Elements
When Aeolus was a young man, a real young man and not just the apparent youth he could always appear as, he decided to tour the lands and seas and heavens and deeps to see what was out there. He placed an opalescent cape around his shoulders, his blue eyes glinting to match the sapphire of the fastening pin, wrought in sliver geometry that somehow spoke of wings. His skin was powder white with pale pink lips, when he spoke the spring blossom blizzards seemed to breeze in the mind. His hair was a floppy spiked mess of platinum and he was beautiful.
He knew of his fate to be king of all the winds, of the complex weathers of the worlds and yet he sort to out run this, he traveled, roaming the world and seeing for himself what life could be. He roamed the windy ice wastes in the North feeling the bite upon his cheeks. There he met an ice queen who thought him lovely and offered him anything he wanted as long as he stayed by her side. He shook his head sadly at her and would have left but then she fashioned him a maiden out of the air and ice and sea, a lovely glowing being that was the soul of an ice dweller. His Enarete.
Aeolus touched her perfect face with his long slender fingers and knew he had found a strange sort of paradise for himself. They stayed in the Arctic realms and he sent great fronds of powdered ice into the a sky festooned with rainbow shimmers, inverted and muted echos of those he had know else where. His ice nymph would look on with awe and wonder but she was never happy, not truly no matter what tunes he wooed the wind to play for her through ice ravines he had carved.
The Ice Witch knew the heart of the being she had created and feared her uttering words that would rip the beauty of the young man away from her. And so she stole the young woman’s tongue and kept it on an enchanted chain around her own neck. Aeolus could not understand what had happened to the normally vocal Enarete, no longer would she hum at his side whilst spinning frost patterns. But still she bore him children and they knew happiness of a sort.
Until their eldest a singularly talented girl who taking after he grandfather and mother became the Great Circle Current, cold and dark and essential, found a strange pendent on the side of an inky pool. She carried it from the Ice Queen’s bathing spring and gave it too her mother, Enarete recognised the sculpted shape and placed it in it’s natural home. Her children danced to her voice for the first time in their lives and Aoelus asked what it was that had made her melancholy all those years.
Smiling she explained she wanted to see the sun in the sky with the firmament laid out before it. Relieved he took her hand and fashioned a cloud from the vapours in the air, they stepped aboard and rose above the world. It was everything the nymph had hoped, beauty and wonder and grace but she was carved from ice and the sun was not cool on her face, not there above the clouds sitting in the sky.
Aeolus saw what was to become of his wife and he screamed to the heavens, his plea was answered and the greater gods turned her to droplets, they fell but Aeolus could scoop them up reforming his love. But the ice queen grew angry on discovering their departure and when she saw Enarete reforming she sent a curse, and at the very moment of formation the nymph dissolved once more into a patter of droplets. Ever since the god Aeolus has driven the air before him seeking to see his beloved, sometimes she is almost there in the clouds before the droplets fall as tears to the earth below.
Posted: Friday, May 6th, 2011 @ 11:14 am
Categories: Flash Fiction.
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