A Slight Chill

Uxinta shivered. Goose pimples rippled down her naked skin. The air thrummed with static charge. She could feel the Song of Winter rising in her bones, turning her breath to crystals in the air, making her flesh pale and her eyes bright. When the song was aroused Uxinta sensed the magnitude of the music. She knew herself as an iteration of the melody, a harmonic phrase immersed in a sea of sound. She was not the singer, she was the one being sung.

The loam of the forest floor clinging to her bare feet began to harden and a sheen of ice started to creep over the ground. The temperature in the glade plummeted and the water in the air condensed on her limbs, her back, her breasts, droplets running in rivulets down her form before freezing solid in their tracks. Leaves above her head withered and tumbled from now barren branches, silhouetted against a full moon. An icy wind gusted, dragging dried leaves out of the glade and whipping them against trees further on.

The Song of Winter was transitioning from its gentle first movement into the harsh rhythms of its central theme. The blood in Uxinta's veins pounded, her pulse quickening, the color rising in her cheeks. She felt her own bodily cycles merging with the music, pulsating in time, quivering at each staccato breath of wind.

Long clear icicles were forming now off every branch, till one mighty limb snapped like a gunshot, reverberating through the woods. Through the air, ice and snow whirled, a white vortex with Uxinta at the center, singing.

Singing and exulting. As the temperature outside plummeted, her internal heat was building and she belted each note ecstatically, anticipating the incipient crescendo.

Far above the woods, blue jays disturbed from their nests by the unseasonable weather fluttered anxiously about, watching as a blanket of white coated a wider and wider region of the forest, radiating out from the young Prill singer. The cold front passed over a creek turning it instantly to ice. It swallowed a small pond, a thicket of manzanita, families of quail and deer. Animals were waking suddenly and darting in confusion from their beds.

Uxinta inhaled the frigid air deep into her lungs, trembling with the nearness of the climax. She let the powerful final movement of the Song overtake her, lifting her from the ground in a mighty and sudden burst of blizzard. Waves of cold exploded through her body rolling outward like an earthquake to the limit of the zone of winter. In the path of these tremors stones split, trees died, and the whole region was buried in a dozen feet of snow.

The last of the shivers tingled in the soles of her feet as she came gently to rest on the surface of the new snow, without leaving an impression. Steam wafted from her skin and she looked around in heady bliss at the wintry landscape. Buried deep in the snow, damaged beyond repair, and mired in immovable ice were the roiling, smoke belching machines of the Cheldrun loggers. Sadly, Uxinta knew, this would not set them back for long. They would return with new machines and be right back to work ripping apart the forest within a few months, but for now...

Uxinta slipped on her light priestess robes, not bothering to tie them closed, but enjoying the prick of the cold against her skin. She was the guardian of the Song of Winter. She didn't mind a slight chill.