the child epiphany.

   So once upon a time there lived a woman, and she was loved by all.

 People talked about her beauty through the lands, and men were ensnared by her. She was a cold, unsmiling child, white of skin and fair of face, but with a tinge to her like a touch of snow or ice. Old women spoke in whispers of how they once used to hear stories about women like her,  she-demons with cold eyes and white skin, and a smile like the devil’s woman.

   She was captured and taken by enemy men from a desert land, lusting for the fabled white women of the mountains. As it happened, another people were passing by in search of enemy, and she was saved by a brave man, fighting for his country. He put her on his horse and smiled at her, and somewhere along the way she fell in love with his kind eyes and gentle words.  And he brought her back to the place of his home. 

   She dismayed because he had a wife, and she saw how he looked at her and how she looked at him, like there was no other in his life, and would never be any other. But, being only a man, unwillfully he was tempted by her charms and womanly body, and sweet, beguiling smile. His wife saw her for what she really was, and was good and tolerant, but pent-up feelings of that sort only will lead to death and despair for either or both sooner or later.

    Now, in secret the snow lady from the mountains was an otherworld being; she wore the skin of a dead woman who killed herself when she lost her child to spite, and she was made of darkness. Each night she discarded the skin of the woman, and stood naked in darkness for what she truly was. She tormented his lady wife, as only a jealous woman in love with a taken man can do. But she loved him enough to die for him, and to give him back to her in the end.

   Another such as herself loved her, a man with desperate yellow eyes and claws like the dragon, and died for it when he came to take her away. People like us cannot love people like them, he told her cruelly, for he saw how she loved the mortal man. And oh, the pain of a heart that knows what is wrong but yearns for it anyway.

   What is holding your heart? In the silence of the darkness, I cannot see your face, and all I can hear is the sound of your soul weeping for a love that cuts.

  So possessed, she laid a curse on his lady love, to appear as such a being as herself, and she made her skin white as death and her hair like the moon, and when she was overcome the tears she cried were blood. She made her people despise her, and she made the brave man doubt her, and she made her promise silence to the grave, and lies and contempt.  See, it is the way of women to be thus cruel, and to lay upon people they love such doom as this.

   But in the end, she could not stand to see him suffer, and suffer he did, longing for his woman, striving to do the right thing by his people, trying to be just and fair and still be a husband, still be a lover. Murderers are punishable by death, and now like dancers good men and women died, and all blame put on her the wife.

   It is a thing to love a woman so as to let her go, but it is an entirely different, and more soulful and breaking and dying thing, to love a woman enough to take her life for her. 

   Men such as these are far and few, and are capable of the sort of love that singers compose into music and dreamers weave into tales that are never forgotten.

   The man loved her enough to kill her, and he died the moment his blade pierced her heart, although he breathed still. She of the darkness and the spite saw this, and saw it well, and it hurt her deep, that nothing she could do would change how he loved the other, and would not make him look and see her instead.

   Cursed are the women who love and are not loved in return, theirs is the worse of all fates out of those of the seen and unseen world, and cursed are those who chance to love another of a different world, where such is forbidden and will only end in longing, dying death. Cursed are the women who are strong enough to let the men they love, love another, they die proud deaths and haunt the souls of divorced lovers. Cursed are the demons and the angels, they know what it means to love till it hurts, to love enough to die alone.

But ah! What how. How sardonically beautiful this curse of the heart, human or other, that binds one to another, lover or fighter, that is the sole responsiblant for unrequited loves and the making of strong young men and women with hearts and souls of stone, who have learned to look and not feel.

   Tales such as this end well almost more than never, but see now what an undoubting heart can do. As the man lay grieving so did open the eyes of his woman and so were healed the hurts of her flesh and banished the wounds of her soul and made gone the afforecursed lies, and so did he return to love again the soul and woman of his heart, and they lived ever long and after in bliss.

   Never did the snow-woman return to the mountains of her birth, but still the grandmothers whisper, and so go the sayings that at the last of repent she who chanced to love a mortal man breathed her life into the dead wife, and watched the lovers secret and hidden, and alone faded into the dawn of the first winter morning.