Andarin: The Mountains: breathe ; II

It is winter, and with it goes the blame; the wind is studded with flurries of snowflakes, ice-water suspended like dust, and it whips jaggedly and jadedly against the smooth planes of Astarte’s face, broken by the occasional welts of tree-scratches and dry skin. She does not thrive in the cold, though against it she looks aflame; her Earth is saturated and frozen, slumbering beneath a thick and heavy layer of ice and snow, and she feels this suffocation (and the delirious haze that came from her trees – cold and motionless in their aestivation, like death) as a miasma, grasping from the permafrost to enslave her own exhaustion. The wind wakes her, stinging her eyes and tangling into her half-frozen cinnamon mane, and she walks into it willingly, even as it etches into those scratches and the tiny lines that crease her eyes, towards some unknown end – though she knows, as she goes, where her weary legs wend.

It has been a long time since she came here, this secret copse hidden behind dead trees and the scattered, non-descript granite boulders that defined the cresting slopes of Andarin, rising precipitously from the lush valley below; she thinks it ironic that the mountain is dying, crumbling further each winter as rain seeps into the cracks of the rocks and freezes, breaking them open as the gradual hammer-blow of time and geology – ironic indeed, as this cemetery of shed rock served too as a grave for a mountain of Andarin, buried here within a tomb of earth and stone by the power that brimmed in Astarte’s own hooves, that summer years ago.

The wind dies as she breaches the fortress of trees, sliding between two withered trunks and sighing as the cracking back scratches at her skin, copper-red and striped with Ixtab’s spirit; she remembers him in the movement of the soil as she had buried him, the cracked tree roots curling to weave and bind around his body, a living shroud to his death. Kale, she thinks, at length as she leans against a solid, leafless slumbering oak, gathering whatever living warmth radiating from its trunk and suffusing it into her skin; she can almost feel him still here, her friend, his earth throbbing in time with hers as if he were still here, alive, breathing and smiling and touching her mane. It was almost – almost, she thinks, as if he were here, for she truly can feel a presence brimming here, real and warm in the biting wind, hidden from her in the howling and the snow; she hesitates, then, feeling everything and nothing in the cacophony of the turbulent wind and the deafening silence around her, the stillness of trees swaying and snow spraying skyward. “Kale?” she whispers, to a shadow and a ghost, as she steps forward into the wind, and to the curtain of trees that ring the space behind Kale’s icy tomb, sliding once more between beech and spruce and sprawling oak, bare now in the grip of winter.

Beyond, there is a shape curled in the snow; a noise throbs within her head, pounding and almost enraged, and the frozen earth cracks with every step beneath her hooves with the power of it – a power not hers alone. The shape, a mare, as white as the snow and hidden beneath it, shifts slightly with breath and awareness – and flashes of memory, of a dream almost forgotten, hurtle and spin within the oracle’s head without her will or understanding: I know that face, she whispers to herself, wonderingly, though she does not yet believe the truth before her own eyes. Silently, she goes to the mare - not a stranger, never a stranger - with eyes blazing green from shock, and confusion, and wonder, her (their) earth strumming taut and tense like thunder between them.

“Lórien?” she says, her voice a soft sigh against the wind, and where the mare - her mother had not heard her footsteps crunched against the powder-snow, she switches her shapely ears at the sound of Astarte’s stunned voice, and the lyrical sound of her name. She comes awake, and lifts her head into the wind, and as it sweeps her silver mane fully away from her lovely face does Astarte gasp once more, and falter, and fall to her knees.

“Daughter…!” Lórien’s own voice is just as startled, but edged with dismay, and between them the rising tide of their earth drives the cold away, the last flakes of snow swept into the wind as the orb of their power shrouds between them, and around them, and away from them, arcing like a sphere into the earth about Kale’s vaunted grave.