A Whisper in the Ear of the Eternal

Revenir Short Story | Winter falls in love with a mortal

Hello and welcome to the Fiction Section of Notes from the Town Hermit. I write literary and slipstream fiction and fantasy focusing on themes of identity and what it means to be human through a lyrical and poetic writing style. Subscribe for free to enjoy more stories.

You are reading a story from Revenir, an anthology exploring the human experience and delving deep into themes of love, loss, and the search for meaning. Written in a haunting, lyrical style and set in a single fantasy world, this collection is for readers looking for character-driven stories with strong emotional resonance.

AI-generated with Midjourney

She is Winter. She knew no other name.

She had seen the coming and going of the ages, seen empires wane before her eyes as others waxed to take their places.

Year after year, she came upon the frost as the last autumn leaf fell to the earth, bringing with her the first fall of snow. She came with ice riding on a blistering wind, plunging into the narrow-flowing river and banishing memories of springtime as men fled before her.

She did not mind; she embraced the solitude of her season, wrapping loneliness about her as a cloak.

Time was to her as constant as the rhythm of the moon, the tides upon the sea. Its passage mattered little to her.

Until he came.

When first he drew her notice, he was but a thin shadow, one of many passing through the story of the world, a faint mark upon the landscape she had walked for countless eras. But he kept coming back. Daily he walked beneath the snow-laden branches of the trees, spoke to her in soft whispers that grew in strength until his voice was all she could hear in the quiet of the woodland. And she, curious, hesitant, mystified, felt herself captivated.

His footsteps crunched on the fresh-fallen snow she called forth, snapping fallen twigs beneath his feet until his vague outline deepened in her mind like his prints in the drifts.

Before the next waning of the moon, her feet followed after him.

In his footsteps, she tasted of heat and beer and the smell of damp leaves just after sunrise. His scent awoke in her distant memories of freshness and youth, of warm sunbeams dancing amidst clouds of dust. Soon, the vague outline of his mark began to take shape in her mind, no longer an imperceptible trace riding along the wind, but imprinted unto the earth, into solid form.

Thoughts of him came to her unbidden as she flew across the sky. She’d wonder where he lay his head at night and her frosted touch lightened in quiet hopes of softening the storm.

At the ebbing of the frost, when she went to her sleep on the eve of Spring, he told her he would await her return when the last autumn leaf fell once more. And she smiled, because she did not believe him.

But return he did.

She learned to know him by cadence and tone, by the rise and fall of his voice and quickening of his breath as he walked beside her. For her, he painted the days of his life into stories of radiant color. He told her of days spent among the sheep of the pasture, of the warmth of their wool; he showed her hands roughened by the labor of drawing the harvest from the earth. He told her how he loved to walk beneath the trees when the sun had yet to rise, and listen to the sounds of the night. Through his stories, she thought she could see the marvel of a tree coming to bloom, hear laughter and gay chatter across a dinner table, and she knew then to love the beauty of a simple life.

One day as the sun sank below the hills, she looked at him with a question on her lips, and he seemed to read the query in her heart. The glow of the fading light hid his face in shadow, yet set ablaze the brown of his eyes so that they appeared as twin tongues of flame.

He answered that he liked the snow that clung to the branches, that he enjoyed the coolness in the air. He said he cherished winter’s colors and smells, said he didn’t mind the lined, scarred, sometimes frozen earth.

He told her he loved Winter.

“Why?” she asked.

Her eyes searched his for truth and she wanted to believe him, wanted it with the desperation of a blizzard beating upon doorframes, demanding entrance. But for all her years she’s known that men loved Summer best. Summer was young, fresh, beautiful, and kept people from counting the days. Summer brought clear skies and long days beneath a smiling sun, and evenings lit with the glow of a thousand fireflies.

Winter was older, used, weary.

Winter attracted the curious but only for a moment; once they touched the freezing cold, they retreated into their homes, sheltering at a warm hearth, away from her. Oh, she could find joy, wisdom, even a little beauty in winter, but she had never met another who did.

She told him this.

He stretched his fingers forward and brushed the tips of hers. Never had she felt the touch of another being. A tremor ran through her fingertips like fire in her veins, tracing the pathways of her lifeblood, consuming her. She wondered how frail mortal bodies could contain it. Afraid, she drew her hand back but felt his fingers lace with hers and hold it fast.

“And yet to me you are beautiful,” he said.

A hesitant yet hopeful smile lit her pale face. “I do not even have a name.”

“Then I will give you one.”

Eirlys, he called her, named for the promise of a flowering love and coming hope. The name spoke of the springtime she had never seen, of the blossoming within her only he could perceive, and she knew then that she loved him also.

So she allowed herself to bask in his affection. She reveled in his love, waited for him at the edge of her riverbank each winter, and for moments felt like she could be Summer.

And each year as the last leaf drifted to meet its brothers carpeting the ground in gold, she met him at the boundary of the forest where she dwelt. She led him to her cherished alcoves beyond the river where no other feet had trodden. For him, she called forth the first snow, bidding them drift gently that their touch might not harm, but enrapture. She spoke to him of the ages she had seen, delighted to see the look of wonder on his face when she told him of distant lands, and promised someday, they would journey there. She learned to know the rhythm of his heart, every callus on his palms, and how it felt to thread her fingers through his.

Together they wove their lives, and for a season she forgot to be lonely. The people rejoiced at the milder frosts, for wind that no longer pierced the bones.

But he was only ever a whisper in the ear of the eternal, dew of the morn doomed to fade at the sun’s rising. She watched as the years gathered on his body, first as wrinkles lining his face, then as infirmity weakening his limbs. She knew not why a sorrow began to linger in his gaze as he walked beside her, slower now than before. As she flew from branch to tree, he crept behind, and days shortened, for his failing eyes could no longer behold the intricate veins of a fallen leaf or the way the light broke in a thousand pieces through shards of ice hanging from the trees.

“I am sorry for the moments that will not be,” he said in answer to the question in her eyes.

“There is time still.”

“Yet not enough.” He turned his face from her.

She looked at him, and wondered, and did not understand.

One day he did not return, and suddenly she knew the cruelty of time.

She cried out for him, yet no answer came forth. She knew not where he had gone, only that he was. And the world emptied of color in the shape of his absence.

In the years after his passing, she walked among the trees and drifted along the riverbank, waiting, waiting in vain, until grief knitted a dark veil before her eyes, and to her all the world was cast into shadow.

Now she walks the woods alone. The villagers still beg each year for softer frosts, and for his memory she grants winter storms that do not destroy. Every day she wraps herself in memories of Spring, aches for the warmth of Summer, and bears Winter. The world is unchanged. Seasons still come and go. Nations still rise and fall. Yet as the snow piles heavy on the tree branches and blankets the earth in a sheen of white, she realizes to her it will never again be the world she once knew.

He has passed over to unknown lands where mortals travel at the end, and she, doomed to watch every season until time crumbles to nothing, can follow no longer. She visits the secret alcoves where they shared many thoughts. Just once. For that age is ended and she cannot bear to remember, with evergreen memory reminding afresh of what she lost.

She looks in the water and sees her lone reflection, looks down at her hands, and realizes she is Winter. As winter rain streams down her cheeks, she realizes she will never be Summer again.

She is Winter. Of all the seasons, he chose her.

She is Winter. He is gone, and she will never again be anything else.

She is Winter.