10th Day of Yuletide

The shadows were thicker about the gathering this time, whispering in the space between flickers of firelight.  The revelers eyed them curiously but they slid aside upon approach and shrugging their observers turned back to the celebration.  This time the bard sat before a strange instrument with many strings supported by intricately carved bridges over a broad wooden base that rested on the ground.  Ivory picks were attached to his fingers extended like claws of frosted ice.  His  audience hushed curiously.  At first he picked his notes out one by one as if they were drops of water in a pool deep in the ice caverns.   Then the notes came faster each separate and discrete and yet merging into a shifting wild journey that carried the listeners back to another time.  He slowed still playing softly in the background as he spoke.  “At last they had reached the Voice.  The source of the song.  Now one question arose above all the others.  What was the Voice?”

The Form of the Voice

The melancholy tune arose from the shadows

Leaving its progenitor in obscurity

Hidden from the brilliant starlight

By the deep shadow of a snowdrift

In solemn solitude.

Jarel Frost and the Winter Queen approached

Softly, respectfully, to stand at the edge of the shadow

Looking in to a mystery

As the song surrounded them

Wrapping them in the darkness of emotion,

Even confronted with this elusive mystery

Jarel Frost could not resist the lure

Of such heartbreakingly beautiful music

And he lifted his voice to the stars

Seeking answers with his voice,

While the Winter Queen took a step into darkness

Her skirt hem disappearing into shadow

Holding her hands out in a plea of peace

Asking without asking

For she could not disturb the music,

For the first time Jarel Frost

Abandoned all pretense of musical support

Diving into a duet

Trying to understand

The nature of his singing partner,

Slowly as musical styles merged

Meaning came into the air around them

Seeping in to their minds

Without quite knowing how

Shadowy and uncertain,

The sense that the Voice had come

From far, far, away

And that it no longer knew where

That is was lost here

Far from anything it could call home,

That it was lonely

For it had no one to call friend

That the beings it had found

Resonated in alien ways

It could not comprehend,

Swaying in time to the gentle beat

The Winter Queen stepped fully into shadow

And the Voice, in surprise

Stepped back into the light

The full light of the stars,

It was an amorphous shadow

For even as they watched

The Winter Queen having retreated

Back by Jarel Frost’s side

It changed,

The Voice sang unhindered but its form

Its form morphed first into

The caricature of a great black wolf

Then a gaunt bear

But it couldn’t hold the forms here or there,

From fox to owl to lemming it flickered

To a flock of geese scattered and frazzled

Stunned in the starlight

It morphed finally into a pitch black dragon

Before slipping back into the shadow,

Where it huddled against the snow drift

Concealed once more in darkness

Where no light existed to press upon it

The insistence of a physical form

Leaving it once more solely to sound,

Jarel Frost and the Winter Queen stared in astonishment

As they realized the truth of this poor being’s fate

It was trapped in this shadow for elsewise

It would be forced into a foreign existence

So foreign that chaos would destroy it.