Nocturnal Reflections

Author: G. Jefferies

At night water reflects

It does this to conceal monsters…

The lake rested inside a vast crater carved in the roots of a mountain. A relic from some long forgotten ice age that sent a glacier advancing over the edge of the cliffs, grinding rock into dust at the foot of an ancient waterfall. The frost giants were now long gone, and water fell freely in foaming cascades edged with green lichen and moss into the pool below. A thunderous tumult sending ripples far out into the distance.

The wizard stood at the edge of a tree line that once furnished the hills in green but now stood in remembrance; skeletal and dead. Petrified and planted in ash with branches bending gnarled fingers to snag unwary travellers.

The water looked cold and foreboding. Home to unseen leviathans, or worse. The latter seemed true. There was something unsettling about the blue-black hue and silence that drifted across the landscape. Both land and water sealed in time after an age of war, leaving death and ghosts to haunt the desolation. Where water met land nothing lived. The mud was black and treacherous. Even the clouds above swirled in anger, forming faces twisted in anguish and glaring ever downwards. He knew unspeakable things lived here.

The Dökkálfar had said as much. “Travel swift, avoiding the deeps; for those of the underworld now dwell in the graves of the past.”

He would not cross the lake.

© G Jefferies and Fictionisfood, 2016. All rights reserved.