benlehman

Once upon a time, as far north as north can go, there was the greatest people this world will ever see.

These people are gone, destroyed just as the world destroys all beautiful things. All that remains are these moments we call memories, moments frozen from the flow of time.

We cannot look upon them as they were, but we can understand them as they die, melting like a snowflake in the sun.

Behold.

A beautiful girl, alone in a waste of ice, stares into a glowing starlit city. Her face is expressionless, but the snow falling from her lips betrays her envy.

His blood drips from an alien flower that he cannot bear to hold, while his sister cradles her own hand and waits, not quite crying, for the knife.

In such a blizzard, you can only see them by the light of their swords.

With a single gesture and a single note of her single song, the flesh tears off the corrupt senators, exposing the worms squirming beneath.

Dancing thick on a glacial floor, a thousand couples stop in time, staring through a rainbow glass at glowing edge of dawn, just appearing on the horizon.

Enraptured, he does not see its claws.

Swords clash at the edge of a glacial, one pale and singing like starlight, one hot and burning like the sun. Our knight looks up into his opponents frozen and fiery eyes to recognize his brother.

In a crypt of sleeping knights, she leans over a fallen warrior, betrayed by his own compatriots. "hush..." she whispers, and kisses him gently as he turns to ice.

With only a moment's hesitation, she drives her sword into her lover's heart. "Forgive me," he says, and toasts her as he dies.

This is no longer a history, this is not yet a story. This is all that remains. Whatever else is what you make of it.