Chapter 4 - Ice

The muted crunch of boot on snow filled Hestia’s ears. She looked back to the direction she had come from, seeing an unending trail of ovals that the silently falling snow was slowly obliterating. Her breath steamed as her eyes surveilled the white expanse.

How could snow be white? Her mind seemed to recoil from that question. It was always yellow when it fell, although from the Heights she had never walked in its frozen embrace as she was doing now. Other questions teased at her mind. If she had never walked in snow, how could she know what the sound of snow compacting under her foot was like? If she had never been allowed to wander outside of the strictly controlled environment that was her father’s home-block, how could she know what being cold was like? She hastily shut out those thoughts. That way led to madness. She was dreaming, she decided, and resumed walking in the direction she had been heading before.

A blanket of white covered the ground all around her. The snow coruscated about, as white as any hospital wall, but impossibly cold . . . impossibly real. Something had called out to her this evening, as she dreamed. Something with a question or an enigma of its own creation, she wasn’t sure. She scanned the horizon, her eyes squinting against the moonlit surface that gleamed so brightly. Another conundrum came to the fore. Since her life had been led totally isolated from the outside, how did she know what moonlight was?

A flash of colour caught her eye. Immediately ensnared by its claret light, her feet found their own steps over the expanse towards it. The solitary feeling, walking alone across a field of ice, seemed to press in on Hestia as she approached the area where she had seen the light. Her breath hissed as she trudged onwards, pulling a searing cold into her lungs which stole away the very thought of curiosity. In ears blasted pink by the cold, her heartbeat drummed a violent, yet compulsive sound in the silence of this domain.

There! The ruddy light flashed again. A slight alteration of her path brought her in a direct line towards the light. Her eyes, stinging from the cold, locked to the point where she’d seen the light as she continued walking.

Thump, thump. Thump, thump. Her heart sounded louder, now.

In the distance, the light was pulsing more regularly, beating in time with the life-giving movement of her heart. But something disturbed her, watching that light. It had grown in size far more quickly than she expected, given that she was walking towards it. Pausing to clasp herself for a minute, hoping to force some warmth into her frigid body, she watched.

Thump, thump. Thump, thump. Her heart called out to the sanguine, guiding light.

She started to feel nervous, now that she realised that her heartbeat was exactly in time with the throbbing vision she was witnessing. She became aware that the light itself, that glow of rubicund hope, hadn’t grown, but that more light was seeping through the snow. It spread out from the centre, tendril-like, reaching directly for her. Veins, she thought, splayed out from the centre of a ruby towards the one that was called.

“Shurri” whispered the wind, “Shurri, you are needed. Now. Come to me. Find me. Heal me.”

Each word was weighed down by an immense sorrow that coursed through this spirit-like voice, yet Hestia knew it was herself that the voice called out to. She had only to touch the blood-red gem, inches away now, to take back memories that had been hidden. Her fingers numbed with the cold, she reached out, grasping the gem. She gasped as a rainbow of colour cascaded over her hand, warming her thoroughly from within. She looked up into dark eyes and answers were hers.

In an instant, gone were the questions of how this impossible place existed outside of recognisable physical limitations. There were no more questions of ‘how’, only the need for the answers of eternity. There, on the plain of ice, she knelt to the one being in this world that she owed fealty to.

“Mistress, I will come.”