In Opal Twilight

Just after last Christmas I completed a new story called In the Palace of the Lost Winter Stars, unfortunately I failed to finish it in time for the anthology it was intended for, so at the moment it's awaiting a home. However, I felt that the first few hundred words, with a little editing and a fresh ending, would make a decent little prose poem. So here it is.

The ending here, by the way, is closer to my original intention for the story: the longer piece - over 5000 words -  has a completely different dénouement.
 

In Opal Twilight

I walked out into the white and wondrous garden with my visitor; out into the transformed world that was now filled with the rose-opal luminescence of twilight, for a fine snow had fallen heavily for half the day. We strolled to the end of the pallor-mantled garden and through the black gate in the white yew hedge, then across the lane, now hidden beneath a crisp mask of ermine, and so into the wood beyond.

My pale breath was the pallid bloom on the grape of the eventide and we both walked in silence as if fearful to intrude on the sacredness of the solitude that the snow and luscious cold had invoked. And as we walked I thought of a poem that had described winter as an empty and haunted room, and of how apt the poet’s description had been, and yet at the same instant how very wrong: the vibrant emerald symphonies of summer and her dancers had long since faded away but here was a serene beauty to equal her often gaudy music and movements.

As we walked the hushed woodland paths deep into the trees, I looked up into the dark branches, that were now limned as with pale silk, and observed the great expanse of the rooks’ nests high above us and I recalled the vision I had had of them earlier in the day from a window of my cottage: the black fume of their strange city meshed in the ebony fretwork of the trees and set against a sky as fragile as glass, and as pallid as white marble, the birds rising up like the black ashes of funereal crepe.

We stood, maintaining our reverential silence, as the twilight deepened about us to a dark amethyst glow like a glorious and dusky wine, a wine that was eventually drawn down into the planished obsidian amphorae beyond the western horizon. A chill breeze had chased the jasmine-white of the clouds away, a winter zephyr as sensual as lengths of unfurled and chilled satin caressing my face. Night had now drawn her arabesque mantle over the world and through the interstices of that garment glinted the delicate iridescence of the stars.

It was then that I sensed that my companion had suddenly turned to look at me and the expression upon his face was one that seemed to fall betwixt terror and wonder and I observed that the insipid colour had drained from the pale flesh of his features and was now almost as one with the lambency of the snow. Then he spoke and the extraordinary words trembled slightly with their fearful passion:

“I have passed through the gates of sable agate and entered the Hall of Basanus above which eternally burn the winter stars that have been lost …”

It was at that moment that I recalled all that had befallen me and recognised that my companion was my Soul: my Soul that had been stolen, that had been purloined from me and forced to wander beneath cascades of strange and frosty suns.

O I remembered all as my Soul began to gradually fade away, the cold light of the lost winter stars upon its pallid face.

John Gale © 2017