Elder Winter

Elder Winter sat by the bonfire long into the night. The forest grew thickly all around him, great tree trunks seeming to peer down at him and his fire.

The other Elders were long gone now, retired from the vigil. Only he remained.

In his lap he held an elaborately carved wooden mask. Hollow eyeholes peered up at him. Silent. Empty.

Empty.

Still, there was a trace that yet lingered. A faint impression left in the very fiber of the mask that yet carried the distinctive scent of the one who had worn it, long ago.

Elder Winter was the oldest of his tribe, extraordinarily long lived: it was the nature of his Song to long endure the frosts of age, waiting for the renewal of the world that would inevitably come with the spring, when the flowers once again bloomed gloriously beneath the sun.

Winter had been waiting for the spring a very long time.

Still, he could not but continue as he had, waiting for the ones who would bring about that renewal. And though the one who had worn this mask had told him that he would not die before he saw those that would be the instruments of the world’s renewal, the old Prill found those prophetic words harder and harder to believe with every day that went by.

He had been given something important to keep for that day, but he was old. Impossibly old and unutterably weary. His bones ached, and he was nearly blind.

Still he lingered on, day after day, holding to the promise of the Dusk Sage that he had called ‘friend.’

There he sat before the bonfire, watching as the flames died away into embers, the embers into ashes.

When the last ember flickered out, the leaves of the great trees rustled in a sudden breeze, and the stifling, hot air of the old forest was lifted, if only for a moment.

It smelled like spring.