Yuletide: Night Two
When the next evening arrived, sooner than the previous one
as winter solstice approached, the dragon settled in with his audience to
continue his tale. The wind had spent
the day howling like a demon and ice fringed all the eaves and branches outside
as if they were growing fangs to defend themselves against the cold. Frost nipped the air and water froze before
it could leave the spout out in the open air.
Inside it was warm but the cold made itself known crackling at the
windows. As the dragon opened his great
maw to speak the wind shushed and the cold grew still as it pressed against the
windows, they all knew the next Plane and gloried in its telling. “Faraway another birth stirred a Plane, one
which mirrored the Fire Plane, an opposite that burns with absence that seems
ever present, the Ice Plane. A plane of
cold and water. Cold so deep that rare
was the water molecule that wasn’t bound in crystalline form. As rare as the creature born upon that night…”
The Ice Plane
Where cold is more than absence
Where heat is a precious curiosity
Where water is locked in molecular bonds
No mortal dares to break
Is the Ice Plane.
Cold that steals breath and chills bones
Cold that braces and awakens
Cold that wraps around you
Promising life that gleams
Such is glory.
Ice spread across the land in crackling sheets
Ice forming jagged peaks so stark, so striking
Ice towering bergs of turquoise
Glaciers of might and age
Ancient conqueror.
Troth this might, this power, this magnificence
Troth the gleaming purity
Troth too the whimsy of frost
The beauty in a snowflake
The crocus in the snow.
The black dragon paused letting the listeners unwind from
the glory of ice to the simple beauty of a crocus. Quietly he stoked the fire. The wind rustled at the window and he picked
up the telling.
The wind howls across vast planes
Building power
Gathering shards of ice
Blasting stone into forms of its own making,
The wind swirls curiously
Twirling snowflakes through the air
Wafting the fragrance of flowers
Tucked in solid nooks of stone
Snowdrops and crocuses
Ice lilies with such delicate blue veins
On such, white, white, petals.
The frost plays wherever it pleases
Etching feathers and ferns
Where few warm-blooded creatures ever venture,
On sheets of pure ice
On boulders of black basalt
On flower petals,
Wrapping vines around stalagmites
Stalactites and icicles,
Etching flourishes on dragon scales
Embellishing the horns
Of fierce, shaggy, unicorns.
The Ice Plane is of cold
Of frozen water, and
Of magic.
The frost forms true ferns, ice ferns
Their plumes growing in clusters
Where the wind’s tread is soft,
And more than feathers
Born of frost are birds
Frost phoenixes, ice gryphons
Little white wrens and translucent nightingales
Snowy owls whose feathers melt
When bereft of their creator’s magic.
It was a night when the wind howled
Even in the ice caves deep in the mountain valley
A night when icicles rose like stalagmites
From the cavern floor
Where two great ice lizards proudly looked on
As their egg rocked on the floor,
At first it was a gentle rocking
A faint tapping from within
As if a baby narwhal was testing ice for flaws
Even as the parents smiled in their musings
With a great crack that rang across the Ice Plane
As if the ice itself had broken
The egg split in twain,
There, in the middle of the shell fragments
Sat a white gleaming lizard
As if he’d never stirred a paw to break out
For a moment his parents thought
But it couldn’t be could it?
That they saw a pair of shimmering wings
As if their baby had broken out of the shell
With a single reach towards the sky
But the moment passed.
For many years thereafter
The family roamed the Ice Plane
The baby lizard growing up
Content in the knowledge
His parents proffered for his eager education
And for a time there was no sign of that shimmer
That translucent glimmer
Of wings.
But sometimes, when the wind was strong
He would look to the sky
As if dreaming
That the wind would snatch him away,
Or as if he had only to stretch
And his own wings
Would gift him with the sky.
For a long moment there was silence, as if the cold and the
wind had coiled around the building like a dragon themselves, smug from hearing
their own tale. Inside the listeners
pondered the mystery of shimmering wings and looked at the windows etched in
frost. The dragon hummed low in his
throat and they drew their attention back to the storyteller. “For a long time the young lizard was content
exploring the Ice Plane with his parents, content with learning all they had to
teach about their glorious world of ice and cold. But a mind that thirsts for knowledge will
soon drink dry the wells of home and so too it was with this one. To the Ice Plane he was born but he would not
stay. And so in due time, undue time as
far as his parents were concerned, he left.
Whereto I shall leave for another night.” His audience grumbled and applauded and
returned to their own lives with shining eyes.
The old black dragon slid into the night and gazed up at the stars. The cold caressed his scales and the wind
howled an accolade.
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