He did not feel it, as eons stretched and all that remained was the stardust in the abyss of the universe. He knew only the death of life – it dulled and faded, and slipped through the cracks of his desperate grasp. Those lights, the tapestry of constellations that stretched across the endless awning, extinguished like strange candles. It ran black tears down his cheek and seared the breath in his lungs. It tore cracks in the clay of his skin. The screaming clawed at the leviathan scaffolding of his bones. He could hear their sorrow, glistening, blending, bleeding and devouring in hue.
Cheimon, the ancient sailors wept. The priests sobbed like children.
Cheimon! Cheimon!
Through the glimpse in the broken glass, he saw the putrid boil of the ocean and the ash-rotted air. The earth and all that was within breathed its last, and he his finite first. The fractal heartbeat of the universe held him, so tight that it unwound his being, strand by strand. It crooned to him the lullaby of discordance and chaos, making promises it would never keep. Once again, he knew what it was like to be afraid. But he was Cheimon. He was one of the last vestiges of his world.
He was still a god.
And so he did what he had always done: he remained. He grieved. Then he bent time to his will.
The yolkish fire of the sun halted. The arid sands of the land knelt to a white crown of the softest snow. The thick furs of his coat touched the ground as he moved along, his hands and lips tinted as blue as iolite. The mangled copses of ebony trees bowed in reverence as the pearls of his skin drifted past; the light of his shadow coaxed snowdrops and hellebores like a veil in his wake. He stood atop the craggy crest of the black stone mountain and breathed into the air until it was wrought with his delight. The smoke of the village rose higher into the slate skies, and he saw the flutter of pale bodies within bear pelts.
Mine, he tenderly thought. And so life flourished, unaware it had tasted the same death for the thousandth time.
He does not remember the crawling passage of time – only ever the end of it. Temples rose and fell. Cities sprung and burnt. Infants wailed, expelled from mothers’ wombs, and the grown ones cried the same as bodies thudded into the cradle of frost-chewed soil or pyre. The offerings of incense and knotted bloodroots at the altar kept him at bay, but it didn’t matter.
The winter he brought swept stronger than any storm in every direction he deigned to cast his gaze upon. He was faithful and lingered through it all.
When the bonfire grew, charcoal and sun-dried tinder piled at the hearth. It was a ritual performed every year at the solstice – when the moon darkened and the stars hushed, silencing the weakened glare of the sun for the blessed stretch of hours. Vibrant cloths flashed and warm boar’s blood pooled into a bowl that was passed around. The drums thundered, rapturous and in ecstasy, and he stepped and twirled amongst its people in their skin. At the end, they’d gift him their final breath and fall with blue-tinged smiles upon their delirious faces.
But he remained hunted by the ghosts of his kin.
The milky eyes of the Crone pierced him once, through the gaze of the child in the forest.
Flaxen hair ruffled in the breeze, trailing dirty and cold down a worn blue frock. Her neck was snapped and bent like an owl. Tawny feathers flowed from a black scalp. Her tiny fingers were weaving a sail cloth, leaving faint trails of blood where the needle pierced her skin. A faint hum reverberated from her chest, a melody older than the very stars. She trailed him, as vacant as an echo, until he could take it no longer.
“Leave me,” he pleaded, the words a final falling stone.
Her silence grew deeper. Then, with her mouth unmoving, she asked, “How long will you carry this winter?”
He spoke to the ground, “As long as I have to.”
“But you do not,” she accused, her voice the scent of imminent thaw. “It is not need that binds you.”
“No,” Cheimon rasped.
“It is yearning,” she adds.
“No,” Cheimon protested, weakly.
“No,” she agreed, and the words were a sigh knowing sorrow. “It is fear. You fear the sun will rise, and you will be found empty. Because it is you that they do not need. They will pass, as all seasons pass. But they will be born anew, in other springs, in different skies. In different lives. In different souls. But you, Cheimon, you are a heart tethered to a single, frozen moment. Without that tether breaking, it will become the rope that hangs you.”
He chose not to believe her.
Eventually, she scattered among the stars and died alongside the thrall of the void she adored. He remained. He stayed. He granted blessings and boons. He ceased the tumultuous churn of waters and raced the wind to the ends of the earth. He visited his frail and most faithful servant, a blind man called Ampelius by those who still strayed into the boundless ruins of Antioch. The steaming broth of bone was always on the cypress table when he entered the crumbling marble gates and into the main atrium.
The fire bristled and snarled. He extinguished it with a wave of the hand.
“My lord!” Ampelius gasped, falling to his weathered knees.
“My servant,” Cheimon said endearingly.
Ampelius trembled. “I have failed you.”
“You have not,” countered Cheimon.
“My body is cold and wounded. I could not bear it,” Ampelius cried.
“But you did. For a thousand lives.”
His gaze held a mute terror of a creature who had forgotten his own den.
“You do not remember.” The god of winter proclaimed. “But I always have.”
Cheimon granted him his most dearest wish. He held him tight, like a mewling child to a parent – the pain from the aging man’s sinews eased, and crystals gathered on his eyes and gaping mouth. It glimmered with the light of the stars. The ash from the charred wood disappeared and the memory of fire erased. The pinkish dawn bled and broke to dusk, bereft of the heat of the sun. He promised wistfully, “I will meet you again. Soon enough.”
There was a story that drifted through towns, chasing the fleeting fog. It goes like this:
Do you remember the sun? It was warm. It was wonderful. There were fields of wheat and barley, the quivering golden maize that stood so tall and proud. Berries ripened from bushes and the rivers gurgled with life, flowing past the rocks and sandy banks with joyful glee.
No. I do not know it.
I know, paidí.
It is cold.
I know.
And it hurts.
Ah, but not forever.
I want it to stop.
One day.
Promise?
Promise.
Cheimon was resting in the crook of the continents when Jaesh found him. The tunnels of silt and obsidian cowered as the water began to boil. Ice formed under his tongue and lashed the molten ores back. Ichor billowed, agitating the shifting currents in the chamber. Darkness descended like vultures with talons outstretched, the dim glow of the earth’s crust ceasing entirely. The susurration of the underworld’s voices pinned him in place; the monstrous bats that heralded the Old One’s arrival swept over him in a maelstrom of jagged wings and insatiable tendrils.
Heat steamed his back, as he stood in defiance.
“You risk us all.” Jaesh snarled. His mastiff teeth gleamed, running rivers of blood and quaking the ground.
“Yet I preserve the world that even you feed upon!”
“You claim. You take.”
“I give.”
“Then what,” the mammoth, more ancient than the stars and frost and death, challenged Cheimon, “do you have left?”
Power.
Defiance.
Sands in the grit of the hourglass. Falling, drifting. Ending. Soon enough, the people curse his name. Remembrance of something dark and unfathomable rises like a wellspring he cannot clench, as the clay of bodies rot in seconds and souls splinter. Ampelius lifted his sightless head and said, soft as rasp, “Spare me, lord. For this time, I beg you to leave your humble servant be.” Incense and bloodroot burned, forcing him to flee. Cheimon, the ancient sailors still wept.
Cheimon! Cheimon!
He took a different shape in their heads. The visage of another idol, cast cruelly in gold. His flesh distended and peeled away, revealing a reddened raw mass that shifts and toils. The winds howled with his agony as his fingers sharpened into calcite claws. Massive wings sprouted from his back, trailing pulpy roots inside, and as he took to the ozone sky in a frightened flight of blistering ice, he did not stir at the familiar groaning that signalled the death of the world he loved so dearly.
For a moment-
There was only stardust, in the abyss of the universe.
Then it was gone too.
The world did not end with a scream, but with a faint whisper of settling frost. Then followed by silence.
A pause in the big infinity.
Snow fell.
It fell upon a world that had lost the art of fearing it. It drifted past the sirens and wails of a city in its fevered dreams, absorbing its clamor into its silent, downward spiral. As it came to a rest, with an almost apologetic tenderness, upon the ledges of a cathedral whose name no one in the rushing city could quite recall.
Inside, the vaulted silence was as ancient as the stones that held up the architecture. The only light inside came from the burnt-out candles that had guttered out hours before. The ashen, diluted glow of a streetlamp seeps in through a narrow window, illuminating a single whiteflake. As it gracefully spiraled through a crack in the glass, it did not appear to melt upon the cold flagstones. It simply laid there. Flickering from a distance. Like a fleeting star.
So distant yet so innate.
A man appears, taking his place in a pew. His breath not making mist in the chilled air. He has no recollections of his reasons behind entering this cathedral. Only a sense of pulling, a hollow need for the quiet. As he observed the intricate geometry of the snowflake, he had a vision.
Not of saints or angels, but of a figure of everlasting winter. A hand stretching out, not in benediction, but in a desperate, final embrace. Black iced tears searing down a face so ethereal, yet so grotesque.
Cheimon.
An echo felt in the marrow of his bones. A name worn smooth by eons of despair. Followed by an immense feeling of letting go. A thread. Stretched across millennia, which at last broke.
The gentle fall thickened outside. It was the Last White Christmas, gentle and sunny, painting the grimy town in a pristine, forgiving lie.
The children would not know it was an elegy. The parents would not know the ever-fading power in each snowfall. This time, it was not a storm wielded, but a memory bleeding out. A deity’s last yearning for his own name, playing on a loop until the reel ran empty.
As the man blinked, the vision of the winter deity faded into a hollow abyss of oblivion. A profound sorrow welled up in his bones, a grief of some sort he had yet to experience until now.
He placed his palms on the sun-warmed oak, and beneath the grain, he sensed a heartbeat older than the city’s pulse. The white snow met him. For the first time, he saw it for what it was: not a mere weather, but a farewell. Soft, glistening, and melting away into nothingness.
Written By: Ash & Trishta
Design By: Sentina
