The Well of Mimir

Night had crept cold around the mountain, wrapping the air in an icy blanket and sucking the day’s heat from the barren stones on the heights. Thorsur slapped his numb fingers against his thick, bare arms and breathed a cloud of white from between clenched teeth. It did little to warm him on this night.

He sat in a crevice long ago formed from rock slabs fallen off the mountain side, without the warmth of a forbidden fire, and stared down into the dark valley below. Somewhere in that black mass was a forest, cloaked by night, and his village, visible only as inviting, burning-orange sparks in the enveloping darkness around it. High above, the night was clear, the stars shone blue and white, glittering crisply in a sky that seemed brighter than the land below, a dark blue opposed to inky black.

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I flicked off the lights as I descended the stairwell, the swiftly fading luminance leaving upon my retinas a faint and ghostly impression of the railed stair descending to the family room, but also leaving me to finish trodding them in utter darkness.

I had taken fifteen steps in the darkness, and I felt a nameless anxiety; at twenty steps, I began to worry; at thirty steps, ten frightened steps further in the blackness, panic took hold, for my stairwell only contained perhaps twenty stairs between the upper and lower floors of the house.

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They blamed the sun, so jolly and yellow, too full of itself and too bright, hanging up above the world. Well, that is what the most-bitter said, for the sun was beautiful and bright, and brought joyous color to the world, like the emerald green of grass and the endless blue of the sky. These were colors no one wished to miss, brought out only by the sun.

Still, everyone blamed the sun, the beautiful sun, for drawing the sirens up out of the depths to sing their terrible, beautiful songs and keep little girls from sailing their toy boats across their swimming pools on sunny days.

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Patience had never been a virtue – not one of his in any case.

He let the fine, dusty red sand sift through his fingers to blow away in the weak and inconstant breezes that teased the thin air of the deep deserts. The black sun hung above him — a quarter of its journey away from the blazing, dry heat of noon — sucking the last vestiges of moisture from the air and soil, eating the pale sky in its endless, cyclical fury.

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