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So, this is for the Caffeine Challenge #18, for @caffeinewitchcraft. I, erm, cannot follow directions, apparently. :grins: I wrote for an hour (though later in the day because the original time is v. early for me), and then just decided to finish the story. I also used all the prompts, because I liked all of them and wanted to see if mushing them together would give me something interesting.
~~~~~~
It’s snowing, which is how she knows that her lover is lying to her. The very air responds to Devareb’s words, a sphere of small flurries that expands the longer she speaks. At this rate, she’ll plunge the planet into a new ice age. Stubborn, inexorable, she forges ahead with what they both know are lies.
It’s not invisible snow, after all.
“Look,” Devareb says, her lashes wet with flakes and only flakes. “Look. We did everything we could and half a dozen things we couldn’t. There was nothing more we could have done.”
The sand beneath their feet picks up the colors of the fading light around them, tired oranges and bruised purples glittering off crystals of both earth and ice. The gentle lap of water is already beginning to become the gentle slap of slush against the shore, counterpoint to the last faint wheezes of the mountainous beast dying near the treeline. Beneath the sharp cold, the air smells like decay, and she doesn’t know if it’s the lake’s power making the guilt of their failure tangible or if the yet-living beast has begun its final dissolution. She shivers and pulls her robes tighter around her shoulders and wishes for thicker fabric. Lies of this magnitude hadn’t been on today’s agenda.
“You keep talking, we’ll be able to go skating,” she says.
“Ignore it. I am.” It snows harder. “Kel, please.”
Kelash holds out her hand, lets out some of her warmth, and lets the flakes gather in her palm. The sunset stains them dull red, as if the blood she‘d washed away in the lake had left its shadow. “Look at this, then. You say ‘we did everything’ and it snows. It snows. So we did not do everything. We failed because there was something left to do.”
“There was nothing.”
Her lover is beautiful and also very, very stubborn. She stands there, chin lifted, the sharp angles of her face burnished copper by the setting sun. Her robes already darken across the shoulders, the vibrant greens dulling beneath the increasing snowmelt. Even if Devareb’s eyes are dry, the sky wets her cheeks for her. Kelash feels the cold sting of each crystal, but then she is also crying. Failure. Magic was leaving the world one bloody failure at a time, and she and the rest of the coilshapers could only cling so tightly.
Kelash catches movement in her periphery where there should be none and she turns. This far from civilization, out where magic is wild and the beasts that contain it are deadly, movement is dangerous. This too is quicker and far smaller than that of the beast they’d tried to save.
The lake’s surface has become solid, decorated with ice feathers where it had been flurry-roughened moments ago. Figures appear through the flurries, shadows upon lake. Now that she is watching, she can see the dark whisps dancing among the heavy snow as the water-now-ice exhales its magic. Not dangerous to them, perhaps, but the faceless heads and shoulders orient toward them both moments after each coalesce.
“De-” Kelash begins, reaching out a hand to her lover, but Devareb isn’t done.
Defiant, glowering at the figures and the snow and the absent goddess whose tears first filled the lake, Devareb raises her voice to shout into the wind, “I get it. I get it! You wanted a miracle! You wanted heroes! You wanted more and you got us and now one of yours is dead. We failed you.”
Eyeless faces stare back, the snow turning the silhouettes into grainy spectres. Kelash has never--never--known it to snow this hard for a lie in her life. The day continues to die faster than the sun can set, the snow graying as the light dims with the storm’s ferocity. Flakes pile around her feet, soaking into her shoes.
“We’re wrong about something,” Kelash tells Devareb, clutching at her sleeve. “We’re wrong…”
Devareb keeps her eyes on the silhouettes in the storm. “We used everything we had. I’m hollow. So are you.”
“We are also too busy berating ourselves for our failures to realize where we’re standing.” When Devareb does not turn to her nor acknowledge that she’d spoken, Kelash drags on her arm and swings her around to face her. “We are standing on the shore of a magic lake. Between the two of us, maybe--”
A heartbeat, two, they stare at one another, breathing heavily, the cold no longer felt.
“You think it’s possible?” Devareb asks.
“I think we’re being called idiots in the most elemental way possible.”
“I’m hollow--”
“And so am I, but if there’s a coil, we can shape it, or we wouldn’t be able to save the beasts at all.” Kelash points at the lake, her hand half-unseen in the driving snow. “It’s not green, but it has residual power, and the shadows are taking human form. If that is not a directive...”
Devareb stops arguing, leans away from Kelash, and shouts at the sky. “Fine! Yes! We got the message! We’re not done!”
The snow stops at the words of truth. Flurries vanish into clear air, the drifting snow gone without melting. Devareb’s robes are dry once more.
Out on the lake, the silhouettes remain: a crowd of them, human in appearance. The near-vanished sun is a faint glow on the horizon as the night chases it from the sky. The surface of the water, once ice, is now glassy-smooth, a mirror doubling the spectres as they mill about waiting. Some ‘look’ at the sky and at the water beneath them, but most remain oriented towards Kelash and Devareb, silent and ready for their sacrifice.
In accord, the two step apart to give themselves the space to begin. In each of the silhouettes is a translucent coil, one she can grasp and pull from the figure. The coils are loose, unliving, and they feel weathered by sun and snow with the green almost entirely leached away, but they were once part of the living many centuries ago. It should be enough. It must be enough, because there’s almost nothing left of the great beast at the forest’ edge as it bleeds blood into the dirt and magic into the air.
The silhouettes dissolve into so much smoke. The wind off the lake smells clean, like salt and magic and truth.
At Kelash’s side, Devareb sniffles, and it’s almost enough to startle Kelash into dropping the coil she is stretching from lake to beast. A glance and it becomes clear that while her robes might be dry, her lashes are not, and there’s no longer any snow to blame for the moisture.
“Relief?” Kelash asks. She knows her lover. “You are so confident?”
Devareb laughs a watery laugh and says, “No. Allergies.” She spares a hand to wave at the smoke of the lake’s sacrifices drifting in their faces, then hiccups to belie her words.
“You’re not having allergies, Deb, those are tears and what you’re feeling is emotions, not your lungs closing up,” Kelash tells her. Each new coils’ vibrations fills her with soft thoughts and distant amusement, with confidence and power that Devareb must also be feeling if her relief has shown up early. It’s hard to tease with a coil tight in her grip, but she tries.
There is a great deal of work left to do, but there are many figures still standing on the water, absent shadows in defiance of the vanishing sun. The beast should live by full dark.
“Emotions,” Devareb dismisses the very notion, but tears still run down her cheeks.
Already the massive bulk of the beast begins to stir. Shed blood steams upon the sand and the nearest trees quake. As the stars peep out above the horizon, the brightest and fiercest first, Kelash looses a silent prayer to the empty beyond and a goddess who might never return. An eye as large as her head slowly opens to cast orange light on her raised hands.
