9th Day of Yuletide

The stars were bright and the night was cold but thanks to the encouragement of the phoenix the fire was warm.  Not that many of those around it strictly speaking needed it but it was pleasant all the same.  The world held still and shadows seemed to gather in the outskirts of the firelight.  Jarel Frost picked up a translucent horn made of ice with opaque swirls that formed unrecognizable designs and the whole thing glowed in the firelight as if it was not quite of the world.  He blew a long note that carried across the tundra with the strength of a glacier and the beauty of a snowflake.  Startling his audience he then played a series of short notes that seemed to tinkle as if starlight had been given sound and he cast forth the melody into the night in invitation.  “Every journey must end somewhere and it was no different for our travelers than any other, though if asked they might have said that their journey ended sooner than they expected, much sooner.”

The Source of the Voice

When the stunted Northern forest

Had dwindled to a stripe of green

When the winds that whirled around them

Blew unhindered across the tundra

The clouds departed.

With the clouds clearing away to the horizon

The stars shone clearly upon them

A crescent moon leaving the stars

To shine supreme

With cold, clear, light,

Granting the travelers their very first

Look at each other

By the dim crystalline starlight

They turned their gazes unerringly

Towards each other,

Jarel Frost looked upon the very vision

Of a Winter Queen

She was tall and pale

With sharp yet dainty features

In a dress of sweeping fur-trimmed white,

Yet he could not see her as cold and distant

After all the hours they had talked

He looked closer at her face in the starlight

Seeing faint traces of weariness

In the shadows around her eyes,

Seeing wonder soften her features

As she gazed from him to the stars

Loneliness in the stiffness of her spine

And somehow traces of a delicate beauty

More fitting a flower than a snowflake,

The Winter Queen looked upon a bard

His features were sharp and pale as ice

Yet softened with humanity

His long sweep of ice-white hair

Was graced with a streak of mortal black,

Caught between mortality and immortality

An uneasy place to be as well she knew

She saw the loneliness that haunted his eyes

The wariness behind his front of cheer

And the soft smile as he looked back at her,

Starlight borne revelations were not to cease

From the shadow cast by a snowdrift

Cut crisply by the cool light

Came the haunting melody

Of the Voice.