Aurora Moonrise

It is the nature of comets to dazzle and destroy. These alien spirits grind kingdoms to dust with joyful ease. Only the power of a daughter of the moon can repel them. There are none left.

Aurora knows she is different. Her father is a plain man, and her mother is a mystery. Her prismatic hair, her divergent mind, her inability to weave common enchantments — it must come from her mother's side But her mother is gone and no one will say why or where or anything. It's enough to make her want to fight someone.

And Aurora fights — people, animals, spirits, it doesn't matter. She doesn't want to hurt them, but it's thrilling. She'll just have to become a hero — heroes get to fight things, right? And heroes get answers to who their parents were.

When a cursed storm leaves Aurora glowing in the light of the full moon, she awakens new powers she can't control. Powers unheard of, except in those old stories.

But the word on the lips of churchmen is witchcraft — communion with unnatural spirits that spells doom.

Will she defend humanity? Or is she a threat to it?

Meteor Cadence

Memories, part vii

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 empty black quietude, a player composes their next movement.  

A comet moves 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: it flies like an arrow towards its 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.  When will is cast with purpose, intent is manifest: like this, the comet sings.

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.

The 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 nature of comets to dazzle, and their song could be heard many clusters away if you listened closely.  She had heard seven comets dancing destruction on this planet (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 gyred around it, and why did its light look so ugly?  She spirals in.  She feels the thick brush of an atmosphere, and know this is going burn.  All her velocity is becoming friction, now. She braced for a meteoric impact; it is the nature of a comet to destroy.

It’s so hot.  It’s too much.  Her song was still missing notes — her light had almost 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 nature to dazzle and be destroyed

A comet falls to earth.

Part I: Flashes of Lightning in Endless Rainfall

Flash i - Melt in Battle’s Heat

A girl falls to earth.

It’s a pounce, but her arms close around empty air.  Her foe has eluded her again.  Moments later, she spots it hiding behind a bush.  A spirit taken the form of a greenskinned child with no face, but the jerk of its head still indicates surprise.

“Gotcha!”  The girl charges after it, prismatic hair trailing like ribbons behind her.  The child is about half the height of the girl — there was no way its legs were long enough to keep up with her.  But with each footfall against the grass-covered earth, it accelerates as if conveyed by the plants themselves.

The girl has no such advantage, and she’s huffing to keep up, her face slick with sweat in the summer sun.  Despite the heat, she has gloves and boots on, a thin, hooded coat over her a arms. Almost none of her night-black skin is exposed.

Her superior tactics see her cornering the nature spirit at the bank of a creek.  Now, the spirit has no choice but to fight back.  The spirit has tricks — the weeds beneath the girl’s feet always seem to catch her feet, when she isn’t rolling on seeds or falling onto thorns.  (But these don’t happen at will; each time, it’s presaged by the spirit pressing an arm to the ground.) Once, the spirit blinds her with a dandelion blow into her face.  But when she closes to hand to hand range, there’s no contest, the girl is making easy work of the spirit.  Grappling its limbs, kicking the legs out from under it, landing punch after punch.  This exchange climaxes with her picking up and throwing the spirits so that it splashes in the creek.

The spirit rises up, drenched, and its stubby arm-appendages close into almost-fists.  The arms themselves are half-outstretched, half-curled up.  Its head twitches on its neck.  Altogether, a comical display of anger.  It stamps the ground, kicks dirt (without displacing any grass), and charges forward.

Seeing it so worked up, the girl cracks a grin.  She leans forward and charges when it does.  The two are running at each other, about to collide at full speed.

Then a sunflower shaped like a person rises from ground, sudden like it had sprouted up between them. Thin petiole arms are thrown out and stop the two, “hand” against their head, stopping each charge in its tracks.

“Aurora, you know what your father told you about fighting all the time.”

The sunflower spirit’s voice is not the voice of a human.  Aurora wasn’t even sure if it was Extolan, or mere sound enchanted to convey intent.  The voice came from high above her; the spirit stood as tall as an adult.

“But there’s nothing else to do around here!”

“There’s always work to do on the farm.  You can pluck weeds.”

“Blank plucks the weeds.  It’s way better at it!”

“Have you trimmed the hedges?  Cut the hay?  Cleaned the house?”

“Sunny, you know I’m no good at any of that stuff.”

“You can still do it.  No one is born good at anything, you have to work for it.”  Sunny smiles, but it looks odd on her sunflower face.  “Even sweeping must be within your abilities.”

“I get tired of sweeping all the time.”

“If you have the energy to fight, you have the energy to sweep.  Please, Aurora, leave Blank be.”

“It doesn’t mind.  Right, Blank?”

Blank throws its arms around the sunflower spirit’s legs, clutching it.  It glances it up at Aurora, flinches and interposes Sunny between them, hiding behind her long legs.

Sunny pats Blank on the head.

“Come on.  If it wanted me to stop I would have stopped!  I can sense these things.  I got better at that!  You believe me, right Sunny?”

Sunny gives a significant look to Blank.  Then, “I believe you, Aurora.”

Blank droops, a hurt look, then flops dramatically on the ground, playing dead.

“But Blank has work to do.  And so do you.  Come with me, children.”

“Harvest isn’t for two moons!  Nothing needs to be done!”

“Work always needs to be done.  It builds character.”

“Then my character won’t be built.  I’m not doing it!”

“Aurora…” There was a warning dissonance in her song.

“What are you gonna do, huh?  Make me do it?”  Aurora sticks out her tongue.

The sunflower’s eyes narrow. “You’re goading me.”

“It almost worked…”

“I’m not going to fight you, Aurora.”

“What, are you scared I’ll beat you?  If you win, I’ll do anything you say for a week!”

“Is that a pact?”

“I promise!  But you’ll have to beat me first.”

“Very well.  Blank, go along now.”

The blank-faced child looks up at Sunny, silently pleading to watch.  

“There’s work to be done.  Go!”

When the fight starts, Sunny is immediately different from Blank.  The sunflower keeps her distance while her petals glow with magical light.  She throws out an arm that sparkles, and a rays of light leap forth.  Aurora dodges, and where they land, it’s as if the spirit had thrown a punch from a distance.

“No fair!  I don’t have any crazy spirit magic!”

“What made you think this fight was fair?  You intend to wrestle me when I lack even muscles.  The only way I can move is through ‘crazy spirit magic.’”

“Doesn’t matter, even cheating won’t let you win!”

Aurora charges, but the spirit side steps and her momentum carries her too far.  The spirit keeps her distance, and more rays of light keep Aurora cautious, even though some of them go wide.  Aurora’s clothes are drenched in sweat now.  Still better than feeling the dirt, though.

When Aurora closes the distance, she catches hold of one of Sunny’s petiole arms.  The other arm glows with a new ray.  Aurora flinches, but instead of being directed at her, the new ray hits the spirit’s own body, at the arm where it joins its stem.  The ray of light cleanly severs the limb, freeing the spirit from Aurora grasp.

The girl chases the sunflower into the forest, and the she fires yet another magical arm — this one going completely over her head.

“Ha!  You missed!”

“I didn’t.”

A tree bough above her falls, and Aurora yelps and hops back out of the way.

Another ray, this time hitting the fallen branch — but instead of being punched, the branch flies toward Sunny as if yanked by a cord.  The sunflower catches the bough.  Where it was severed from the tree, she joins it to her own flesh, granting her a new, sturdier limb.

“Ready to give up, child?  If you concede, I’ll will reduce it to a mere five days of service.”

“I never back down from a fight!”

Aurora charges, and the sunflower swings her new arm down with a massive crash against the ground.  The girl frowns, a bead of sweat on her head.  The bough gives her a whole new way to keep Aurora at a distance

When she tanks a hit from the bough, she grabs hold of it.  Grinning, she climbs on top of the tree branch and walks towards Sunny, weighing down her new limb.  Aurora leaps to pounce on her, and Sunny picks that moment to discard her new limb with another ray-amputation and runs for it.  Once again, Aurora’s arms close around empty air, and she gives chase.  She’s slow this time, wet and panting, almost nauseous. 

It’s short lived, because a moment later, she trips and face plants against the ground.  Aurora cries out, not from pain or surprise, but distress of hitting the ground.  The texture of dirt was awful and now it was on her face.  The grit mixes with her sweat to become a muddy grime, and she rolls over, and forgets about her pursuit, wiping the dirt from her face.

There’s a squeal of laughter.  She had tripped over something, after all — over someone.

She recognized the spirit of the woods beyond her fathers’ farm.  Half pig, half goat, and both ends covered in leaves instead of fur.  It was still as red-orange as a wild boar, though.

“What the heck gives?”

“You had tunnel vision.  Practically asking for.  It was hilarious.”

“I was in the middle of something.  Our fight!”

“I will consider it… a draw,” Sunny says.

“I was gonna win!”

“Win what, though?  From the sound of it, she might as well be handing you the win, practically speaking.”

Aurora crosses her arms.  “It’s not the same.”

Sunny gives a level stare at the pig spirit.  “I have work to do.  Ensure she returns before dinner, Sus.”  And the sunflower spirit is gone.

“Why did you do that?”

“Do I need a reason?  Us spirits gotta look out for each other.”

“Doesn’t look like she appreciates it.  Looks like she doesn’t even like you!  You nuisance!”

“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” the spirit says with teeth visible.  Did pigs have such sharp teeth?  “Shows how little you pay attention.”

Aurora blows air out of her mouth.

“You realize she despises you, yeah?  Or did you not notice?”

“Nanny Sunny doesn’t…”

“Of course she does.  Or what about Blank.  You think it cares for any of this?  You’re just less annoying when it plays along then when you’re ignored.  Me?  Haha, no.  None of us like you.”

“That’s…”  She frowned.  Her head hurt.

“Insightful?  Puts everything into perspective?  Or is it just hard to accept?”

“No, you’re wrong.  If nobody liked me, then why don’t you all just…”  It was hard to find words through her headache.

“Just what?  We can’t go anywhere.  We are this land.  So long as the old man Geller keeps you, we just have to put up with you.”

“Daddy!  He loves me.  There, you’re wrong.”

“He feels some obligation toward you, sure.  Else there’s no reason to keep you around.  Don’t do any work, and you’re not charming, so what good are you?”

“I can fight!”

“Yeah, you’re nothing but trouble.”

“No, I’ll be a knight when I grow up!  I’ll fight robbers and gembeasts and comets!  I’ll defeat the biggest monsters and then everyone will see how great I am.”

“A comet?  What a daydream.  What gave you that idea?”  There was a snicker behind it.  It wasn’t funny.

Aurora gets quiet. She looks up at the sky.  Her hands work as she debates giving voice to what has, until now, only been a persistent suspicion.

Aurora knew there was something wrong — something different about her.  Her father was a great earthcanter, and she couldn’t manage any of his incantations.  Her skin, her hair, her eyes, they all looked strange, like no one in the family or the village or that she’d ever heard of.  She felt different.  No one understood her, and she didn’t understand anyone.

Nothing explained why, except there was one blank spot.  If she knew what went there, she was sure it would explain everything.

“My mother,” Aurora finally says.  “The daughters of the moon exist to defend the kingdom from comets, and they have ever since Queen Uluna first banished them.”

“Blah blah, mortal history.  I don’t care.”

Aurora continues speaking, ignoring him.  “They disappeared fifteen years ago.  I was born fifteen years ago.  And my mother… no one has seen her since the moonweavers disappeared.  I’m not stupid.”

“So you think you’re descended from what, cometslaying royalty?  Why isn’t your father rich, then?  Why isn’t your father anybody but a farmer in a backwater barony?  Why hasn’t he told you?”

“I don’t know everything!  But it all fits, doesn’t it?”

“Plenty of people died that year.  You mortals die all the time.  Ever heard of coincidence?”

“Coincidence doesn’t explain why I’m like this!  Let me hear your explanation, you stupid pig!”  Aurora’s face was drenched in sweat, her temper not making her feel any cooler in the summer sun.

“Hear this.  Maybe… you’re just a mistake?  No deep truth to it, just a worthless mortal your mother couldn’t be bothered with.  Just think about it.  If your mother and father both cared about about you, why doesn’t he tell you the truth?  Maybe he doesn’t care.  Or maybe he does, and doesn’t want to tell you your mother doesn’t.  How would you know?”

“Shut up.”  Aurora didn’t have the patience for this. 

“It’s my forest, I can say whatever I want.  Don’t like it, leave.”

“You’ll shut up if I come over there and make you shut up.”

The pig squeals laughter again.  Aurora launches into motion, unsteady on her feet but tackling the pig.  She moves so fast that finally, her pounce succeeds.  She holds the pig in a vice grip, even as its hooves beat on her back.  They go down.  She’s wrestling with a pig in the mud, getting dirt all over her, she hates it but she’s mad enough she doesn’t care.

The pig bites her.  She screams, and releases it enough to start wailing on it.  It smacks her in the face with a hoof.  Her vision goes white for a moment.

Her head is pulsing.

She keeps fighting but it’s getting fuzzy.  The world is throbbing.  Their positions shift, the pig rolling over top of her.  She resisting, she’s pushing back, she’s screaming.

She’s—

She’s nothing.  The world is nothing.  Hot, hot darkness.  She faints and see nothing.

Visual snow falls in a dream. She glimpses stars in the noise.

Flash ii - What Haunts the Stars

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 window holes.  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’d 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 a saying, but Aurora didn’t know that, had to ask and ask and ask until someone explained.)

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, “Why do you 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 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. 

This 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 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.  

He’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 doesn’t mind the pat, though she was almost shoulder height, making the motion awkward.  Despite following his lead, Aurora rushes out of the door before him.  (Though she pauses to swap her slippers with proper shoes.)

Their ‘porch’ is a plot of dirt where grass doesn’t tread.  Father is closing the circlular 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.

In skies 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?”

She did know; but he speaks in a tone of story-retelling.  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 he 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 sky, where sun sat unmoving, where the stars could always be seen.

He tells of more worlds than the six kindred.  Beyond them lies the three outer worlds, tracing more far-ranging paths in the sky.  He could name the outer worlds, too; and no one in Willowind could do that.  According to his tales, the lands and skies of the outer worlds are even stranger, escaping 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, who wandered cloaked in the black spaces between the stars.”

But they aren’t really cloaked; but only 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 not long ago 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.”

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 heaven, so feeble they disappear in moments.  Wishing on one, it’s placing your hope in a brief, dazzling flash 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… 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 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.  “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 mor 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.  She’d never asked her and didn’t want to.)

He doesn’t travel, and Aurora had 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 about 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 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 corporeal spirits.  “Their memories are longer than any record.”

“You aren’t saying it.”  He knew she could feel the deception, if he just lied.  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 feels 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!

“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, she could feel it when a spirit was watching her, and she was being watched.

Aurora breathes out a growl.  She tenses, tightens 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.

Flash iii - A Freezing Summer Wind

A cloud passes in front of the moon.  A shadow rears up behind Aurora.  She lashes out, 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 cann’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 are 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 deathly bare 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, the 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’d 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 movies.  The eyeshine is piercing light out from two holes in its bark.  Above, two boughs split and split again, a crown of fingers.  After glimpsing for a second, Aurora breaks eye contact (there was a mind behind those eyes, she knew it in her bones).  It’s still there, she can feel it watching her.

Yet it seems wise to take 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 close, 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?”  She 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 lightens to a deep blue.

Aurora gasps, terror choking her breath.  (What color was strangled flesh?)  She falls to the ground, coughing.  Trembling, she makes to stands, 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 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 it’s false, 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.

Sweat soaked her underclothes.  Did she smell terrified?  Even as her fear deepened, she feels ever hotter.

She was being led, it was obvious.  Once, the brief appearances of the spirit had nudged her this way and that, and now she must be getting close.  The deer 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 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, 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 nearing 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, 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 ice pond.  She struggles to pull 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 freezes 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 it all 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, don’t you?  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, 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 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 wonders if 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.  She 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 it 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, 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 cold.  What does winter mean to mortals caught in a blizzard?