Snowfall: A Short Story

Chapter Three

Alia glanced around wildly. Where had the man gone? So he was magical. But how? Was he a wizard? Wizards had been extinct for centuries, or so she had been told...

Calm down, she thought to herself. Mother always told her that her imagination was too big for her head, and Father said that she couldn't let it work against her or she'd be at war with her own mind. So she took three deep, calming breaths and relaxed all of her muscles, like Kila had taught her.

There. Now she could think with a clear, relaxed mind. So the man was magical. What of it? He hadn't hurt her, and while he had been terrifying, Alia refused to be the first child to not pick the flowers out of fear. She would just have to keep going, pick the flowers, and hurry on back to the festival. She had to be home before nightfall, after all.

So she steeled her nerves, held her head high, and proceeded into the forest.

Soon, the wind began to pick up. Alia frowned as a bit of freezing snow hit her face and bent her head, pulling the cloak farther over it.

Gently, it began to snow. Gradually, the wind picked up, until Alia found it hard to walk in a straight line. A little snow and bad wind won't stop me, she thought resolutely. I have to get the flowers.

Then it began to snow harder. Soon, Alia could barely see the trees because of the snow wildly whipping around her head. She struggled onward, falling often, until her hands ached with the cold and she leaned against a tree, the cloak keeping out the worst of the elements. Only her exposed front and face were in danger.

All of her life, Alia had been warned of being caught in snowstorms. If she hadn't been so set on picking the flowers for the festival, then she would have recognized and heeded the warning signs and made her way home as quickly as possible. Now, as it was, all she could hope to do was find shelter and make sure her fingers, toes, nose, and ears stayed as warm as possible to avoid frostbite.

As she huddled in the slight bowl that a tree's roots created, she thought with a jolt, is this the doing of that wizard? He had said that she would be put through a test - but how was a snowstorm a test? Perhaps she had already failed and this was the punishment...

Her thoughts were becoming disoriented as fear filled her. How foolish she had been in not turning back for home! Now, instead of being the first child to forsake the flower picking out of fear, she would be the first child to ruin Snowfall by dying.

Faces flashed through her mind as she lost feeling in her hands. Her father, working hard in the fields where he was employed. Her mother, giving homemade bread to the kindly, old woman who lived down the road. Benji, getting ecstatic over life's littlest miracles. Kila, looking exactly how Alia had always envisioned snow princesses.

Snow princesses. The rulers of the snowy kingdoms. They controlled elements, animals built for the cold, plants that bloomed in the ice. They were powerful, and the cold never hurt them.

I'll pretend to be a snow princess, Alia thought.

If Alia had not been slowly dying from the cold, if the wind wasn't threatening to blow her away, if the snow wasn't blinding her and stinging her face, Alia would never have dared to do what she next did. But then, perhaps the snow and the wind were actually blessings in disguise.

She stood. She unfastened the red cloak that had been her little protection from the harsh snowstorm and let it snag on a tree branch, the same tree that had just been protecting her. She stood, in her thick winter dress, and walked resolutely onward.

She ignored the cold. She ignored the screaming pain in her hands and feet. She ignored the fact that she could not see. She ignored the chattering of her teeth and the spasming of her muscles.

And then, through the snow, she saw it, faintly. Light. Bright light, shining, her beacon, beckoning her forward. She walked faster, trying to run and becoming foiled by the mounting snowdrifts.

Finally, she reached the light. It was an orb, hanging in the air, and seemed the friendliest thing that Alia had ever seen. She reached out a trembling, blueish finger and touched it.

The light moved closer, slowly enveloping Alia's entire body. A warm light spread over her, chasing away the chill and the death in her fingertips and toes. It healed her, stopped the chattering of her teeth, and made her muscles go slack and relaxed. It got warmer and warmer until it was nearly an uncomfortable heat, but Alia reveled in it.

As she got warmer, she also thought more clearly. What was this light? Who had given it to her?

But of course, in the middle of a raging snowstorm, she couldn't fixate on such thoughts. She tried walking forward and found that her legs easily cut through the snow. She glanced up at the trees around her and saw, to her delight, a carved X on one to her right.

Grinning wildly at her change of luck, Alia sprinted down the path of carved trees and into the clearing.