The Ancient Chronicles: Short Stories

Madam Season

     Aloft golden emissions of marvel, it relinquished a beauty like no other. With a flowing mane eternally varying shades and eyes bright and spherical, it favored requirements buried within each viewer. That was the legend anyway. As Madeline gazed at strong foothills rich with green foliage she reclined against a tree. It felt strangely familiar and yet foreign with its twisted mass and dark auburn trunk.   Her skin warmed as though a spring's sun had settled directly above her.  She squinted and bolted upright. He set foot onto her shadow and in it she watched with a pounding heart as he extended a hand. Nothing before this registered in her mind. Those eyes, that hair and physique propelled her into acceptance.

     Her fingers curled as her fist lay in his palm. Warmth flooded her at once. It was a sensation obscure in reason and she did not care to understand it. All she knew was he was claiming her heart, body and soul.

     And she became aware of another watching her from a distance engulfed in nightmares.

     Cherry colored lips opened. They splayed across bleached skin and curled upward into impossible angles. As they pulled back crimson speckled teeth elongated and twisted from black, swollen gums. Steam billowed out from between them, reached the flickering forty watt bulb with gray tendrils and soon disappeared.

     Time encased bitter sorrows. They now displayed in the liquid dark hollows of her eye sockets, poured from each defined corner and spiraled into muddy pools around her white lace collar. From the formless voids tangerine embers flared.

     She shifted. Her movements were blurs, strangled colors mixing together and reforming again. As she lifted her head, her grainy resolve flickered just as the overhead light continued to do. With ashen palms pressed again the window pane the cascading flow of her raven hair writhed and coiled.

     Freedom waited for her. The time would herald a new world and when she was birthed into it, there was going to be no end to the misery countless of centuries had left to decay. She would deliver it unto them in every fashion her mind could fathom.

     Seeds of December were already being planted. The harsh winters were around the corner. Then her season would be once more upon her. As Madam Winter she needed to settle into change, though admitted change was a frightening thing at times. Then again, with change comes a new possibility.

     Desperate competitors failed to see what true artistry was all about. In their ravished minds common sense bathed in ego. Truth wasted in their bitter shadow, but not before succumbing to disease.

     Cold hearts were the easiest to touch. Closed minds were simple to taint. Life as she knew it produced these fragile things every day. Some were pushed into it while others fell into it and before they knew how to recover were victims of their own stupidity.

     She shifted again. This time her attention fell along a stretch of glistening ice as it scaled a section of plaster. As she neared, her shape fragmented and then reconfigured, her feet brushing the glacial slab of floor as she glided. Beneath the twinkling crystals faces writhed. It might appear they were in agony, but as she leaned closer all she saw were clever endeavors displaying her evolving genius.

     They never again would know the warmth of spring or the blistering heat of summer. In death they are as they lived. Greed, arrogance, envy and corruption all brought them to these conditions. How many more might fall into her trap?