.
When you talk to people, you don’t have to listen to what the other person was saying. You can say anything, it doesn’t matter, it isn’t physical, words aren’t real. But you can’t ignore a kick. That’s real.
But Aurora wasn’t supposed to fight to get her way. She knew that. That was one of Father’s most important rules.
Really, Aurora wasn’t supposed to fight at all.
But how could she stand that? It was the only time anyone was honest. People didn’t make sense and when she tried to make sense of them, she’s doing something wrong.
It’d be easier to just run away, never have to talk to another person ever again.
(But she’d never get another fight, like that.)
Spirits were better than people, made more sense, but Sus was a spirit.
Aurora half expected the porcine goat-thing to be grinning hunger at her right now, or waiting unseen to trip her. No, it was more than half expectation, he could feel it when a spirit was watching her, and she was being watched.
Aurora breathes out a growl. She tenses, tightens her hands into fists. Fighting was fun to her; it was clearer than talking. But sometimes, all what you wanted to say is go away.
Forget her father’s rules. If something bothered her now, they would get a fist to the face.
A cloud passes in front of the moon. A shadow rears up behind Aurora. She lashes out, a fist thrown with weight behind it.
She impacts hard against tree bark. There’s nothing there. Jumping at literal shadows.
Aurora sighs, and advances deeper into the spirit-haunted woods.
Running through this domain, one can’t say Sus made no attempt to trip her. Sus is these woods, and the roots beneath her feet had every intention of pulling her to the ground; the vines and branches clearly intended to slap out in front of her stride, and the only paths allowed to be worn in the underbrush were those that twisted like a maze. But having spent over ten years wandering these woods, she can weave through at a jogging pace.
On and on she went through the dark of night. Far enough to be alone for a bit, to feel peace and solitude, to cool off from how hot she’d gotten. (Some would be afraid in these woods; of wolves and gemfiends and wild spirits; but Aurora had easily wrestled dogs and foxes, and she had the measure of Sus; she didn’t trust them, but she trusted her safety in their woods.)
When she finally slowed to a stop, it is not out of caution. No, it’s still so hot. Sweat slicks her face like she’s melting. She keeps moving, but it only gets worse.
(The shadows look like visual snow.)
Aurora knows the feel of Sus’s woods, familiarity to the point of instinct.
So she knows something is different. It’s off, it’s wrong.
The paths are too straight, the trees too tall. Are those cypresses? Not willows or oaks. If she was being watched earlier, now she felt ten more eyes on her. The shadows are sharp. Were those bones?
The moonlight — the moon is brilliantly full — filters down between the branches. Sometimes she blinks and the needles are gone, the boughs bare and every too-tall tree now skeletal and spirit-haunted.
“Sus?” She’s not sure if she speaks the words as a reproach, an invocation, or a quiet cry for help. There’s no response of any sort. The wind blows locks of too-colorful hair in front of her face. Her long-sleeved coat is fluttering around her. It’s a strong storm’s wind, and it chills her. She doesn’t shiver.
Aurora isn’t running anymore. Cautious steps forward, head swiveling and double checking every shadow around her. Those shadows shift when she steps near a tree’s shade; they disappear when she gets near.
“Who are you?” Aurora speaks, steadying her voice.
There’s a presence, sometimes felt in the twisting of a cypress’s sharp leaves. Sometimes echoed in a fallen twig. Always distant, fragmentary indications, like a moon viewed from glinting dewdrops. A spirit. So close, so far away.
Aurora grits her teeth. “Come out! I’m not afraid of you!”
Her head is still swiveling around, gaze impatient for motion, true motion. The wind is knocking rocks and sticks around and making the tree limbs groan — it meant there’s so many distractions to look past. But if she saw something—
There! A hundred feet away! Eyeshine behind a dead tree leaning against its fellows. The body is long behind it, like it moved on four legs. But a glimpse is all she gets.
There’s a tremble in her legs. She would run, but she wasn’t afraid. This spirit would show itself, and Aurora was going to punch it for scaring her like that.
A tree moves. The eyeshine is piercing light out from two holes in its bark. Above, two boughs split and split again, a crown of dead fingers. After glimpsing for a second, Aurora breaks eye contact (there is a mind behind those eyes, she knows this in her bones). It’s still there, she can feel it watching her.
Yet it seems wise to drink no more than a moment’s glimpse of that sight.
Aurora’s eyes stare at the ground. She crouches to pick up a rock. And then, eyes closed, hurls the rock to where she feels those eyes watching her.
Wood cracks as if under strain from snow. Is that the sound of her hitting the mark, or the spirit making sparse? The skin-prickling stare is gone now.
Aurora roots herself to the spot. She’s not afraid.
“Aurora?” The girl suddenly remembers the sound of her father’s voice. “Aurora! Please come back here!”
She runs. Not now, not when he wouldn’t tell her anything. She wouldn’t go back yet.
Under the cold light of a full moon, Aurora never finds refugee of shadows to hide. The storm wind seems to blow boughs out of place as soon as she steps under them. The way even dark overhangs grew illuminated leaves her wondering if, somehow, the wind is blowing the moonlight itself.
More than Aurora is running, tonight. She sees mice darting, foxes ignoring them to crawl into burrows, owls nestled still in the hollows of trees.
Aurora still feels hot, a coal in a smith’s forge, burning with the heat that fueled action, the sort of action Father has rules against. It’s that heat which keeps her from feeling cold — her breath is a cloud leaving her mouth, and she swears there’s gleaming flakes of frost in the night air.
But all of the animals stowing themselves away — did they feel like winter had come early?
The eyes appear anew, fifty feet to her left, then forty feet to her right. Aurora dropped the pretense; when her path would take her near those glowing, hollow sockets, she ran the other way. As they watch her, she sees it more and more fully. It wasn’t a tree with two boughs — those were antlers upon its head.
It felt safer to glimpse the body. She had seen hunters kill doe. She had seen wolves kill a buck and happened across the carcass. She remembered it now. Skin still covers these bones, but barely. The deer is thin and taut, like it had grown larger than a man without ever eating.
(Was it hungry? Would she be its first meal?)
They were so long — deer didn’t have eight legs. Deer didn’t have pair after pair of antlers upon their back like wings of velvet and bone. Deer were prey, they didn’t chase.
The wind blows again, and above her she see clouds rolling in so fast a fisherman of the sky must have reeled them. Now the moon is occluded from the ground by clouds colored like the fringe of a rainbow.
So why did the shadows still light up when she steps near?
The deer spirit manifests, twenty feet away right in front of her, closer than it ever has come before, like a shadow given flesh. This near, the hide appears a shade of deep blue.
Aurora gasps, terror choking her breath. (What color was strangled flesh?) She falls to the ground, coughing. Trembling, she makes to stand, falls again. But she has to get up.
How long has she been running? Twilight had long given way to true night. Aurora is tired. She can’t keep this up.
Trapped in the domain of a malevolent spirit, unable to move. Would she melt from the heat still building inside her? Freeze with the unnatural cold of this storm? Or would the winged deer devour?
Get up, child.
Aurora mumbles. It’s not words.
Run. Escape. Give me a hunt.
The shadows seemed enchanted with the words.
Aurora rasps a breath, and scrambled to her feet. The shining, hollow eyes are peering at her, deep and evaluating. Eight legs crush dead cypress leaves underhoove. The spirit circles her. She has to time to stand shakily, then get steady.
Go. The deer’s mouth yawns upon and there’s something within and Aurora starts running anew.
The hunt is different, now. Those eyes are behind her always, and never leave. Earlier, the trees sometimes flickered, looking leafless and dead. She can’t banish the images no matter how many times she blinks. She can feel its falsity, a ghostly illusion.
A fox sleeping in a low tree branch looks like a crow-picked skeleton. But it’s not.
Aurora had delved too deep into this spirit’s domain. In each tree, it was no longer a distant presence; every plant here sung with the slow, faint pulse of a spirit’s enchantment, a will-song.
Sweat soaked her underclothes. Did she smell terrified? Even as her fear deepened, she feels ever hotter.
She is being led, that much i obvious. Earlier, brief appearances of the spirit had nudged her this way and that, and now she must be getting close. The deer-thing pushes her exactly where the spirit wants her. Each long, cantering stride of those eight legs brought that stare closer and closer.
Just up ahead, there’s a gap. The trees break into a sudden clearing.
But Aurora trips again. Her balance tips forward, and her hands catch her. She doesn’t want to stop moving, she can’t fall again, so they push off the ground even as her legs keep moving. For that moment on all fours, she truly feels like prey animal fleeing in mortal terror.
A leap brings her out of the forest. Before her now lies the banks of a pond so round cartographers would draw it with a compass. The banks rise up toward the edge.
Aurora strides twice near the pond’s edge before leaping again. She was so hot. All she could think, seeing those cool waters, was how they’d feel washing over her skin.
Sailing over the waters, she looks down, and understands.
Why the shadows kept shifting, why the forest was illuminated, why the deer’s gaze looked so much like eyeshine and she was afraid to look too deeply.
Aurora is light. Her skin glows; her hair sparkles; her eyes radiate.
She really was like a coal in a forge, so hot she burned bright.
Time to be doused. Her arc reaches a peak, and now she falls toward the clear waters. The pond had no fish or scum, and even the bottom looked smooth instead of muddy
She should have splashed. But Aurora sinks into the waters like sand, and it’s not a ripple or wave that flows out. It’s a crackling sound: the waters freeze to ice around her, ice glowing with her light.
Frost coats her skin when she emerges from the depths, and the freezing happens so fast that, when lifting an arm out of the ice, it goes from covered in frost at the wrist to chunk of ice at the elbow, and when her shoulder emerges, it’s near-immobilized by the mass of the iced pond. She struggles to dunk it back in.
The deer trots forward. At the the pond’s edge, the long, gaunt neck bends toward the thin rime of ice (the pond is freezing slower, farther from her). A long tongue breaks the ice and sips at they water. The eyes stare at her still, shining back with her own light.
“A most pleasant hunt, child Aurora. I confess I cannot swim; patience will seal your freedom.” The voice is not human. If a wretched old crone sounded tender and matronly; if a deep lullaby were sung by a wailing banshee; if you could hear the winter winds make threats and promises, it would sound like this.
It’s then that everything snaps and falls apart in Aurora. She laughs, high-pitched and rhythmless. If this was her last laugh, it would be terribly embarrassing.
She says, “That doesn’t make sense! Deer are prey, not predators.”
The deer neither laughs nor growls at this critique of its chosen form and art. “To my precious leaves, deer are the most relentless hunter,” says the spirit.
She, the spirit, dips her head deeper into the cold pond water. Tear tracks flow down from the hollow eyes, and glowing ice crawls upward. The ice continues, tracing out the whole of the deer spirit’s form in all its austere emaciation. It is both illuminated and defined. Somehow, hanging off this spirit like an indecent raiment, the glow doesn’t feel like her own light anymore.
When the head lifts, the spirit hasn’t closed the mouth.
Aurora wasn’t sure if pigs had sharp teeth, but she was certain deer didn’t.
“Are you going to eat me?”
“I would not dare subsume you. I lack that power.”
Aurora frowned (or tried to, cracking the ice on her face). “You seemed to have plenty of power in that hunt.”
“Truly, it is a borrowed might. You feel it too, do you not? Burning in your breast, setting your teeth on edge, the omens of a great and terrible storm to come. I would not be awake in month, in this season, not without it, and at this hour you, dear, would be asleep.”
“Oh,” Aurora says. She looks up at the clouds. Was it just the weather, all along? But that couldn’t be it, she had reasons to feel how she did. “No, I was frustrated. I was mad, and that’s why I ran out here.”
“Two things can dance together as one truth.” And then the deer sits, dropping to look down on her from a lower height, eight legs tucking underneath. “Tell me, what insult inspired your journey?”
“You’d know the pig spirit, right? Sus, your neighbor?”
“I see,” the spirit says, as if that alone had explained everything.
She continues explaining anyway. “They, they said that everyone hates me. And,” — if Aurora hesitated her, it’s the frost on her lips, she doesn’t stutter — “They’re right. I tried to prove them wrong and I didn’t.”
“What you must understand,” she starts, “is that Sus is a spirit from the court of wild autumn. It is their nature to delight in the decay and ruination of all things. The truth is not that you are despised, but merely that Sus is jealous of your position. I have watched your father hold you close when winter’s chill grips the land. He cares for you greatly, and Sus would simply prefer that attention be theirs, or no one’s at all. Everything else is a lie traced between points of truth.”
“But Sunny? She’s sick of me, isn’t she?”
“If Sunny feels any ill will towards you, it is regret, or bitterness, or perhaps a different species of jealousy. Long ago, Sunny dreamed of your fathers hand in marriage, but that was never to be.” The deer is looking up, like she could read it in the stars, but you cannot see the stars behind violet clouds. “I would not be surprised to learn she looks upon you, on some occasions, and dreams a fantasy where you had been her daughter instead.”
“But Father, I mean, Geller — is he really my father?” She only gets a stare from the spirit, and eventually is granted a languid nod, as if disappointed in the question. “What about Mother? Did you ever know her?”
The deer looks around them, eyes wandering around the pond. “How could I ever forget her?”
“Was she a powerful enchanter?”
There’s a strangled sound, like a deer drowning, like ice cracking. Aurora frowns, slowly realizing it was a brief laugh. Another might find it offputting, but spirits’ strangeness never bothered Aurora.
She’s worried the thing was laughing at her mother, though.
As if sensing her offense, the spirit finally says, “One of the greatest, some would say.”
Aurora cracks (literally) into a grin. It lasts until she wonders, “Then why doesn’t my father just say that?”
“Do you feel your mother’s absence? Wish that, at night, you had someone else to hold you? A woman to be proud of you, to guide you?”
“I wish for it every night.”
“But you never knew her. At best, you’ve heard what mothers are supposed to be like. Now imagine you had. Would her absence not pain you doubly so? Could you stop yourself from dwelling on that loss at every moment?”
“I don’t know.”
“I can look into your heart and see it clearly. You’d run away from it. Running away… it comes as naturally to you as autumn turns to winter. It’s what brought you to me, after all.” Another strangled, cracking sound. “Your father isn’t much different. He thinks he can escape the pain of losing your mother by not thinking about it. It leaves him ill equipped to discuss those matters with you.”
Now Aurora stares up as if she could see the stars. She’s frowning. She’s not a coward, is she? But… it makes sense. It explained this in a way nobody seems able to explain why people do this.
Aurora sighs. “I think I understand now. Thank you.” She watches, and the spirit doesn’t make any indication of appreciation. Aurora frowns. She ignores it. “You know, I’m not sure if I’ve seen you before, miss spirit.”
“Of course not. I belong in the dead, dark nights of the coldest months. But this weather, it is invigorating. The ice nascent in those clouds, it sings to me. This storm… it will be spectacular.”
“Well, I’m glad you’re here to see it.”
Strangled, cracking, and the sound goes on for so long. “Oh, do not be glad. Do you imagine me compassionate? This is incorrect. I am merely truthful. I am a spirit of the court of wild winter. Do you know what winter means to mortals caught in a blizzard with nowhere to go? I am death. If you imagine me compassionate, then imagine my condolences.”
“For what?”
But the spirit was gone, like a shadow in the passing of a light.
Aurora stares into nothing for a while, dreaming of her mother, of a future that would make her proud. It may have been mere moments. There’s a flash, coming lightning a rumbling forethought in the heavens. The winds grow still. Very still.
Flakes of snow descend from on high. It’s cold, but the chill that grips her is pure fear. The words echo with all musicality of a choking, frozen deer.
It was so very cold. What does winter mean to mortals caught in a blizzard?
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.