[I] A weathered old soul teeters along the Limbic Glacier. A tiny pinprick against the vast ivory, he places one foot in front of the other, clawing at the rock-like ice for strength. The icy wind tears at his parched skin while matted hair dances savagely upon the deep ponds of his vacant eyes. Scathingly, he squints through the lashing hail out into the marble glare, searching for a path less brutal.
From high above, nestled on a cloud, the ice-bound deluge of Limbic would resemble an albino serpent, lodged between rock in frozen slumber, lain from horizon to horizon. Now, in actuality the glacier does shuffle onward, ever so slowly, and while it does it sheds a skin of water; enough to endure but never to quench. Like all beautifully dangerous things, such a phenomenon as the Limbic Glacier is incredibly volatile, a white thunder that might crack at any moment. Until it does, the icy snake scales the landscape in short shallow fractions.
Towering dark mountains marshal the glacier. They rise unmoved, monitoring the tense procession with eager threats of rock and pelt. Beyond them, in the soaring distance, the sky drops hints of overwhelmingly vast freedom into the closed arena. The geography wears the inviting cosmos about its praecipes but idles, standing in the way, violent and oblivious.
As he potters dismally, the man’s mind wanders through the decades to warm and regular embraces. Cherished, nourished and protected. From somewhere between the banks that bind the glacier he hears his new-born cry warm his mothers heart. The sound strikes like a gunshot as it ricochets through the years, invisible and ghostly, lost on the glacial plain.
The silent migration along Limbic is exclusively unforgiving. Titanic pressure from deep below warps the terrain. He navigates a broken chess board, tiles askew, raised and overlapping, impeding progress and forcing him to struggle over and around a sea of icy-bergs. Some sections have cracked apart and ground slowly into oblivion.
Amongst the many mouths of the frozen beast, clumsy footwork can be heard. Metal cleats smash against the ice accompanied by the occasional grunt and heavy breath. Frigid mounds crunch like bones, each step a joyless victory, felt only at the knees; his feet joined forces with the ice months ago. Without exerting itself slightly, this silent steadfast avalanche butchers the Achilles’, burns the thighs and splints the shins. The ancient ruins of icy kingdoms lain with fissures like slashes on the forearm of a fallen god. For all the furs that hang about his frame and keep him warm he pays dearly with percolation. To drain him further yet, he pulls a weighty wooden sled along the uneven banks of frost, tethered securely around his waist with hemp. The damps underwood of the sled lacerates the glaciers back. The frosty beast screams a painful reverb around the valley as the abrading ice tumbles inside our man’s ears like tiny stones in a metal drum. It is infuriating and twice already on his journey he has raged at it for silence but none has come.
As of yet, the heavy sled remains devoid. But nevertheless, it is a vessel, and a vessel must be filled with cargo. To notice subtly in the man’s behaviour, amongst his vacancy and planning, his eyes scan the entire field of ice every few seconds, loitering in places before darting off to scour a yonder, pausing around slush pools; faltering on a patch of hoarfrost. Furthermore, his journey in one direction along the glacier, and decidedly not the other, must amount to something.
Eyeing the rock debris as it swirls into the frozen ground, he wonders at the nature of good things and the nature of bad things and how all things are grey until someone picks the ying from the yang and calls it so. The sun brought life but it’s destruction will bring death. With one hand it gives joy. With the other, cancer. Civilisations have worshipped it and in doing so sacrificed their children for it. It warms the heavens and thaws the world but it is the fiery pits of hell that heat it first. The sun brings hope each morning and takes it away each evening. Pain is the price we pay for being alive, quintessential to the human experience, and the sun is to blame for that, too. [II] Now as that sun warms the hibernating beast’s back, it sweats out glacial milk in shallow ulcers. Pilgrimage is trickier when the beast is slicker – so; dangerously thirsty and depressingly sticky, the old weathered man pitches down to drink. He empties one pool quickly, his lips descending with the surface in betrayal until they kiss the glacier. He bares his teeth and gnaws at the circumference of the ice-bowl, chewing down it’s moisture.
Swinging his face across the glazen track he sets to draining another twinkling lagoon that sits on the surface like a burst blister. He leans over on all fours, like a baby giraffe at a watering hole, and begins to slurp. His eyes are only a breath away from the water and he can feel it’s chill inside them; but even know they do not rest.
They work alone for him even when he falters, and wear the watery concave in which his face sits like a visor, surveying the glacial compound deep below. Down in the depths where the blue ice twists black, they register the tiny beat of a silent prism glowing like a baby jellyfish, pulsating like a rainbow, at the bottom of an ocean frozen solid.
From weathered old man lain across the glacier he switches suddenly to albino alligator, camouflaged and predatory. The hunter’s pupils dilate for the spectrum to shine inside and within a beat, his world detaches from both history and continuum as he implodes into the ice like an arctic fox. He slaps the water from the pool and untangles his pick from the ropes around his torso, strapped tight underneath his layers.
Now he is smashing into the the glacier as if it were no longer a thing to fear but a thing in the way. He bores through it and stops for nothing, digging through the chunks of ice and sweating like a rhino. Shards like shattered glass fly across the sky behind his slump as he descends maddeningly into the glacier’s framework.
Dizzied by days of hacking, he reaches the prism: a perfect diamond born of ice, plucked from the crust like a verruca from a heel. His fingers dance numbly over the yarn that joins his furs, exposing his torso to the elements. Tenderly, he holds the gem to his bare chest and whimpers. His eyes flutter for just a second, his aching jaw and shoulders fall slack and he drifts absently to his knees, burrowed within the glacier as the spectrum lights the inside of his eyelids.
