Ice: Chapter 1

Well, I've decided go ahead and start up with the writing-posting thing again... a friend of mine [pikakaru.blogspot.com] reminded me of something I wrote 2 yrs ago... I read it over again and liked it, so here's Ch. 1 of an epic tale you will get to read chapter by chapter on my blog. Aren't you excited? :p

BTW... this chapter copyright John Pate 2002 and all other chapters copyright John Pate 2004

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"You must avoid him," she says with a coarse, mocking cough, "for he does not hate of flame but of ice." The cooking-fire flickers demons on the shadowed, leering trees. "He--" Her coughing fit spasms through the abandoned winter air. "He does not burn, he... solidifies, crystallizes; he turns your own organs into agents against you, your very heart becomes a frozen, delving shuriken, sinking and tearing..." she sits, still and hunched over the simmering kettle. Minutes pass, bewildered and humming; words dare not tread in this silence for a naïve fear of rousing some new or ancient Presence, surreal to even the most--

"But that is the far lesser evil he looks to wreak," she starts, lidless and empty-white eyes now focused, brow tensed in serene agitation. "Pain subsides, and the wounds can be healed by most any grammarie," she slits a strip of bark from a nearby banzai sapling and spits on it, rubbing it artfully with strangely steady fingers for one so old and haggard. After a very few deft seconds, she presents the bark for display: "'twill remedy any physical ailment with the proper meditations." She draws the fire near nearer her and whispers, blank eyes somehow passionate in her wild brand of sure control.

"'but that's not all he can do!" Flecks of spit long gone stale in that tired, neglected mouth fly from her cracked and bleeding lips as she takes a step back. "His second curse has seized even him!" She is now livid in her primal and vocal expression; the fire flares more violently, the smoke screening her yet motionless frame and somehow forming a sort of blighted purgatorial halo. "He scars the mind, frozen at his stroke, narrow as a ravine in a glacier; nothing strange and new retained, nothing old and weary released. Those soothed and struck alike are irretrievably frozen in their progress, orphaned by their souls, their selves; such abandonment is worse than the plight of the vein-thieves of the far south." The fire has gone out. The old, weathered woman stares for a second, face blanched filmy-grey in the lingering smoke; a blinding flash without any light; the copse now stands empty of her.

It begins to hail.