SciFi and Fantasy Stories: Death of Seasons

The little girl ran through the autumnal wood as fast as she could fling her small frame, the leaves and damp twigs crunching beneath her Wellingtons, a huge grin on her face. She could hide anywhere with one hundred. So much better than her brother Joey, who would only count to forty-four. Alena was a bold child and gave no thought to getting lost as she pushed through holly bushes and ducked past bracken. If only she could get to the deepest bit, that bit where everything was still like thousand-year-old temples, then no-one would find her. Alena’s cheeks glowed with pleasure at the thought of burrowing down under a bush somewhere secret and safe whilst Joey and Daddy blundered about looking for her, how funny it was to outsmart them with her smallness and stillness. She wove though thorny bushes, ducking low to keep the twigs out of her tangled mousy hair. Scrambling over an ivy-covered log and leaving a great gouge of pulpy wood with her heel she broke out into open woodland again and ran for a clump of trees.
She nearly ran over the dead woman.

Seeing her Alena’s tummy went tight and she couldn’t run any more. She could tell the lady was dead because she wasn’t moving at all, not even breathing, and no-one could be that thin and survive. Her skin was the colour of pale fungus on tree trunks but it looked glowingly white against the fallen leaves. Dark hair streamed out behind her like oil. Alena thought she was very beautiful. She stepped forward a little, still breathing hard, her breath making little warm puffs of mist in the sharp air, and reached out to touch the dead lady’s face.
“Do not touch her.”
Alena jerked her stubby hand away and stared around. Like the game she played making pictures out of layers of tree branches or odd shadows on the wall, as soon as you looked that way he was suddenly there. The bark-patterns on the tree became shadows on his ivory skin, dark patches on his coat, a thin branch became the shadow of his arm, ridges in the bark his lips. “She is not of your kind.” His voice was like the sound of a tree when you pressed your ear to a branch high up and the wind blew, deep and creaky and whispery all at once. She thought he sounded very sad.
“Why isn’t she in a coffin?” she asked, looking at the man. He was all long and spiky like Jack Skellington in Joey’s video, but instead of skull holes his eyes were just huge and round without any whites to them, like a crow’s. She thought he was very beautiful, then remembered that for men the word was handsome. He didn’t look like any of the princes in the books, though, he was strange and beautiful like the shapes of trees. He stared at her for a while with those big jet orbs, then looked at the lady, his brown hair gaining highlights like spun copper and gold in the light.
“She would not want trees to be killed for her,” he said in a voice like the wind blowing in a valley full of leaves “She will join the earth soon enough.”
But she looked so cold, Alena thought, all huddled up with nothing to cover her, then realised that was silly. Dead people were cold anyway. She curled her small fingers into her sleeves to stop them tingling. The skinny man was looking at her again. He must be much taller than Daddy. She thought that if a strong wind came up and made the trees thrash he would be whipped away like a piece of grass since nothing seemed to hold him to the ground. A shimmering like a single strand of gossamer across a sunlit path made her gasp, following what had seemed to be shadows on the trunk behind him to discover near-invisible limbs like those of a gigantic dragonfly. The lady had them too, Alena looked for her wings and traced the delicate veins that blended so well with the lip of shadow edging each fallen leaf. The lady’s were easier to see, death had brought a yellowish tinge to them like pondwater.
“Are you fairies?” Alena asked. She looked at his long, delicately tapered ears. “Or…elves?” He looked like an elf, she reasoned, like one of the elves from Lord Of The Rings, not the Santa ones, all quiet and noble with long hair, even if it was a bit messy. In the pause before he answered Alena could hear crows calling far away. Here the woods were still as though in mourning, the occasional leaf dropping like a tear.
“We are - she was - Ysofaraii.” The word was breathed like the impact of one dry leaf against another. “There are no elves now, there are not enough trees.”
More silence. Alena breathed in the scent of damp leaves and old wood, the smell of yesterday’s rain. Her clothing looked garish to her now; he wore many colours in his mottled coat, gold and greens and oranges and a thousand shades of brown, but they all blended in, even his belt which looked red was the brown of polished wood and his dark boots and leggings were like damp timber. She felt ugly like a plastic bag caught in a bush. Beside them the branches nodded and dropped leaves like yellow coins. Even the dead lady seemed to stand out less, her skin the colour of the underside of a brown leaf. Alena gazed at her. She didn’t look old at all, but she wasn’t wounded. The lady’s nut-brown skin was smooth and intact.
“Why did she die?” she asked at last.
“She died in her sleep. We are autumn creatures, children of the cold, and the summer seems to end later and later each year. We crawl into the cool earth to sleep out the summer months but it was too long…too long asleep and not enough food left in her. I begged her, pleaded with her to wake up, shaking her, but I was so weak. I had to go and seek food and when I came back she was…cold. She never saw the winter.” It was almost like he didn’t understand. Alena knew a little about summer getting longer, it was Global Warming which was something on the news about there being so many cars that the stinky exhausts were heating up the Earth. She thought about how they used Daddy’s car all the time and felt bad and very sorry for him. The lady’s skin looked even darker now, veined and translucent like a dried Chinese lantern flower, all crumpled. Her wings had the texture of baking paper and were crumbling in coffee-coloured flakes around the edges. They had been such beautiful wings it made her want to cry. Even her hair was turning to terracotta dust like the rot inside an oak. The man went on: “I did not know what had happened at first until I remembered tales of my kind dying from long ago. I dragged her out here from our long burrow so that she could become earth. I know there should be words to say but I do not know them. I had thought the other ysofarii had simply disappeared, gone North - maybe some did - but now I know that most must have died, died in their burrows as summer stayed too long. We did not die before, why does this happen? Why does it change?” His voice sounded like a branch breaking, its fibres twisting and splintering. Alena leant away, uneasy to be asked such a thing by a grown-up. She tried to remember what Mummy explained about see-o-two but the ideas wouldn’t stick together so she shook her head like she didn’t know, feeling like a liar inside. He didn’t seem to notice, he was making a thin noise in his throat like wind across the treetops, like shrieking in a whisper. It pulled at her heart.
“Was she your wife?” the girl whispered, because her voice sounded ugly too and she thought it was right to whisper when people were upset.
“Wife…” he murmured “…yes, she was my wife. We say shu thiaste, one who shares the heart.” He fell silent and gazed as the woman went almost black, the skin taut and shiny like a mummy pulled from a bog, her hair and wings all crumbled away. Alena felt sick until she saw the way the sun shone through the covered skeleton, amber like through thick stained glass. Then she just admired the bones like something carved in a church. She looked at the man again, at his still face, all sharp lines like a bird and big eyes.
“You’re not crying,” she observed. The ysofarii’s wings shimmered as he looked, trembling with the breeze. She saw his long pale fingers shaking too.
“No,” he said as the skin bulged tight across the skull, “that is not what we do.”

“Alena! Alena come on, we have to go home! Alena, where are you?”

The man’s head snapped round so fast it was like he’d never moved. Alena looked apprehensively too. Daddy was calling in the woods and she didn‘t know what he’d think. He didn’t like it when she looked at dead things, she knew that, he said they were dirty even when they were pretty like the dead magpie in the road. She bit her lip.
“I have to go.”
The ysofarii nodded. The sunlight’s slant had changed while they’d stood, dimming. Alena crashed off through the woods and looked back only once at the sad, strange man. He had knelt and put his hand on his wife’s body and she saw it glisten with frost and fall apart in a tumble of soft flakes like ash. The dark petals blew away as he stood up and looked at her. For a moment his wings were like water, then he was gone. Alena almost ran straight into Daddy and squealed as he picked her up.
“Where’ve you been, eh, little one?” Alena scrubbed her hand through his beard, thinking. Daddy hefted her weight and caught sight of something over her shoulder. “I wonder if those are eating mushrooms…”
Alena twisted in his arms and looked. “No, they’re bits of bone,” she told him. “An eso-fairy died.”
Daddy frowned, put off investigation by his daughter’s morbid imaginings. “They’re probably only snowdrops,” he said brightly, turning to carry her to the car where her brother was waiting. “Maybe it’ll snow soon.”
Alena knew he had it all wrong, you didn’t get snowdrops in autumn when winter was coming, you got them in spring before it was summer. She hugged tight to Daddy’s neck so she couldn’t feel sad and watched the points of whiteness get smaller with every step the grown-up took.