Winter, personified
Me, writing whatever is in my head, badly.
❄️❄️❄️
The legends say that one needs to listen for bells, and so there he stands, a few miles from his home, where autumn meets winter, and strains to hear any note, any chime, above the rustle of the leaves.
Behind him, there are few trees left which are not yet bare, but still the world is gold and red and brown, with the tall grass rustling and dry leaves falling in curving arcs to the ground. He blends well in there, with his dark, tousled hair, his yellow-red-green scarf and his wooly but worn out mantle.
But in front of him, behind an unclear border drawn through the landscape like paper ripped in two, the seasons change. Frost laces the weeds right in front of his boots, and a few paces further north, snow begins to pile in the shadows of the trees. He knows from experience: go half a mile, and the snow rises to your ankle, and half a mile more, it looks like winter has lived there for a hundred years without end. This ever frozen place is a strange land, the legend say. There live large, antlered creatures with fur so thick you can bury your whole hand in it, fox-like critters that trail stardust behind them, and snow spirits that enchant snowflakes to fall and your hairtips to freeze, so it is told. He knows all these tales well, but there is one specifically that has brought him here: he is looking for Winter personified, a being that many claim to have heard of, from a friend of a friend or a distant relative’s relative, but no one has ever seen. They tell of Winter dancing, with graceful, airy movements over the snow, not a markl in the snow left behind. Long and white is her hair, and trails of her dress are floating behind her like iridescent wings. Clear and bright is her laughter, like an ice cold stream running through the forest, and her eyes are the deepest blue. Like the sky at dusk, says one. No, like a still winter lake, claims the other. But they all have heard the bells that accompany her. As if her every movement rings an invisible chime, her every step produces chords of the most clear, ringing music the listener has ever heard. But that is all that Winter is: a fragment of waking dreams, a vision in the snowfall, not more.
He is going to change that. He wants to find her, and so he crosses the glittering border, and enters the land of the frost.
***
The snow is around his ankles, but not yet tumbling into his boots. He is not freezing, thanks to his thick clothes, but every breath clouds in front of his face. Again and again, faint chirps of birds ring in the air, even though no songbird he knows would stay in a forest this cold. But of course, this forest is not normal, and neither are its residents. Even more ofte than the birds, he hears clumps of snow falling from branches and snow crunching beneath small paws, but he is not worried. Of course the spirits of winter are following him, curious as they are, but he is no enemy and in turn expects no hostility. On more than one occassion, he stopped and tried to befriend the little critters, but he does not stop for them today. His mind is full of glittering wings and all things blue, and he hears bells in his mind. Determined, he plunges on.
***
The sun has come down, but its is not dark in the forest. For one, he is carrying a delicately wrought lantern with him, a candle flickering inside, but even without it’s light, it would not be dark. The stars are out, and in their light, every branch, every frost-rimmed leaf is glittering. He does not stop to watch the glimmering light, but he stops when he hears an unfamiliar sound in the distance: a howl. It tells of anger and reminds him of a cornered animal. He did not expect this; normally, the sounds of this place are soft and clear, and often remind him of glittering light on water or the clear dripping of droplets falling. This howling, raw and desperate, is different. Of course, he goes to investigate.
Is is not hard to follow, and soon, the snow-laden trees part to show a moonlit clearing. At first, he does not understand what he is seeing in the middle of the frozen meadow. A living thing, writhing and trashing like a fish in a net. Only after a long he begins to understand the creature. It looks like a fox, but larger, and somehow more graceful, more sinuous. Its ears, the line of its back, its long tail: they do not belong to an ordinary fox, but are sweeping and elegant, like drawn by a romanticising artist instead of being a real thing. Its fur glitters white, almost iridescent in the starlight, and the longer he looks, the more hints of color he imagines to see. In his mind, he hears the far away chiming of silver bells.
It takes him some seconds to spot the problem, but then it is easy to discern from this world of white and blue: a hunters trap, dark and cruel, clamped around the creatures hind leg, bending its thin limb in an uncomfortable angle.
He takes a step forward, and instantly the foxes’ head snaps toward him. He is startled by the dark blue of its eyes, so deep that it almosts distracts him from its long teeth, which the creature is baring. Slowly, he crouches and sets down his lantern in the snow with a soft crunch, and now the fox hisses. But its eyes are flickering from him to the lantern, focusing more on the flicker of the flame than on him, a living being. Confused, he reaches for the handle of his lantern, and immediately, the white fox hisses again.
Leaving the creature like that is not an option for him, but reaching for the trap with the fox unnerved like that, loosing a finger seems more probable than doing anything useful. But he does not believe the creatures aggression is directed at him; it growled more at his lamp with the candle still flickering than at tim, or so he thinks.
He conteplates the way home: through the cold, strange forest, back to the border and then a few more miles through dried-out meadows. It won’t be easy in the dark. But he does not want to leave the creature like that, so does he really have a choice?
Slowly, his gaze fixed on the fox, he bends forward and blows out his lantern.
With the flame extinguished and his eyes adjusting to the darkness, the soft glimmer of the forest around him seems way brighter than before: light from the stars is reflected by the snow, and moonlight breaks in the icicles hanging from the branches.
When he moves forward again, he is fixed by the blue eyes of the fox. It feels piercing, almost uncomfortably focused, but the creature is not hissing anymore, and it does not retreat as he is coming closer. It’s gaze feels eerily intelligent, and the comparison to a fox feels less and less accurate. Absentmindedly, he wonders why the creature minded the lantern so much. With it being so much calmer now, and it examining him so intensely, it wanting to have the fire gone feels now more like a challenge, a test than the reaction of a wild animal.
Now, keeping one eye on the long teeth of the fox, he reaches carefully forward and pries the trap apart. It takes all his strenght, but after a moment it is opened far enough for the creature to pull its leg out.
Without a moment of hesitation, it jumps away into the undergrowth, not sparing a single look back. Even it’s movements are graceful and arcing, like it is submit to less gravity than the rest of the world, and, dazzled as he is, he imagines that there are no pawprints left in the snow. But maybe he just can’t see them in the dark. Pensively, he rises and, after a last look to the other side of the clearing, he turns around. Slowly, with his extinguished lantern in hand, he makes his way back, only aided by the light of the stars glittering far overhead.
***
In the days since this pecuilar meeting, he has been often to the clearing, but never saw a trace of the fox again. Still, he has returned more often to the forest than he ever did before he met the creature; now, he spends almost every day in the forest. Today, the sun is shining, but still it is icy cold, and the creek he is following is only a small stream of water flowing through a mostly frozen brook. He listens to the clear, high bubbling of the water and the crunch of his steps, until he stops at the spot where the stream branches of into two arms running deeper into the frozen forest. Deep in thought, he watches the light glitter on the water. After a while, he thinks it would be better compared crystals lying under the water than light falling on top of it; he can see every single color reflected in the water, and the rippling of the water is mixed with the bright chiming sound of cold, silver bells.
Realization has not even struck when he is already whirling around. No one has ever seen her, but now here he stands, his ears and the whole forest filled with the clear chime of a dozen bells, and the notes are all around him, as is the light. Not the light from the sun, but the light reflecting of her dress, her hair: it breaks on every snowflake, every crystal, and his whole worls is filled with colour. Blue eyes, as dark a every lake, light as every dawn sky, dark as a graceful foxes eyes, find his.
Winter has come to him.
