The Gang of Five

Beyond the Mysterious Beyond => The Arts => The Written Word => Topic started by: Fyn16 on March 08, 2017, 08:39:49 PM

Title: Spring Green
Post by: Fyn16 on March 08, 2017, 08:39:49 PM
Hello, everyone!

My campus is currently hosting a fiction writing contest, with contestants required to write a short (800-1500 word) story or poem to the theme "Spring Green." The following is my entry, which I wrote in about forty-five minutes (many thanks to Rhombus for proofreading it!). I submit it here, for your consideration and perusal! I don't think it's my best work, but I guess that's what happens when you spend two years writing nothing but dinosaurs.  :lol
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Spring Green

Spring comes to the world, Spring Green, reaching up through the snow, brushing the ice from the branches of trees with warm, soft fingers. With a quiet, powerful suggestion it coaxes the flowers from their buds, preening their delicate petals with the skilled, discerning hand of an experienced watchmaker, or a seamstress. It reaches up to the sky, parting the gray clouds, spilling the warm sunlight upon the starving land below. Thus the land is nourished and rejuvenated by its arrival.

He notes it, too, he who walks the well-trodden paths of the woods on surprisingly delicate hooves. He sees the arrival of the new season, sprouting from the ground just as his new antlers grow, spreading from the humblest of nubs into what will one day be reaching, sprawling, triumphant statements. “See my magnificence,” they will whisper in challenge, “I have lived another year, and my very existence demands your respect.” But for now they are small, soft, velvety. These are not the accouterments of a ruler, but in time, they will be.

This creature, this monarch of his wooded domain roams this forest each day, and each day he sees these things, sees Spring’s touch as it clears away the snow and ice, hears its voice as it breathes its warm, soothing breath, and hears its song in the sounds of a world reborn from the cold.

Summer spreads its wings and hovers over the world, majestic and powerful. Its strength rivals even that of the buck, his antlers now fully-grown. He admires Summer, admires its strength and its beauty as he traverses golden oceans between islands of green woodland. He cherishes the long days and lazy afternoons, but also knows to respect Summer, for its touch is a double-edged sword. Its warmth is comforting, but lethal. Its heavy, hot days bring with them the cool caress of rain, falling to the ground to quench its parched surface. But the rain, in turn, brings storms.

Dark, ugly, rolling clouds sweep over the fields like a thick blanket. Thunder shakes the ground with its awesome roar and lightning strikes without warning, bolts of light that lash out with a speed and fury unmatched by any natural predator. Where the land cries for water, this lightning strikes without mercy. From its touch springs fire, a small, bright creature that quickly grows to become a roaring, lumbering, hungry beast. It leaps from the ground, spreading from wood to grass to field, its appetite insatiable. It craves life. Some of the monarch’s kin fall, but he does not. He has seen fire before, and understands its power.

When the fire finally dies, it leaves nothing behind, the ultimate grazer. He moves on, there is nothing left here. And when the sun finally shows itself again, he welcomes the Summer heat. Better to respect it than to hate that which he cannot change.  

Fall creeps up upon the world. Its presence is barely noted at first, and it makes itself known in different ways. Sometimes it can be seen as fruits ripen, their soft, plump bodies food for the monarch and his kind. Other times it is the crisp, white edges that grow around the leaves and the grass each morning as the monarch wakes up to the bite of cold now present in the air. But when the leaves take on the hue of the sun, their warm colors a final expression before falling to the earth, Fall’s presence is known to everyone, and the monarch is no exception.

His antlers stand proud, bearing the scars of a hundred stories. One scratch is the young buck who challenged him. A gouge marks his escape from the fire. A chipped end, a hectic river crossing. As Fall arrives, he remembers these things as he walks through a vibrant, dying forest. Leaves fall upon him and around him. He tastes sweet fruit and crisp, cool water, but at the back of his mind, he knows these things are fleeting. Fall is beautiful, true, but it is also a portend of something far worse to come.                                            

Winter falls upon the world. The white clouds of summer return, but this time they are grey, brooding. They move close together, as if to huddle against the coming cold, and in doing so hide the sun, so that it may not see the death and dark days that are to come.

And they come. The monarch hears it, Winter’s fierce, chilling howl, a sound that pierces flesh and bone in the shrill screaming of the wind. The scattered flurries that once drifted so peacefully down from the sky become an unforgiving swarm of stinging, unrelenting insects as the howling wind drives them on. Snow smothers what little green is left; it becomes the land’s burial-shroud. Ice chokes the rivers, reaching out with skeletal hands across the water’s surface. The nights are cold, but with a cold that reaches past the skin, deep down into the bones and into the soul. Steam escapes the monarch’s open mouth- it is his livelihood, scattered to the bitter air as he stands quietly beside the dry, cracked bark of a dead tree. His once proud antlers are but a memory. One is gone. The other, withered and cracked, resting above his right eye, will fall off soon, too. He knows this, but the loss of a part of him, no matter how temporary, is still a loss. The biting wind and cold snow weigh heavily on his mind as the nights grow long.

Perhaps this winter will be his last. For some, it is. They sleep, unaware as Winter reaches down and spreads its delicate touch over their eyelids with one soft sweep. Winter is cruel to the living, but it treats the dead with a strange, unexpected form of grace. Every night the monarch expects never to wake the next day, but each morning he is greeted by the same cold, the same white world.

Everything looks the same under Winter’s veil. Every tree, every river, every day is exactly the same. The spectrum of the seasons has faded, leaving behind a ghost of itself, and that is how the monarch feels as he walks the same forest that held such rich sights and sounds not long ago, traverses the sea of grass that once stood proud but now slouches, defeated under the Winter’s all-encompassing embrace.

He feels it will never end. He always does.

And then he sees it. Sometimes it is the first sign of velvet above his own eyes, the shape of a bud pushing back against the frost strangling its branch, the bright, defiant patch of green beneath a rapidly-fading snowbank. He hears the steady drone of water, the chorus of birds as they return to their roosts. He wakes up and feels a familiar, friendly touch upon his skin, and he knows the worst is over.

Winter clouds retreat from the sky, and the sun and the grateful monarch below return to their domains as Spring Green returns once more.
                       
Title: Spring Green
Post by: LBT90321 on March 08, 2017, 08:56:57 PM
I like youre fanfiction
Makes me feel like its spring break already
Title: Spring Green
Post by: ADFan185 on March 08, 2017, 09:23:35 PM
Amazing job very well written and you did a awesome job. I hope you win the contest