Ice

Light cracked in the ice. Refracting within the confines of the glacier, reflecting itself. It was within the colour of the glacier she saw herself, eyes realigned, Picasso-picture-perfect without a touch of a smile on her lips. With the echo of the frozen river reaching her eardrums she would have cried had she not thought it so burdensomely cliche. It reminded her of standing beneath starlight in Paris, with the moon dripping down her back. It reminded her of the night nothing had happened. Without action, without words, it was that night she felt the most alive. The sporadically inspirational effect of inaction. The thought of it clung to her shoulders, shrouding her from the dripping water as it began to melt.

She would be trapped within this crevasse unless she continued upward. Or else she could return to the others who had refused to follow her. But then she would never know.

The local man had told her that above the ice lay a city of sunlight in the valley of two peaks. That it was there man had first conceived the notion of life after death. The veins beneath her skin constricted at the thought; that she could see beings of sunlight walk in the shadows of frozen Titans.

She clenched her fingers around a trinket and gripped it tightly, hoping to envelop her flesh around it. She pulled herself from the ledge inside the glacier and climbed higher inside its crystal artery. The blood drained from her arm as she lifted her body. For a moment she felt as if her arm would give and her form would fall. She glanced beneath her and thought that it would be a brilliant thing; to drop into the darkest of crevasses, with spots of light glinting as if stars from the black.

The heat of the day rippled within the frozen water, freeing it into its liquid form. She reached the lip of the ice and brought herself onto the white plateau which lay in the basin of the valley between two dark peaks. She saw everything and nothing and lifted a hand to her forehead, still gripping the trinket with its worthless value.