As I’m spinning my wheels deciding what to do now that The Audacity Gambit has finished its run, please enjoy a short story from the same world, some years later. This was originally published at Patreon and Comradery on February 28, 2022, as one of the stories for Flash Fiction February.
Winter stood in the cold, dead field and took a deep breath. They could feel the deep roots of the grasses that were waiting for Winter to move on so they could get to the business of growing and seeding. But even now they weren’t dead. The cold was hardly the death many made it out to be. A false dichotomy of warmth and cold, life and death.
When Winter had first taken the job, their hand forced to save another from the ice crown, they’d been full of ideas of what they could change Winter to be. The entire Sidhe felt outdated, stale, old, biased. They’d be the young blood that reinvigorated it all.
The first thing that went was the title. No more Winter Queen. Their counterpart had agreed far more quickly than expected. The Summer Queen wanted to be King instead for centuries, it turned out, but he’d felt confined by the legality of the title. The two of them had settled on simply “Winter” and “Summer,” words that had a far more expansive use than that of monarchy. Were they not the avatars of a season? Why mimic the broken structure of humanity, when they could shake their sleeping fey blood awake and see what it could do unconfined?
They made it into a celebration, a strange affair set at the border of their two lands. A reveller enjoying the fete could find themselves dancing from baked dirt and scrub to lush evergreen coated in ice in only a few steps. After plans had been decided, treaties settled, and lot of good food enjoyed, they’d parted, Summer and Winter trailing their courts behind them and letting the land settle back into something more coherent.
It had felt full of promise. A good beginning to something new. And so Winter began to play, unaware that eyes were on them.
But, for right now, which was then and which will be soon, Winter stood in a cold dead field and thought about grass and tried to remember the name of a winter berry they’d seen in a book when they were in third grade.
This post is part of The Audacity Gambit – Serialised. Learn more about when the book was first published here, see the archive and overall content warnings here, and find more of my writing here. I’m over on both Comradery and Patreon, if you feel like supporting my creative endeavours. If you’d like to subscribe to this story, here’s a handy email box for you: