Stuff I have written for school.

Mountains are cool.

("The opening chapter to a serialised novel." I have no idea how, because the only character is DEAD, but I might continue this? I doooon't knoooow.)

(spot the Silmarillion references)

Towering high above their surroundings, three peaks rise from the chill earth, screened in mist and gloom and flecks of sleet that have been for centuries trying to batter the mountains back into the ground. Three peaks glower down at the bleak tundra, beneath their imperious selves in both status and height, and the wind shrieks around their craggy summits like when some mad goddess first ripped continents from the stomach of the earth and sculpted the rigid rocks and the world was young. Three peaks dwarf the land. They stand alone and untouchable and mighty in their frozen glory, wreathed in diaphanous layers of lenticular clouds, sky-splitting, they will cut through the troposphere and let the air drain into space and still they will stand grim and mighty as ever.

The mountains shudder; the sky shakingly holds its breath as a flurry of snowflakes storm towards the ground. They swirl in soft eddies, skitter across the cracked and frozen rocks and dislodge the icy stalactites that cling to steep precipices. Icicles cut open snowdrifts, fall like shards of broken glass down, down until they clatter against the frigid and frozen lake.

Cutting through the silence, the muffled crunch of snow being compressed under heavy boots, the rustle of layers of jumpers and a thick winter coat. Laura Atrinke trudges through the sleet, gloved hands tucked into her armpits to protect them from the bitter cold. She has lost feeling in the tips of her ears, the tips of her toes; she focuses solely on placing one foot in front of the other, again and again and again.

Her mind wanders, wanders back to the stories she was told as a child, stories of mountains like these, and of a wild goddess who made the stars, who made light and matter, water and ice, magma and mountains and the insides of planets and gases compressed and spun into spheres, orbits that looped and interlocked, whose voice made tiny sulphur crystals grow around smoking calderas; perfect in each minute detail as thick ash fall from billowing clouds of dust, and each eruption mirrored the earth’s heartbeat, thumping and pounding against rocky walls.

She dismisses the thought with a barely noticeable shake of her head, reminds herself how the earth was truly created, reminds herself of the distant lights of stars, reminds herself that in the time that their light has taken to reach our planet, many of them will have died.

Ice crystals have crept over the glassy surface of the lake in an intricate mockery of veins and arteries and capillaries. They have spread faster than the ferns that nestle amid newly cooled lava flows, they are like inverted fumaroles, and they brought unending winter with them.

The glare from sunlight reflecting off of snow and ice is blinding, the glimmer of frozen water as bright as the shine in a snake's eye; a crystalline glint hidden under cool blue.

Laura’s teeth chatter in the chilly air, her neck itches under layers of wooly scarves. She glances first at the sinking sun on the horizon, then at her digital watch; it reads 4:16 PM. Almost sundown. She quickens her pace, left foot, right foot, left foot-

The ice beneath her feet gives way, cracks, splinters into a thousand shards. She slips, falls, is swallowed up by the gaping hole in the ice, the water soaks through her clothes, weighs her down, chills her to the bone. Maybe she is screaming; she cannot tell over the sound of her blood roaring in her ears and water sloshing and plates of ice cracking. She struggles but a sheet of ice slides over her head and she cannot breathe and it slides away again and-

For a second she stays afloat, gasping for breathe and choking on the cold water-

For a second she desperately grabs at the ice, tries to pull herself up and out-

For a second she resists the tiredness that comes over her, the urge to sleep-

But then her fingers fail her, she sinks down once more and doesn’t even try to save herself, it would be so easy to just go to sleep, it’s not even that cold, and everything begins to fade into black and so she closes her eyes. She doesn’t remember that once the brain subconsciously knows you are dying, you stop struggling and give up. She does not remember the stars. Strange voices in a familiar language wrap around her, she is engulfed in dental fricatives and rolling nasal consonants as she sinks, down, down, down. The lake itself reaches an untold depth, and the biting cold scrapes through the earth's crust and into the asthenosphere, as deep as the roots of the mountains that loom above.

The sun drifts below the horizon; its light is distorted by the atmosphere and streaks the clouds in deep maroon and plum. The day grows dim, the lake becomes a mirror which brokenly reflects the distant stars, hanging in constellate; perfect from so very far away.

It will be weeks before they find the body.