The Tale of the Ice Basilisk’s Heart
Yuletide: Night One
Fire crackled in the hearth, warm golds and reds, sending
shadows dancing about the room.
Salamanders giggled in the ashes and a black dragon curled sinuously
before the hearth raising his great head to command the silence of his
audience. They stilled where they had
settled. Humans and elves cuddled in on
couches and cushy chairs or sprawled among their friends on the floor. Equine forms kneeled gracefully on warm
rugs. Other dragons melded with the
shadows in the room’s margins. Avians
perched here and there, a raven on the bookshelf, a phoenix on a dragon’s
shoulder, an owl on the back of an armchair.
Felines great and small lounged wherever they pleased be it the back of
a couch, an elf’s lap, or the back of a dragon.
The wind outside paused its roaring as if the winter’s night too
listened. “I shall begin the tale now of
twelve of the Planes as traversed by two beings opposite in form but not in
troth. The tale of the Ice Basilisk’s
Heart. It begins with fire for hearts
are not possessed by one being alone and to understand this tale we must first
understand the Fire Plane…”
The Fire Plane
Merrily crackle reds and golds
Dancing flames like marigolds
Caught in the eternal breeze
That fans the flames
Of the Fire Plane.
White is the flame that sears the eyes
Brightest of blazes the colors canceled
By perfect balance
The heat of stars
Pure, clear, bright.
Sly the hiss of purples and blues
Hotter, deadlier, slyer they burn
Dragons amongst the salamanders
Their intensity slips them
To the edge of vision.
The horizon is a mirage an endless heatwave
The ground is minerals hot and dry
Shifting sands in rolling dunes
Sharp stones dark and wicked
The legacy of lava.
Fire as stone molten burning
Overwhelming the land in relentless floods
Fountaining up into the sky
Glorious red arcs and sparks
The blood of the Earth.
Amid this conflagration
This celebration of heat
Revels of untamed elemental joy
Are gentler expressions of fire
Delicate workings
Sunnier lands where good cheer holds peace.
Bronze trees rise about oases
Water shimmering gold from flame
Curling crimson petals
Spiral on updrafts
Perfuming the air
Sweetness to match the smoke,
Hardy grasses cover fields in gold
Through which wildfires run gaily,
Sparkling in nooks and crannies
Or columns rising to the sky
Gems catch the light for their own,
Smoky blossoms open at night
Silhouetted against eternal fires,
Tiger lilies bloom in pockets of soil
Perched on stone cliffs
Of ancient lava falls.
Salamanders’s hissing laughs
Blend with the Autumn colored fires
In which they dwell,
Vermilion frogs with leopard spots
Born to fire and dry to the touch
Snatch lava drops from the air,
Graceful equines pirouette
Among curtains of flame
White on white,
Dragons fly their scales alight
Or dark and sleek as they dance
Twining with blazing infernos,
Above the rhythm of the hiss, the crackle, the roar
Through all the colors of the fire rainbow
A melody rises sweet and pure
Ringing with joy
A phoenix is born.
The visions lingered in the minds of audience and
storyteller as he waxed poetic and almost, at the edges of their minds, they
could feel the heat and smell the smoke from more than their hearth fire. The fire popped but no one stirred still
caught in the webs of fire. The dragon
paused letting his listeners find their way back into the room in which they
sat before continuing his story. “Fire
warms and burns and heartens and it was in the Fire Plane itself that the
phoenix Lyra was born. A phoenix who
would become known across Realms and Planes alike though to many her name is
lost. It is in her that we begin to
understand the Ice Basilisk’s Heart though she fledged in fire before the Ice
Basilisk was so much as a gleam of frost.
But the tale of his birth Plane is for another night.” So the dragon finished, and his bemused
audience applauded with great respect.
Even if he must leave things at the very beginning, and an unexpected
beginning at that, talk of the Fire Plane had warmed their hearts and visions
of flame kept them warm as the slept that cold winter’s night.
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