A Night of Color and Light

 The golden gibbous moon

Shone benevolently upon the night

Surrounded by the silver stars and planets

Shining bright

Against their backdrop of dusty blue midnight

Casting down their light

To catch on the surface of the waves.

The waves in turn

Where they rolled upon the shore

Rippled with seafire

A line of light upon the sand

And twinkled with phosphorescent sparks

Like stars a blink within the sea.

And I a poet in my kayak

Set forth within that night of light

The golden moon

The silver stars

The green touched blue

Of the seafire

Surrounding me in a sphere

Of color and light.

The phosphorescence lit in clouds

About my paddle

As it dove into the water

Rippled like fire in my bow wake

Glowed against my companion’s hull

As if her kayak was lit from within

And not without.

When I struck the surface of the sea

In a skimming blow with my paddle

The light was such it nearly hurt my eyes

The blaze of my paddle blow

The seafire scattered in the air

And ignited as the water rained down.

A handful of water scattered

Fell like a meteor shower

Upon the sea

Discrete drops of light.

I held the water cupped within my hand

And saw nothing but cold, clear, water

But when I sloshed it

Light bloomed

And I held the seafire in my hand

As it spilled back into the sea.

My fingers dancing in the water

Ignited clouds of phosphorescence

As if my idle orchestration

Brought into being, light.

Never before have I seen

Such glorious phosphorescence

Igniting in blazing clouds

Shining bright even beneath the gaze

Of a brilliant gibbous moon

Never before have I seen such color

Within the night

As I did beneath the golden gibbous moon

Whilst delighting in the green touched blue

Of the seafire that bloomed that night.

12th Day of Yuletide

The air was clear and cold, the sky a glitter with stars, and dancing across this shining backdrop the Northern Lights filled the world with mystical color.  The fire was quiet but merry and eyes turned to the sky-fire more often than the campfire.  The white woman stood side by side with the bard and together they faced the gathering.  He spoke as story-teller one last time.  “You have heard now the story of our meeting.  How we were brought together out of loneliness by the Voice from the Space Between Stars.  We stand now before you to share the promises we have hence made to each other.”  Aina the Winter Queen and Jarel Frost stood hand in hand before a humble fire and shared their vows with loved ones beneath a sky filled with winter light.  A Voice on the ground whispered to its brethren in the sky.

Vows of Winter Hearts

The Winter Queen cold and forsaken

Made herself known as Aina

A once mortal girl

Who had long tread the winter road

Alone,

Jarel Frost cold and proud

Remembered his mortal roots

From a time before

The long winter night

Had numbed his soul,

I, a Voice from the Space Between Stars

Was lost and alone

Gone mad in this strange plane

Somehow in my madness my song

Found hearts who resonated,

It was these twain who found me

Who, through their own emotions

Reminded me of my lost life

And though I dare not linger

I am proud to see them now,

No longer would any of us resonate

With that song I sang

So haunted and heartbroken

For it sent me home

And it brought them to each other,

Now they stand before us

In this the longest night

Sharing their love

With we who care

No longer alone.

“I vow to be your cold in the Spring,

To keep your memories in Summer,

To share your warmth in Autumn,

To be your song in Winter, my love.”

So swore Jarel Frost.

“I vow to be your anchor in Spring

To cherish our time in Summer

To return to your warmth in Autumn,

To be your song in Winter, my love.”

So swore Aina, Winter’s Queen.

They kissed before the gathering

As sparks spiraled up from the fire to the sky

Where the Northern Lights undulated ebulliently

Beyond which lies my home where I will return

To sing to them from the Space Between Stars.

11th Day of Yuletide

By now those gathered had become accustomed to the thick fringe of shadow at the border where firelight met night.  It seemed that all the listeners were crowding in, no longer willing to listen from afar.  The bard had a similar instrument before him as the night before only this one had a base and bridge of ice and was strung with starlight.  Each note rang like a shard of ice or the twinkle of a star as he played.  “Now that Jarel Frost and the Winter Queen had seen the Voice it was all the more mysterious, for neither had seen its like before.  What manner of being was it to lack a form of its own yet be forced into it upon exposure to light?”

Freeing the Voice

Jarel Frost sought understanding through their song

He sang a winding duet seeking to mirror the Voice

To demonstrate empathy

He sang of loneliness and desolation

Of heartbreak and sorrow and solitude,

The Voice listened in turn but the meaning

Of its own understanding

Became no clearer, until at last

The Winter Queen broke through her self restraint

And sang,

Her voice rose like snowflakes in a gale

Beautiful and powerful and turbulent

Joining with the smooth shining splendor

Of Jarel Frost

And the ringing purity of the Voice,

The Winter Queen and Jarel Frost sang

Of the utter desolation of solitude

Of the heartbreak of loved ones lost

To space and time

And the Voice shivered,

Jarel Frost fell back to a harmony

The Winter Queen rose up like a storm

Singing with all the despair of centuries

Of being trapped by belief and fate

Confined to walk the snow laden cold,

For no more could she run through fields of flowers

No more to nap in the summer sun

She was confined to the realms of Winter

Of the cold and dark alone

Captive to belief,

They believed she was the Queen of Winter

And so she had but to step upon

The sun-warmed grass so green

To disappear in a puff of steam

Wiped from existence,

For a season, gone for the summer

Only to return with the first snow

Year after year, unless

She stayed apart for summer months

Alone in the eternally frozen North,

She conveyed the terror and desperation

The numbing loneliness

Of a trapped existence

In the cold and dark

And the Voice cracked once,

Now she faded back to a low harmony

Jarel Frost rose back to sing his piece

Turning away from the dark themes

He remembered brighter days

And sang of freedom,

Of his innocent youth

When he could run in winter

Across the churning ocean

Ice under his every footstep

His father the North Wind at hand,

Of the time when his grief for his mother had passed

When he roamed the vast North alone

Heartbroken, with nothing to anchor him

Adrift like a piece of down

Not even constrained to his father’s domain,

Of long centuries as a wandering bard

Free to meander through forest

And over tundra’s wild and free

With no need to fear storm or frost

For they were his own,

Now the Voice cracked again

And the meaning of its song

Took up a new turn

As it remembered

A life it had forgotten,

Before the mind-breaking isolation

Before it was trapped in this strange place

Full of frozen water and physical constraints

It had roamed the universe wild and free

It had known, what it couldn’t remember,

Things blurred again and the Voice shook

The tundra shivered and rolled

Jarel Frost stopped singing took the Winter Queen’s hand

She met his eyes and spoke:

“My name was Aina.”

He smiled and bowed over her hand

“It is a pleasure to know you Aina.

My name is Jarel.

May I have this dance?”

Aina looked around in astonishment and then smiled,

“You most certainly may.”

The Voice howled as they danced

Over the tumultuous tundra

As all their conversations coalesced about them

Leaving a simple realization,

That they were no longer alone

And need never be again

A conclusion that brought with it

The memory of a half-forgotten emotion

That flared now between them,

Brighter and with more potential

Than they had ever known before

Bringing with it warmth

Stronger than ever it had been

In their bygone mortal days,

And as the heat rose between them

The Voice grew quiet as it listened to their hearts

Remembering that which had been driven from its mind

By the madness of this strange world

Recognizing the song in their hearts, as love.

Wrapped up in each other Jarel and Aina

Barely realized that the world had settled back into stillness

Until the whole world held its breath

As the Voice sang again

Filling the world with bright piercing joy,

The Voice spun a melody of starlight and love

And before their glowing eyes

A dark comet shot up from the shadow

Streaking for the sky

Into the space between the stars.

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.

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.

8th Day of Yuletide

The clouds had retreated to the horizon leaving the stars to twinkle down.  A chill fell across the land as the vast ocean of space stole away the Earth’s heat but the gathering around the fire cared not.  Footprints radiated in towards the gathering and milled in circles around it, some tracking from a long way off and some appearing from thin air.  A great snowy owl, late to the party, flew over and noticed two such sets of footprints that began in an expanse of clear snow and continued on side by side.  They were soft prints such as those made by the reindeer herders’ boots but lighter as if the wearers weighed less than they aught or hadn’t quite settled down to earth.  He followed them all the way over the fire were the bard was laughing with a woman dressed all in white and on their feet were matching boots of white reindeer hide.  The bard picked up a bodhran with an intricate snowflake designed that twisted as the viewer watched revealing foxes and owls and reindeer cavorting.  He beat out a steady traveling beat and then shifted into a more frenetic rhythm with the odd skipped beat before returning to a steady pace.  “The two climbed up out of the tunnel into the open air once more but still in darkness.  The storm had left behind its thick, looming, clouds.”

Traveling Together

Side by side in the Northern dark

Of a winter long and cold

The travelers tread on the crusts of snow

Out from the forests sheltering embrace

Out to the tundra’s vast plain.

As they journeyed by instinct and memory

Sightless, they filled the air with sound

Speaking of the lives that had brought them here

Cautioning wearing away to leave truth

To sidle out into the open air.

It was in this peculiar lightless world

Made of the snow beneath their feet

The taste of ice in the air

The sound of each other

That they heard the Voice again,

It pierced the darkness, weaving sorrow

As it haunted the long cold night

Winding about them with bittersweet beauty

With nothing to allay it

It passed them by unknowing,

Even as the Winter Queen froze in silence

Her breath shallow and soundless

Jarel Frost inhaled the icy air

Taking his element into his lungs as he listened

And sang,

At first it was a simple harmony

Bracing the Voice with notes

Drawn from his own loneliness and heartache

And as his voice filled her ears

The Winter Queen wept,

But then he changed his tune

Amid the heartache and sorrow he sang

We are coming

You are not alone

But if he was heard there was no sign,

The Voice continued to pass them by

And as it faded once more into darkness

The travelers spun

Needles in their own magnetic field

Turning towards the pole of heartache.

7th Day of Yuletide

The snow clouds were heavy and low closing the tundra in on itself as cozily as a vast expanse of gently rolling land can be.  Surrounded by drifts of snow the gathering was snug and cheery about their fire as fat warm snowflakes fell from the sky.  The children of a snow maiden and a fox shifter pounced on the falling flakes and rolled down the snow banks upon landing, they hadn’t quite figured out how to plan for after they jumped.  Their parents smiled at them indulgently.  The woman in white caught one kit before she could roll too close to the fire and put her back on her feet smiling.  The kit bowed in cheery gratitude, nearly tumbling over again, and went off to join her brother in pouncing on their father’s tail.  The bard watched the white woman’s smile as it nearly concealed her wistfulness and hid a slightly haunted look of his own by tuning his lute.  Settling in to his snowy seat by the fire he picked out a merry traveling tune on his lute, a repetitious piece that could wind over hill and over ice floe, if he let it.  “As all storms will this one came to pass and the travelers were faced with a decision.  A decision on which rested more than they could know.”

The Decision of a Beginning

The storm reveled in the wild expanse

Of the North with its stunted trees and sprawling tundra

But eventually, with a great clap of thunder

The storm gave a great yawn

And dwindled away.

Slowly the quiet percolated down

Through ice and snow and stone

To the two travelers in the cavern

Conversing in the dark

As time wound on,

They came to realize the existence

Of a new absence

The absence of the storm

And silence fell between them

The time had come to decide,

For each knew the other

Was on the same quest as their self

In search of the voice

That haunted them still

With melancholy that sang in the heart,

Jarel Frost broke the ice with cautious good cheer

“It was a pleasure meeting you.

Now that the storm has passed I will be continuing on.”

“Likewise.”  The Winter Queen replied

“And I too shall resume my query.”

She hesitated, but Jarel did not

He quite liked the sound of her

And, she kept the loneliness at bay

“It would seem dear Winter Queen,

That we are going the same way.”

She started, it had been a long time

Since any had spoken so affectionately

She hesitated to involve herself

But wasn’t that exactly what she sought

A kindred spirit?  And here one was.

“So, it would.  But the way North is both broad

And quite narrow.”

“Shall we take the narrow way?”  He proposed

“I should like that.”

She replied cautiously,

“Then lead on, I believe your entrance

Will make a better exit than mine.”

Jarel Frost gestured grandly

Unseen in the dark

The Winter Queen retraced her steps

Opening the tunnel before them,

Following the snow soft sound

Of her footsteps transitioning from stone to snow

Jarel Frost followed her

Up through a tunnel of delightful cold

Trailing his fingers along the wall of crystalline ice.