The Librarian and the Assassin, a Sapphic Romance at the End of the World - 36. Chapter 36 - Chapter to Sleep

“Bix, this story is about the world ending by another means besides the plague,” Tawni explained before she began to read. “I liked how this started, but it’s sort of fizzled out for the time being. I might come back to it someday.”

“I can’t wait to hear it,” Bix replied.

Tawni grinned, and she read aloud.

*

Hidden in frozen darkness beneath the silver bosom of an ancient glacier, a light shined with its own power. Buried deep under the ice, the glow radiated with a luminescent ballet of blue and silver and white. The colors shifted their spectrums, and her entire world was illuminated in the hues.

Naked, she existed in quiet isolation at the root of ice. She was harmonious with the cold and untouched by the chill, and she required no protection against it. The glacier had been her home since time immemorial, and she dwelled within a vast hollow pocket inside the ice. The cavity provided her with a lovely and spacious queendom, and she was its unchallenged monarch.

Her feet crunched on the hard-packed ice as she walked through her realm and into a dark chamber. With the slightest wave of her hand, a crack opened in the ice right in front of her bare toes, and from it sprouted a glass-clear seedling. She twitched her frosty fingers, and the plant grew as high as her knee. The act of moving her hand through a series of mudras caused the ice flower to produce a glittering blossom, and it opened with translucent petals that overlapped and melded into one another. It was not a normal flower, made up of the organic slime that comprised life, for here in her home, there was no life. Her hand moved again, and a mystic light burst forth from the bloom. She smiled.

Whoever she once was, or who she might someday be, were not concerns to one such as she. Hers was an existence of the present. Whatever past she may have led was lost to the forgetfulness of too many thousands of years, and the future was never a concern to this undying individual.

Unaffected by the eons alone, time and decay were absent from her, as was the need for companionship. Years were as nothing, and the cold itself provided everything she required. As a being whose only purpose was to add beauty to her frozen realm, she was perfection personified. Her energy flowed from the ice, and it sustained her.

She lay down and stretched her naked body onto the frozen floor, and she closed her eyes. Sleep was not the objective, nor was it necessary, for she drew power from the ice, and the ice obeyed her.

As if becoming liquid, the rock-solid surface upon which she lay absorbed her body down into it. She was enveloped, and she disappeared. The floor again became rigid, and there was no movement within the chamber.

Time passed with her body embraced in the glacier’s core. The cold revitalized her spirit, and when her energies were satiated, the ice released her from where she was cradled. She was raised, still on her back, and the ground solidified again beneath her. She opened her eyes and sat upright.

Something in her world was different.

An age had passed since the last time she spoke. The act of speaking, even having a name, had become superfluous in her solitude. However, a change had arrived to her status quo, and it prompted the use of her voice. There was something new in her glacier; she heard sound, and curiosity was her response.

The sound was uncanny and seemed to be more than simply a noise that was foreign to her icy world; it sounded unnatural. Her own footfalls and the groaning glacier as it shifted were the only noises she ever heard.

This new noise was traveling to her from a distance, a faint whine that was whistling far off in the ice. The quiet noise was almost imperceptibly beginning to grow in volume, and there was no question of its location, for there was now another new anomaly in her home. Partway up the interior wall, different colors added their light to the glow of her world. The colors were blue and silver and white, but they were not her blue and silver and white. The light was unnatural, and the sound matched the weird illumination in its peculiarity.

This other light was dim, but it was impossible to miss.

The unearthly whining continued quietly echoing from its distant location in the enormous glacier, and little by little, the strange sound and light continued to grow. The anomalous unquiet was soon much louder, and she approached the aberrant spot on the wall. She lowered her body to sit in its eerie glow, resting her hands on her knees and meditating on the light, giving it her focus but not sharing any of her power with the uninvited new arrival.

The light gradually brightened until the colors shifted and adopted a hue that was completely alien to her. She saw the new color and her eternal mind called it yellow; she would name herself for the yellow. She did not remember what her name used to be. She would be naming herself anew.

She spoke, and her voice was like the creaking of ice. She did not recognize the syllables that issued from between her frozen lips, but she knew it was her name.

“Aioloth.”

*

Tawni glanced at Bix, who was breathing heavily and had fallen back to sleep, and Tawni smiled at her. She closed her notebook and slipped under the covers.

“I love you, Bix,” she whispered, and she also fell asleep.