Intro
She stood on the frozen surface. Snow, freshly fallen, gave way to her gentle steps. Harder, frozen snow, already turned to ice, remained solid. Ice, two metres thick, formed a barrier to the water beneath but she wasn’t aware of any of this. Instead she screamed, long and hard. In fear, simple animal fear. Until her breath left her and again, her loud high-pitched scream echoed through the falling snow, over the ice. For she was alone, totally alone. It was this one thought that registered again and again in her mind. And a new scream came forth, until, exhausted, she fell to her knees. Broken, exhausted and defeated. Quiet sobs wracked her body, she was spent, a former image of her beautiful Scandinavian self. Almost involuntarily she collapsed in slow motion and lay down on the cold surface, the falling snow turning her pure white. She was lost – her mind had retreated to some other place, not here, far away from here and this ice cold world. Where her dead lost love was, where she was, where they are together. Giving up hope, she prepared to die, to freeze to death, an empty shell of a girl, finally sleeping, her pain and loss and anguish taken away, momentarily…
A distant noise came through the snow, almost non-existent – maybe it was nothing. Did nothing have a sound? Slightly louder, it came again. There was something there, not natural, a man-made sound of a machine in distress. It to was dying; something else was coming to this godforsaken place of death to die. Was it a Norwegian God, coming to claim the lost girl’s soul before she passed – as was alleged to happen in the Viking days? Then it was here, huge black, on fire and dying. The crippled Halifax bomber almost fell onto the ice surface, slicing through the snow blizzard…
In the distant depths of her mind the young Norse girl dreamed, of warmth that wasn’t here, that was now, of a man who she had lost some summers before. A cold, a cold so razor sharp that it threatened to drag her back to some place she wanted to escape from, grabbed hold of her body. Back to the cold place, her dream said. She wanted to reach the warm place, for there she would find him, be with him. Yet she needed the cold that would take her to him, her dead love, because it would freeze her to death on the ice. For how could he have survived the bullets that had pierced his heart, for he was hers? Murdered by her own kind because he was different, was the enemy. Because he wasn’t of the Satanic Church, because they thought he was too good, too pure, to even exist in their world? He dared to fight his common enemies, the Nazis, and the Satanic Black Magicians in the total war that engulfed the whole world. They had guessed his purpose, that he was a Pagan Warrior who had ended his mission; he had failed like all his comrades had. So he had to die, for in war, any war, there is no second place for the defeated.
In her dream, as she drifted towards him, something tried to pull her away, even as she could see him beckoning her to him. Something not of this place pulled her back, even as her body had started to freeze, her body and systems shutting down. Something unknown stirred and an even deeper thing came to her. Quite clearly considering her state. It said, don’t die, don’t die, but another voice in her soul said, I must, to be with him for this world has too much pain. My homeland is overrun by Nazis, my lover is gone and those of my own kind have turned against me. I have nothing, am nothing.
It was not enough: the other thing remained there, refusing to be quiet. In effect it lifted her up from the paralysis that engulfed her mind. Something snapped and caused her to open her eyes, frozen shut with tears, how did she do it? She saw the lake surface, white, fluffy and cold, at a vertical angle. Her brain registered this but remained numb, and then she saw the snowflakes falling, like cold Norwegian tears, her tears, her country’s tears.
Then she heard it, an unearthly roar of an unknown thing not from here and a huge grey shadow passed over her. It touched her, something in her damaged mind whispered, and then it was gone, replaced by a vibration felt through her body. A huge eagle smashed onto the ice, dying, crying in pain, torn asunder. Most important of all, this fallen eagle, this thing carried something for her, very important. Before unconsciousness claimed her once again, ending her mortal fight, she knew that everything was okay, it really was. Blackness came, a welcome friend – she was going, forever from this world…
No comments:
Post a Comment