4th Day of Yuletide

The prevalent sounds about the gathering were the shush of snow falling and the crackle of the fire rising.  A kitsune jumped on a particularly fat snow flake and then looked up shaking snow off his white face disgruntledly.  The black ravens began to turn white while the white ravens ruffled their feathers smugly.  The bard picked up a goat horn and blew a long note out across the tundra.  Drawing breathe he cast a sequence of faster and faster notes into the air and the snow seemed to pick up its pace as it fell, until he stopped, and all the world went still.  “For all that our travelers were closer than many of the others that had resonated with the Voice’s song they still had a long, long, way to go.”

Traveling Alone

Snow lay in monumental drifts throughout the forest

Shaping the world with its own shifting topography

Misleading crusts that dumped the unwary

Into piles of powder as deep as themselves

Or sticky, pokey, tree wells,

The wary, the clever, and the cursed or blessed

Were gifted to walk the surface

Never to fall in

They strode across the crest of the drifts

And down into the vales of white,

Jarel Frost whistled as he walked

And all the little songbirds

That dared the northern winter

Came flitting through the trees

Adding their high voices to his song,

The Winter Queen glided

Her skirts erasing her faint footmarks

The wind dusting snow across her trail

As she traversed a different stretch of forest

In silence,

For Jarel the birds were a fleeting joy

A brief brightness in his solitude

He conjured up his pipes

And played them a merry tune

Quickening their foraging,

For the Winter Queen it was a peaceful time

Twitter birds avoided her, yes, such was the season

But there were no humans to plague her with emotions

A graceful lynx passed by at a distance

As silent as she,

When the birds had left for better foraging

When the lynx was no more than a memory in the snow

The hollows of solitude were empty once more

And the memory of music drove them mercilessly

Deeper into the winter night,

As the moon waxed from new dark to a bright first quarter

The travelers continued along parallel paths

That seemed to promise to stretch into infinity

In the endless dark of a soul chilling winter

Without ever meeting.