At last she thought I shall understand, and the blue of the ice that I can see, will be made clear to me, or so she thought. The inhabitants of these lands hardly meet, for it is a place of eternal silence, and few care to disturb the precious balance of ice and blinding white and the silence.
All knowledge of the past is taken away in this place, and once consenting to live here then the past does not matter very much.
It had taken a long time to thoroughly comprehend the hard beauty of the long hanging stalactite, its uncompromising hardness that gave beauty but no comfort. To live here is to live beyond comfort, and in that knowledge she tied back the long black hair, back from eyes that were pools of ice, green emerald deeply cold ice.
Within those depths a shoal might swim for miles, without seeing another living form if by ‘living’ you mean to state that the forms in the ice are human, but that would be wrong to give such attributes to the icelands.
It took the course of a complete day to move at all, to look away from the hanging stalactite towards the land’s horizon, where a slender thread of faded redness in the evening sky told of a sun that had never existed in that place, and never would. This land is dedicated to whiteness and long thin lines of black where ice has cracked in a sharp crease of zig- zags, that could be a harmony of pattern but is not.
Harmony is a requirement of course she thought and stared intently at a single pearl of light, its curve a microscopic reflection of the ice-world, admiring its perfection until the air’s moisture dissolved the pearl. Forgetting that in this land, silence is mandatory she sighed gently at its loss, and the sigh shimmered over the great expanse of ice, disturbing the sharply crystallised particles until they lost their place in the order of things until the land moved, shifted and the ice caps lost the perfection of shape that had been the sole reason for their existence.
In that shifting, the surface of hard snow had become transparent and she could look down into the depths, down into the milky blue levels that reformed softly into undulating tide-marks and in the glassily transparent centre lost faces gazed back at her, frozen tears etched on their long dead faces. Come back to us they told her, come back and be one of us, do not seek to be of the living there is no hope in that hope. White hands push back the heavy black hair, and the green eyes sharpen, and focus intently refusing to take the outstretched hands that promise her an eternal embrace of cold memory.
I do not need you, I do not need your frozen tears she replied without moving and you cannot threaten me or take anything from me that I do not choose to give and the soft taunts of their impotence sharpened the dead faces with anger. We will take you they hissed, we will take you until you are only pain, until you know nothing but pain, but she knew that the only sorrow was their loss of living, the long lost lives that they had once had. That was the pain of which they cried, that was the gift they would give her.
With economy of movement she folded white hands together and closed her eyes until black lashes lay softly on her face. The lost faces of the ice nearly remembered such human beauty, and the soft beat of pulse in rhythm to the living of things until the pain was the deepest cut of all and the dead experienced a pain that would never end as they sank back into the deepest ice levels not to weep for such redemption was not possible for them, only numb despair.
She never saw the faces dissolve into formless ice and when she opened her eyes again there was only the perfect surface of freshly drifting snow, a slight scurry of feathered snow in a land of ice shot through with blue light. Of course she thought I understand, that’s how it should be .