Flash iii: A Freezing Summer's Wind

A cloud passes in front of the moon. A shadow rears up behind Aurora. She lashes out, a fist thrown with weight behind it. She impacts hard against tree bark. There's nothing there. Jumping at literal shadows. Aurora sighs, and advances deeper into the spirit-haunted woods. Running through this domain, one can't say Sus made no attempt to trip her. Sus is these woods, and the roots beneath her feet had every intention of pulling her to the ground; the vines and branches clearly intended to slap out in front of her stride, and the only paths allowed to be worn in the underbrush were those that twisted like a maze. But having spent over ten years wandering these woods, she can weave through at a jogging pace. On and on she went through the dark of night. Far enough to be alone for a bit, to feel peace and solitude, to cool off from how hot she'd gotten. (Some would be afraid in these woods; of wolves and gemfiends and wild spirits; but Aurora had easily wrestled dogs and foxes, and she had the measure of Sus; she didn't trust them, but she trusted her safety in their woods.) When she finally slowed to a stop, it is not out of caution. No, it's still so hot. Sweat slicks her face like she's melting. She keeps moving, but it only gets worse. (The shadows look like visual snow.) Aurora knows the feel of Sus's woods, familiarity to the point of instinct. So she knows something is different. It's off, it's wrong. The paths are too straight, the trees too tall. Are those cypresses? Not willows or oaks. If she was being watched earlier, now she felt ten more eyes on her. The shadows are sharp. Were those bones? The moonlight --- the moon is brilliantly full --- filters down between the branches. Sometimes she blinks and the needles are gone, the boughs bare and every too-tall tree now skeletal and spirit-haunted. "Sus?" She's not sure if she speaks the words as a reproach, an invocation, or a quiet cry for help. There's no response of any sort. The wind blows locks of too-colorful hair in front of her face. Her long-sleeved coat is fluttering around her. It's a strong storm's wind, and it chills her. She doesn't shiver. Aurora isn't running anymore. Cautious steps forward, head swiveling and double checking every shadow around her. Those shadows shift when she steps near a tree's shade; they disappear when she gets near. "Who are you?" Aurora speaks, steadying her voice. There's a presence, sometimes felt in the twisting of a cypress's sharp leaves. Sometimes echoed in a fallen twig. Always distant, fragmentary indications, like a moon viewed from glinting dewdrops. A spirit. So close, so far away. Aurora grits her teeth. "Come out! I'm not afraid of you!" Her head is still swiveling around, gaze impatient for motion, true motion. The wind is knocking rocks and sticks around and making the tree limbs groan --- it meant there's so many distractions to look past. But if she saw something--- There! A hundred feet away! Eyeshine behind a dead tree leaning against its fellows. The body is long behind it, like it moved on four legs. But a glimpse is all she gets. There's a tremble in her legs. She would run, but she wasn't afraid. This spirit would show itself, and Aurora was going to punch it for scaring her like that. A tree moves. The eyeshine is piercing light out from two holes in its bark. Above, two boughs split and split again, a crown of dead fingers. After glimpsing for a second, Aurora breaks eye contact (there is a mind behind those eyes, she knows this in her bones). It's still there, she can feel it watching her. Yet it seems wise to drink no more than a moment's glimpse of that sight. Aurora's eyes stare at the ground. She crouches to pick up a rock. And then, eyes closed, hurls the rock to where she feels those eyes watching her. Wood cracks as if under strain from snow. Is that the sound of her hitting the mark, or the spirit making sparse? The skin-prickling stare is gone now. Aurora roots herself to the spot. She's not afraid. "Aurora?" The girl suddenly remembers the sound of her father's voice. "Aurora! Please come back here!" She runs. Not now, not when he wouldn't tell her anything. She wouldn't go back yet. Under the cold light of a full moon, Aurora never finds refugee of shadows to hide. The storm wind seems to blow boughs out of place as soon as she steps under them. The way even dark overhangs grew illuminated leaves her wondering if, somehow, the wind is blowing the moonlight itself. More than Aurora is running, tonight. She sees mice darting, foxes ignoring them to crawl into burrows, owls nestled still in the hollows of trees. Aurora still feels hot, a coal in a smith's forge, burning with the heat that fueled action, the sort of action Father has rules against. It's that heat which keeps her from feeling cold --- her breath is a cloud leaving her mouth, and she swears there's gleaming flakes of frost in the night air. But all of the animals stowing themselves away --- did they feel like winter had come early? The eyes appear anew, fifty feet to her left, then forty feet to her right. Aurora dropped the pretense; when her path would take her near those glowing, hollow sockets, she ran the other way. As they watch her, she sees it more and more fully. It wasn't a tree with two boughs --- those were antlers upon its head. It felt safer to glimpse the body. She had seen hunters kill doe. She had seen wolves kill a buck and happened across the carcass. She remembered it now. Skin still covers these bones, but barely. The deer is thin and taut, like it had grown larger than a man without ever eating. (Was it hungry? Would she be its first meal?) They were so long --- deer didn't have eight legs. Deer didn't have pair after pair of antlers upon their back like wings of velvet and bone. Deer were prey, they didn't chase. The wind blows again, and above her she see clouds rolling in so fast a fisherman of the sky must have reeled them. Now the moon is occluded from the ground by clouds colored like the fringe of a rainbow. So why did the shadows still light up when she steps near? The deer spirit manifests, twenty feet away right in front of her, closer than it ever has come before, like a shadow given flesh. This near, the hide appears a shade of deep blue. Aurora gasps, terror choking her breath. (What color was strangled flesh?) She falls to the ground, coughing. Trembling, she makes to stand, falls again. But she has to get up. How long has she been running? Twilight had long given way to true night. Aurora is tired. She can't keep this up. Trapped in the domain of a malevolent spirit, unable to move. Would she melt from the heat still building inside her? Freeze with the unnatural cold of this storm? Or would the winged deer devour? Get up, child. Aurora mumbles. It's not words. Run. Escape. Give me a hunt. The shadows seemed enchanted with the words. Aurora rasps a breath, and scrambled to her feet. The shining, hollow eyes are peering at her, deep and evaluating. Eight legs crush dead cypress leaves underhoove. The spirit circles her. She has to time to stand shakily, then get steady. Go. The deer's mouth yawns upon and there's something within and Aurora starts running anew. The hunt is different, now. Those eyes are behind her always, and never leave. Earlier, the trees sometimes flickered, looking leafless and dead. She can't banish the images no matter how many times she blinks. She can feel its falsity, a ghostly illusion. A fox sleeping in a low tree branch looks like a crow-picked skeleton. But it's not. Aurora had delved too deep into this spirit's domain. In each tree, it was no longer a distant presence; every plant here sung with the slow, faint pulse of a spirit's enchantment, a will-song. Sweat soaked her underclothes. Did she smell terrified? Even as her fear deepened, she feels ever hotter. She is being led, that much is obvious. Earlier, brief appearances of the spirit had nudged her this way and that, and now she must be getting close. The deer-thing pushes her exactly where the spirit wants her. Each long, cantering stride of those eight legs brought that stare closer and closer. Just up ahead, there's a gap. The trees break into a sudden clearing. But Aurora trips again. Her balance tips forward, and her hands catch her. She doesn't want to stop moving, she can't fall again, so they push off the ground even as her legs keep moving. For that moment on all fours, she truly feels like prey animal fleeing in mortal terror. A leap brings her out of the forest. Before her now lies the banks of a pond so round cartographers would draw it with a compass. The banks rise up toward the edge. Aurora strides twice near the pond's edge before leaping again. She was so hot. All she could think, seeing those cool waters, was how they'd feel washing over her skin. Sailing over the waters, she looks down, and understands. Why the shadows kept shifting, why the forest was illuminated, why the deer's gaze looked so much like eyeshine and she was afraid to look too deeply. Aurora is light. Her skin glows; her hair sparkles; her eyes radiate. She really was like a coal in a forge, so hot she burned bright. Time to be doused. Her arc reaches a peak, and now she falls toward the clear waters. The pond had no fish or scum, and even the bottom looked smooth instead of muddy She should have splashed. But Aurora sinks into the waters like sand, and it's not a ripple or wave that flows out. It's a crackling sound: the waters freeze to ice around her, ice glowing with her light. Frost coats her skin when she emerges from the depths, and the freezing happens so fast that, when lifting an arm out of the ice, it goes from covered in frost at the wrist to chunk of ice at the elbow, and when her shoulder emerges, it's near-immobilized by the mass of the iced