The Veil of Frost and Longing
A boy of shadowed birth began to climb,
His breath a fragile banner in the night,
His boots devouring snow like whispered sins.
The mountain loomed—a cathedral of ice—
Its spires carved by centuries of wind,
Where winter’s choir sang in crevasse and crack,
A hymn to all that yearns, yet cannot keep.
He carried naught but silence and a locket,
Cold as the cheek of death against his palm:
Within, a face—not mother’s, nor a ghost’s—
But *hers*, the stranger etched in tarnished gold.
“Aurelia,” the letters wept, “my truth,
My north star bound in frost.” He did not know
Her voice, nor why her eyes (two embers drowned)
Had haunted every dream his childhood carved.
Yet up he climbed, where air grew thin as grief,
Each step a pact with echoes. Rocks, like bones,
Protruded from the slope—a skeletal hand
Clawing at the sky. The wind, unkind,
Tore at his cloak, hissed tales of those who froze
With hope still warm inside their ribbed confines.
“Turn back,” it moaned. “No light survives this height.”
But forward pressed the boy, his heart a drum
That beat her name in rhythms old as stone.
*Au-re-li-a.* The syllables took shape
As frostflowers bloomed upon his lashes, pale
And transient as the love he sought to claim.
Three nights he climbed, each darker than the last,
Till on the fourth, the summit’s jagged crown
Rose stark against the Milky Way’s cold stream—
And there, beneath the aurora’s shivering veil,
She stood.
Not flesh, nor phantom, but a wisp
Of starlight woven into woman’s form—
Aurelia, her hair a cascade of midnight’s breath,
Her gown the shimmer where the snowflake dies.
“Why have you come?” Her voice, a silver chime,
Unmade the tempest in his blood. He fell
To knees that split the ice, held out the locket—
A plea, a prayer, a bridge between two worlds.
“You knew my mother,” trembled from his lips.
“She left this… left *me*. Who are you? Why do I
Feel, in your gaze, a home I’ve never had?”
The spectre knelt, her touch a paradox—
Both fire and frost that seared his calloused hand.
“Child of the valley, hear the tale the snows
Have kept: I loved her once, a sister sworn
Not by blood, but by souls that beat as one.
We climbed this peak to seek the fabled dawn
That melts the ice of hearts too long confined.
But storms descended, black and ravenous—
She fell, and I… I lingered here, unbound
From mortal chains, yet chained to memory.”
The boy inhaled her sorrow like a drug.
“Then you are kin,” he whispered. “In your eyes,
I see her laughter. Stay. Mend all I’ve lost.”
But Aurelia turned, her form a blur of tears.
“You ask the impossible, dear heart.
I am the whisper after breath is spent,
The shadow where the candle fails. To love
What cannot stay—this is the mountain’s curse.”
Yet even as she spoke, her fingers traced
The contours of his face, as if to etch
His youth into her ever-fleeting mind.
They lingered in that dance of almost-touch,
Two stars condemned to orbit, never meet.
He told her of the years spent unadorned,
A sapling bent by absence’s harsh wind;
She sang him lullabies the blizzards stole
From cradles far below. But as the east
Unfurled its grayish tongue, Aurelia waned—
A sigh dissolved in morning’s brittle light.
“Return,” she murmured, fading. “Life awaits.”
He clutched at threads of glimmer, screamed her name
Into the void. The mountain, vast and mute,
Returned no solace but the creeping dawn.
Despair, that viper, coiled around his will—
Yet still, he chose to stay. Let others flee
The ice’s bite; he’d make this haunted peak
His pyre, or his shrine. He built a hut
From splinters of the shipwrecked pines below,
Ate roots that clawed through permafrost like veins.
Each dusk, she’d come—more faint with every visit—
Her voice a reed-flute’s tremor on the breeze.
“You fade,” he wept one night. She smiled, her hand
A phantom pressure on his aching heart.
“So does the fire when denied its wood.
Let go, beloved. I am not your home.”
He refused. What use a world
That gave him only thresholds? Here, at least,
Her ghostly fingers brushed his dreams with light.
But seasons, even here, are not undone—
The mountain’s wrath awoke. One howling eve,
As avalanches roared like damned souls freed,
His fragile shelter shattered. Through the storm
She appeared, luminous with frantic grace,
“You must descend! The peak will claim your breath—”
“Then let it!” he cried. “Without you, air is ash.”
They stood, two figures in the chaos’ maw,
Till something in her eyes—a mother’s grief,
A sister’s resolve—hardened. “Then I choose
To break the chains that bind me to this rock.
For you.” Before his scream could find its shape,
She kissed his brow—a brand of final warmth—
And plunged her spirit into the abyss.
The mountain shuddered. Ice, once merciless,
Retreated like a whipped beast. Dawn spilled gold
Upon a path unscarred by snow. But she—
Aurelia—was gone, her essence spent
To carve his road to life. He crawled, half-dead,
Down slopes that now lay still, her name a dirge
Upon his lips. The valley’s green embrace
Received him as a stranger. Years crept by
In muted hues. He wed, raised children, sowed
His fields—yet ever gazed toward the peak
That wore her face in mist. When death approached,
A wrinkled pilgrim clutching Aurelia’s locket,
He whispered, “Wait for me beyond the veil.
We’ll climb again, where no storm dares to rage.”
The snows, they say, sighed softly as he passed.
Now travelers swear that on the clearest nights,
Two shadows scale the moonlit slopes—a youth
And woman made of starlight, hand in hand—
Their laughter spiraling where glaciers weep.
But dawn, relentless, parts them every time…
The mountain keeps its vigil. Love, denied
A cradle, finds no grave. It breathes, instead,
In the eternal climb—unseen, unsung.
