Pagan Winter Pulls Me Deeper

The name’s Craigswrack Haddlesworth, and I fell into a dream.

I woke in deepest night with brightest disk, creaked out my cabin bed. To the toilet—inside, I was roiling. I felt like dinner was swallowing the plate, but I didn’t release a piece. The sickness was a centipede what skipped my gut for the brain. 

I rushed to slam the hoarfrosted window open, suck in the crystaled fog atop this silvery mountain. Relief—but just a pinch, and I needed a handful—no!—A barrelful. My trembling hand reaped my white hair and great beard like a strange harvest.

Time was stingy, would brook no question of destiny or the dark path ahead. I didn’t know.

Fate denied even topcoat or snow trousers. Only my union suit, red as blood’s crimson, held me. I fell on the door like demons chased, and I scratched and scraped at the knob in the gloam until it let me out.

Face in the snow, I shook a blizzard from my head and stumbled from the log homestead. 

The leering moon consumed a seventh of the heavens. Every trench of those great craters fit the mountains around me like a puzzle. Clouds crowded but couldn’t cross. Soon all the sky was quilted and swirled in steely weft and warp, leaving just that soul-sucking eye.

Lurching through winter’s drifts, my teeth gritted as if I were the war-wounded. My hands and feet froze bloodless. The cold was a suit of iron, yet the gale cut sharp. My legs disobeyed me—my eyes punished me. 

This shambling flesh carried but a baffled prisoner. 

Through this path promised neither huddled village nor crackling inn cauldrons and beer—only an uncharted route through those dire evergreens and tortured roots.

A simple man doesn’t stalk what looms in the gloom, but the urge demanded I plow aheadlong.

A howl escaped me, made alchemy with the wind. It was a swarm of bats that bounced off the solemn cliffs then like a falling star found me back. 

Whatever taut nightmare rode me hastened such that the rear foot was always the former. I loped, snow-drunken, as my lungs flapped like desperate stove bellows. 

Twenty years on this mountain and this world never hit my eyes. Seven years in the war and this terror never found me. 

Everything took a single direction like arrows from a pagan god: each winter-written pine, each jag and jut of pre-Flood stone, each footprint of mythic game. All leading me, all following me, all pushing me toward that point. 

The brambled clustering opened to the summit. The cyclopean sky yawned. Other peaks prayed. Upon a plinth, the alpha and the omega—Wait—I know not these words, but they spill forth.

There she was. Naked. Translucent, glistening in the immaculate chill.

My breath steaming in the stillness was the only sign that ice didn’t hold dominion over all.

She sat on the glacial slab, giant-hewn, with her long legs crossed, waiting for me with sapphire eyes and saturnine lips in repose. An avalanche of arctic streams billowed from her head.

My love I left long ago was, next to her, a smudge.

The otherworldly lightning inside me paused as I drank in the sight. 

Wordlessly such that her actions sang, the legs shifted straight. Priestly sermons bleated up from my memories but they were nothing against the coming maelstrom.

Her slender back lowered down to the pedestal, her arms sliding. Her feet rose from the snow, betraying no footprints, and her knees pulled up, and her toes stabbed the sky. Finally breaking the century-long gaze that bound us, she rested her head back and—

Sighed.

Everything held its breath save me. I neared her with eyes like that spying moon. My marble-blue body must have creaked and crunched in the freeze, but fighting it was a dead man’s sin.

The pause broke. The snowstorm boomed back as ecstatic whiteout. Nothing existed beyond the rapturous squeeze. My foot stubbed her glacier, and I fell before her, and saw her body before mine: shining, exposed, eager.

Do I dare God watch this folly? Do I dare gamble with my soul? I didn't care anymore.

With its own horn of Gabriel sounding, that eldritch force conquered me. I forgot myself. My union suit was long-lost to the elements, and I claimed this primordial fae with all my heart and body.

I felt fire in that instant as I plunged into her, and vortexed with her endless cold.

With each deep, driving thrust, alternating waves of magma and permafrost scourged my nerves. Our gasps superseded all sound.

The frostbite fled my limbs—I blazed from the inside out as I hollowed out this snow goddess. Each plunge wracked my brain in a chimera’s throat: lurid pleasure, inhuman terror; escalating, echoing peaks like the jagged teeth around us.

I was liquid flame, I was burning snow, I was she, but all the while my member glowed white hot like a brand, melting her innards that reformed stubbornly and endlessly around me, and all was a blurred rush, a pagan rite, a maddening sin, a creation myth where does it end what does it mean how have I been chosen from everyman to neverman—

The feeling inside me grew and grew, greater, deeper, higher, stronger—

I exploded into her unknowable form, my life’s lava raging through her starving gate into her belly. She melted away against the heat she’d wrestled, spilling over into rude waters against the turmoiling white earth. Collapsing through her vanishing aqua, I tried to scramble away but fell through instead.

It was like the foundations of the world were shattered by my outrageous orgasm against a human inhuman. Earthquakes awoke, the snowdrifts around me spilled away, and the blizzard turned hot.

Rain, rain, rain.

I rolled onto my back in the mud boiling around me. I watched the air mist from the torrents.

A dozen swords stabbed my back. I squirmed as saplings, daring in their emerald heraldry, burst past my flanks. Grasses and bushes pushed me skyward until I surfed the verdant wave of foliage. The moon cracked in half above me, and the treacherous winds turned to treacle and kissed my body. A regal sun, spark-white, birthed from the falling regolith placenta. 

That light chased away my aches and fear. The waters washed away the dirt and blood. A jungle boomed around me, and I could only hear birdsong and tigers’ roars and apes’ cries.

I’d never seen these things before, but I knew them. The tumult around me edged away as the explosion of life spread outward, leaving only the vacuum of peace. I didn’t want to name what happened here.

I stood up, and brushed off my knees and elbows. I tried to wipe my face, but it was clean, 

and smooth, 

and young.

Thanks for reading!

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Photo: https://archive.org/details/clevelandart-1934.156-storm-in-the-alps