One of the foals coughed around a mouthful of frozen spit. A foal—maybe the same one, maybe not—croaked a hoarse question: “Are we lost?”
Facet’s heart would have sunk, but it could get no lower, so it only gave a weary flop in her chest. “We’re not lost,” she said, for the hundredth time, with a confidence she had stopped feeling long ago. The icy wind skirled around her words and carried them away. She hoped the foal had heard. She didn’t look back to find out. She knew what she would see: the long line of little shivering bodies, teeth clamped on to one another’s tails in the hope of staying together.
She couldn't look back. She had to keep her eyes fixed on the snowdrift she had picked as her guide. If she looked away, if she got distracted for even a moment, she would never be able to pick it out again from the thousands of identical white hillocks.
There was no significance to that particular snowdrift. Facet could vaguely remember picking it at random some time ago. How long ago? She had no answer. She was more tired than she had ever been, and time seemed to compress and warp, stretching back into a white fog of uncertainty and forward into a darkness that she had a duty to ignore.
She had been a miner in that fogged past. She worked, she ate the rations bestowed by the benevolent king, she worked again. It blurred together into meaninglessness. Her only clear memories were the light and the cold. Preserving those memories was some kind of cruel trick played on her by her brain.
The light had come in the early evening, filling the western sky with a white flame that smeared the air from horizon to horizon. It faded in minutes and left the west dark and empty. When the light disappeared, so did warmth. Arctic wind howled down onto the mine, carrying fat heavy snowflakes in their millions. Confused and terrified, the miners took refuge in their homes. The shanties that made up the mining town were built for the balmy weather of the Eastern Province. The cold slipped through their thin walls like knives. The miners gathered together into fewer and fewer buildings, sharing their body heat as they waited for the caravan that would bring supplies and answers.
The caravan never came, and the only answer the miners learned was that they could not bury their dead in the frozen ground. They carried the stiff bodies out into the snow and left them to be suffocated under a blanket of silent flakes. The corpses’ faces were always peaceful, and Facet began to hope each time she slept that it would be the last time. But it was always her friends and neighbors who went peacefully into the cold dark, and one day she awoke to find that they had left her all alone with their children.
The foals looked at Facet with hollow cheeks and eyes as empty as the death they were waiting for. Something in that emptiness pulled her away from her own impatient waiting. She forced herself up onto stiff legs and stood for a while, panting from the effort. Speaking would have cost precious energy, so she was silent as she went around the tiny room, stepping over the stiffening bodies of last night’s departures and pulling away blankets and torn strips of clothing. She distributed them to the foals, whose blank eyes showed no comprehension as their bodies huddled the cloth around themselves. She pulled withered vegetables down from the hanging baskets in the shanty’s tiny kitchen and used the last nuggets of coal to boil a pot of snow.
The survivors had been rationing the remaining food, staying just this side of starvation as they waited for help from the kingdom. Insanely, knowing she was insane but not caring, Facet decided that the only course of action was to take the foals to the kingdom. It would be a long march. There was no chance any of them would survive long enough to reach it. But the foals’ blank emptiness spurred her on. Surely it was better to let them die with some hope.
So they ate well and wrapped up tight and went out to fight against the cold. They left the mining town behind and struck out westward, toward the dark place on the horizon where the lights of the kingdom had been.
Facet followed her snowdrift, hardly blinking so as not to lose track of it. She had a duty to the foals. The gray belly of the sky would not let her follow the sun to the kingdom, so she followed one snowdrift after another to keep from listing off course as she walked. They had been walking for days, sleeping in stolen moments when the temperature increased to merely horrible, eating from their dwindling supplies as they walked. The cold had leached away what of Facet’s reserves fatigue hadn’t, leaving her hurting everywhere. Only her duty to the foals tugging on her tail kept her moving.
Facet felt disconnected from her body, unable to feel her hooves or her legs. Only the frozen bite of air singing her lungs told her that she still had a body at all. She began to imagine the world as an endless curved plain of snow and herself as a log-roller balanced atop it, making it turn beneath her as she walked, pulling the snowdrift closer with each step.
An unknowable eternity later, she stumbled on a rise in the snow. She pitched forward, her alien legs unable to catch her fall, and her muzzle plunged into the pristine white. She lay there for a moment, luxuriating in the rest and in the warmth of the snow. But she pulled herself up away from the sweet feelings, unwilling to abandon her duty. As she stood, she discovered that the rise was the edge of her snowdrift. She felt a distant sense of pride and even excitement. She had achieved a goal, reached a milestone. She was carrying out her duty. Safely standing on the drift, she could check on the foals without fear of losing her direction.
When she fell, the foal immediately behind her had come unstuck from her tail, but he was right behind her when she turned. He looked up at her with cheeks that were still hollow but with eyes that were no longer. She looked past him and found each of the foals in the line, thin and shivering but not hopeless. She nodded to them, turned, offered the first foal her tail. She was doing her duty. That was enough to keep her going.
Facet climbed the snowdrift to sight on the next one she would follow. She labored with her head down, struggling as she fought against her frigid body’s resistance and half-dragged the foals behind her. When the ground stopped leaning treacherously against her, she knew she had reached the top. She raised her head.
She would not have guessed that she was still capable of crying, but tears were freezing painfully into the corners of her eyes. The far side of the snowdrift was a gentle slope that descended too far. Much too far. There was a divot, a crater, in the ground, wide enough that its far side was lost in the haze of falling snow. Wide enough to hold a kingdom. The miners had wondered why the sky had gone dark in the west, as though the lights of the Crystal Kingdom had vanished. Now Facet knew the answer.
One of the foals coughed around frozen spit and loosened their locked jaw. “Are we lost?”
“Yes. We are.”
Author's Note
This was a quickie I wrote for the Hazardous Materials and Writing Challenges group's weekly prompt from August 23, 2015.
The prompt was "Lost," and within moments of starting to think about it, that final exchange of dialogue came into my head and I was off and running. A couple hours later and here we are.
This was an enjoyable break from my ongoing project, writing a long story that's a long way from being finished. I hope you liked reading it (or well, it's kind of a downer, so I hope you... appreciated it?).
