Weekly Writing – January 6 2024

Her shadow stretched like a signal flare across the snow. The sun had set what she guessed to be half an hour ago, time kept by the numb pendulum swing of her trudging steps, but its light still echoed through the valley. Lavender reverberating from sheer fields of ice, gold petrified in the motionless plunge of waterfalls. Even once that and her shadow faded, darkness wouldn’t truly fall.
She would be able to trudge on in its eerie absence, the dead-channel glow of snow albedo. She would have to, unless she wanted dawn to stretch her shadow motionless and frozen across the unmarked white.
Keep walking. Keep moving, keep marking. Whenever her boots grew heavy enough for it to feel like she was walking in place, she stamped them light again and looked back at the improbable thread of her steps thinning back into the distance.
All the way back to the silken ice sheets that poured into the southern end of the valley. She had slid down on her back, feet braced for anything that might stop her, but the ride had been smooth from crest to floor. A thin, dangerous layer of melt had licked her down into the valley and frozen into her clothes; the valley had swallowed her clean.
Would it let her crawl back out? The northern end looked more craggy and promising the closer she drew to it, steep but helpfully complex with ridges and caves. If she could reach those, she could rest without the exposure killing her.
Simple as that. If she couldn’t, her clothes would freeze to the snow. No kind darkness would hide her death from her – she would be able to watch every moment of it.
Keep walking. The caves held darkness like a hoard. Keep stretching out that thread. Step by step, while the sun’s miserly warmth slipped away and her breath billowed brighter and brighter.