Winter's End, Part 7
This is the seventh part to a longer story. Catch up on the previous parts here!
Spring
The world is at odds with itself. She knows it even before she opens her eyes. The air is not so cold as it should be. Her body still feels its aches, as though she has not slept for long enough, and the desire to go back to oblivion is almost overwhelming.
Even in this weak, early state of her reign, when her powers are slow to return and she is all but cut off from the valley’s life, she feels the disquiet. She blinks away sleep and lifts her hand to block the worst of the bright sunlight in her room. Yet, as her eyes adjust, she finds the sun not so bright as it should be. The room is cast in a strange, orange light.
She looks to the window and her insides turn to ash. The world is awash with browns and reds. The morning sky is clouded and heavy with oncoming rain. She presses her palm against the glass pane and stares out at a world she does not recognise.
Death and decay, the powers of Autumn, drown the valley in skeletal trees and the brown mulch of dying leaves. They clog the unfrozen streams in the wood. There is not a single flake of snow in sight. The swathes of white that have always greeted her are absent, leaving only brown in their place.
At first, she fears she has woken too soon. They are at the cusp of winter, surely – even Tamber is showing half a coat of his winter fur, still growing in. But the slight stirring of her long-dormant power tells her this is not so. The season of her reign is fast approaching on the heels of Autumn, and Winter is nowhere to be seen.
With frustration comes the knowledge that she cannot step outside and go in search of the cold. Not yet. She has just woken and knows she is too weak to leave her home. She’d learnt that lesson the hard way last time. Instead, she is forced to wait. She paces her castle day and night. At every window she stops and looks out, hoping for a glimpse of the snow she has come to love, but to no avail.
As soon as she has the strength, she leaves her castle and steps into the world that should be white but is now red and gold. She stumbles through the forest over exposed roots and tears her cloak on thick thorns in the undergrowth. Leaves crunch underfoot. The sound is an abhorrence. She fears she is causing them pain. When she reaches the castle of Winter she enters without a thought and calls for him through his thawing halls. The howls of wolves respond, but none have the voice of the great Erebus, always at his master’s side.
Despair threatens to break her apart. She flees the castle and walks the woods until her feet hurt and her limbs are weary. She tries to find her way home, but the dark of night is coming, and the familiar paths are easy to miss when they are not covered with snow or cloaked in green.
In the foothills of a mountain that is not her own, Autumn finds her.
His hair is a fire of red upon his head. His eyes are molten gold and death coats his fingers in ash. A crown of twisted hazel and dead leaves rests in his hair. A fox with yellow eyes sits at his heels.
Always has she feared Autumn, her opposite, bringer of decay. Now that fear is overwhelmed by despair. She begs him for news, for what has happened to Winter. He bows his head, whispers, Dead.
Autumn clears a path through the fallen leaves with a sweep of his hand. She follows it. Fresh leaves fall around her, a false snow of reds and browns. When she reaches the evergreens, mushrooms spring up along the route in place of leaves and soon she is back at the door to her castle.
She huddles in a corner of her library. The spines of books press against her back. She holds Tamber in her arms, buries her face in his warm fur, and weeps. The jackalope noses her hair. He tries to bring comfort even as he holds back the shakes that threaten to overwhelm his small body. Fear is thick in the air, hand in hand with grief.
She had not known it was possible for a god to die. She wonders how it happened and clutches Tamber closer for fear that she too may slip away into the permanent dark. She and her fellows have walked the valley round for a long as she can remember. With Winter gone, how with they keep the world in balance?
The loss of a god is felt from the peaks of the mountains to the forests at their ankles, from the meadows to the fallow fields and the grazing lands. Trees, who throughout the autumn had been shedding their red cloaks and preparing for their own dormancy, now feel the return of warmth in the air and find themselves without the strength to grow new leaves.
The bears and all the other sleepers of the cold months roll over in their dens and hideaways, unable to find rest in the heat. Most have all but lost their summer coats in favour of thicker fur and now begin to swelter as the springtime progresses. Those who have built up fat stores work to shed them quickly. The lambs do not come in the spring, but in the summer, and it is a while before one does arrive in the right season.
The villagers rejoice at the absence of Winter. They celebrate his death, the lack of the penetrating cold and the long months of rationing out their autumn harvests. When Spring finds Summer waking and tells her Winter is dead, the first conversation the pair have ever shared, Summer’s response is one of joy. How could she mourn the loss of her opposite? The man who froze the world she wants to brighten and warm. She is glad he is gone.
Spring struggles. She tries to coax new life into the world, but her green fingers bear no fruit. The seeds she buries in the ground lack the nutrients to grow strong and those that break the soil cannot push through the carpet of rotting leaves. They suffocate.
The trees fare no better, weak from lack of their long, cold sleep. The rest the world enjoys in winter has not been had. The land is tilled over and over, and it is tired. Spring, with all her powers, cannot keep up. In the woods, the animals stumble on quivering legs. They greet her as a friend, but she sees the question always in their eyes, Where is Winter?
Dead, she tells them. Dead, she cries. With every three-season year that passes, the fear grows. Summer’s joy and Autumn’s apathy turn to concern. Every time Spring wakes, she knows without looking, feeling it in her bones, that Winter has not returned, and yet still she turns to the window in the hope that snow may be ready to greet her instead of more decaying leaves.
It never does. The world stays dead.
Continued in Part 8