A woman wearing a yellow raincoat over her white dress came up to me, as I lay bleeding out in the abandoned streets. The chill of the ice drained my consciousness, and the glow of the sunset faded as I heard her speak.

“It's another one… hopefully this soul will sing.” She muttered under her breath before looking into my eyes. Every thing else in my vision faded, yet in that grey haze her eyes were still there.

“Tell me who you are and how you got here.” Her voice shaped around me as the fog slowly faded, and the world became monochrome. I felt like I left my body. The woman became a towering tree as a voice creaked from its branches.

“First, start with your name.”

A strange but comforting voice sounded in response. The voice was like nothing I imagined, or perhaps it was what created my imagination. When it spoke, I instantly understood who I was, the voice was me.

“I am Garry Vrenturch.”

I live in an old, small, and desolate city called, Gullnain. Gullnain sits with the mouth of the Lauin river to its south, the Great Yixlna lake to its west, and the forested Golden mountain to its North. All of which creates a natural boundary that seems to isolate the city from the world. Yet, also give it its reason to exist. Despite the fact that almost half of the year is winter.

Gullnain seems to have always existed in some form or another. 1,000 years ago it was a city on the mouth of a gold mine. Before that, it was a fishing and boating town, earlier than that it was a trading nexus and before that a yearly stop for the nomads that used to live here. Now it lives as an ever-shrinking port city, as most similar cities who invested in industry a century ago do.

Cities like mine tend to have their own legends and taboos, quite unique to their surrounding areas. It is mostly due to a mix of Gullnain’s size and solitude that these legends still exist. There have always been rumors of ghosts, sorcerers, strange creatures, and hidden religions. Yet, everyone has a story about the Winter Eye.

In Gullnain, the sun in winter has always seemed like an alluring bait. The brighter it is, the more hospitable the outside seems. But it is then, the second you bite it and go out, the facade crumbles. In Winter out here, just standing outside for a minute is enough for your body to go numb. The warm sun that you expect, is not the one that you see. It is an Eye that illuminates an illusory playground that is cold enough to kill. Yet, the Eye hangs there, waiting for a fish to take its bait and run. It doesn’t care how long it will take, because someone always bites. If you do, you will never know how far out you have gone. It is only when the Eye closes that you realize that you are lost. Then, the net made by sharp wind and suffocating temperature will enclose around you, taking something from your soul. Your only solace is that that sacrifice will not kill you, by itself. If you find warmth, you might survive.

You are wrong if you believe that ignoring the Winter Eye will keep you safe. Once you know of the warmth of the sun, you have already unknowingly become its target. If you are lucky, you will die before your sacrifice.

Don, my best friend, and neighbor, was a detective who was somewhat successful. It has been two weeks since anyone has seen him. He was best at working on the smaller, nonviolent, crimes, as well as thefts. This made him quite a few enemies, perhaps that is why he went missing. That is what everyone else believes, at least publicly. Yet I, like other natives of this city, always have a gnawing in the back of my mind when someone disappears in winter, constantly reminding me of the Eye.

He was never a superstitious person, always believing in a rational reason for any unknowns. Any rumor had its explanation, and all magic was an illusion. Don wasn’t always that way, though. I remember when we were still boys, and he would cower at passing shadows, thinking that they might have been some strange creature. When walking, he would make sure to never step on a crack. This changed when his parents divorced, and he left Gullnain, with his dad, for Kansafornia. Yet, he would always come back in the summer.

I remember when we first met again, a year after the divorce. My older sister, Phel, told me that Don was coming back for the summer. She had overheard one of our mom’s conversations with Don’s mom, Nora. The next day I waited at the window for him. Finally, at about noon, I saw Nora walking with him. When I saw Don that day, the first thing that I noticed was how he no longer stared at the ground when walking. At that moment, I thought, ‘I didn’t know Don had an older brother.’ He was almost an entirely different person.

 It didn’t take him long to remark on the absurdity of this ‘backwater’. I was confused back then, but now, when looking back, it seems as if he was angry at his mother and everything that he thought represented her. Yet three years later, when she was diagnosed with leukemia, it was something he came to regret. That year was a frantic one for him. I remember that he wanted to help take care of Nora, but his dad was reluctant to let him go. According to him, he ran from home a couple of times to try to get to his mother. I guess at that age, it is hard to understand how far ‘half a country’ actually is.

That summer, he barely left Nora’s side when he came back. Something that took a few years for me to truly understand. That year Nora became involved with the Dead Butterfly, an old weird local religion. One that bordered on being a cult if you didn’t know Gullnains long history as a city-state, 1,000 years ago. Long story short, there were a few religious civil wars between the Seeing Crows and the Wilting Sun Church. As they fought, they gradually shrank while the Dead Butterfly secretly grew in strength. It is this secrecy that allowed the religion to survive and come to prevalence back then, some members infiltrated the other religions. It was through their design that the Wilting Sun church ambushed the Seers. The two fought hard, and the Wilting Sun came out on top, but the mantis hunting the cicada didn't see the oriole.

As for what that peculiar religion believes in, it is hard to know, outside of a mix of a few old and modern rumors. If you believe those rumors, they believe that our universe was created from the dead dreams of a butterfly. Or, perhaps a man gradually metamorphosed into a god. They do have a few rituals, one is the New Year's sacrifice when summer ends. Sacrifice something that was once dear to metamorphize into a new person and truly become part of the religion, or something. When Nora recovered, she credited this ceremony. It was a week later when Don’s dad died in a car accident. Don went from being ecstatic about his mother’s recovery to being devastated by his passing. I don’t remember much about this, outside of being suspicious of the aforementioned New Year’s sacrifice.

Nora too died seven years ago. A year after my mother did. I was still in high school when my mom passed. I was devastated, but Don and Phel were there for me. Phel decided to skip going to college to take care of us. I had trouble with the rest of my years in high school. In the end, I decided to not go to college and joined the local museum as a curator. The pay is not much, but I don’t really need or want more than food, shelter, books, and my computer. 

Earlier today I had gotten a curious artifact to document. A clay tablet from the early days of the Withering Sun Church. It recorded a tale that I hadn’t seen before. Besides the archeologists' notes, the only thing that tipped me off to its identity was that it began with the standard greeting of the church. At least the one of that time. I believe the translation of what it read went like this:

‘You who have awe in the waning sun.

You who fear the winter rope.

You who know nothing of life.

I greet you, stay, and listen to my story.

It was the twentieth night of winter when this happened.

The Wilting Sun had disappeared when I left my house.

As I walked, a fiery stone enticed me.

Its glow illuminated the fairy’s world.

Its glow illuminated my fist as I grasped.

Its glow illuminated my path.

A path into trouble I did not know.

I showed the stone to my wife.

She remarked. “How nice, can I have it?”

I gave it to her as she disappeared.

Her image clear in the burning facade of the stone.

I asked a nearby seer for help.

He asked to see the stone.

When I refused, he told me that he couldn’t help.

I asked…’

It was there when the text became unreadable. This is how confessions were formatted in that church. If you did something wrong, or if something strange happened to you, you, or a priest, would carve what happened on a piece of wood, and the church would introduce the carving to a wood-eating fungus, or, very rarely, termites. That carving would then be placed in the sun to slowly wither away. The wrong and evil captured in the wood, trapped to degrade into nothing. When it is gone, the wrong is forgiven. If the wood never rotted, then the evil was not forgiven.

The Withering Sun Church kept only its most important documents and stories on clay tablets. They believed that hardened clay withered slower than parchment. Every once in a while a new tablet will show up, but those are usually treasury reports or new church decrees. I have never seen a confession on clay. In this context, the fact that this confession was carved into something near permanent, makes this tablet feel more like a curse than a plea for forgiveness. 

This contradiction inspired me to go through the archeologist’s report once again.

‘A clay tablet found on the east side of the Rose mountain, part of the Golden mountains. Found in dig sight, Rose a24. Rose a24 seems to be a graveyard used by the Withering Sun Church for the community that lived near the Rose mountains. This tablet was found in the grave of a member of the Withering Sun Church, specifically grave 17. In grave 17 we found the bone fragments of an adult male resting on his side, with his hands under his head. This is in line with the practices of this church. Found in the grave was a clay tablet 8.3 cm from the skull of the grave's resident. The text on the tablet reads … Also found in the grave was a large crystal of rose quartz. The crystal is 3.4 cm wide and 17.6 cm tall. The quartz was placed in a ceramic jar. 5.2 cm behind the grave's owner. This ceramic allows us to date this grave between 3600-3670, 600 years ago…’

Attached to the front of the archeologist’s report was the list of all the people working on the dig site, a series of photographs showing its layout, and a statement that this was the first of 16 artifacts that the Gullnain Museum of Local History had bought from dig site Rose a 24. After combing through the archeologist’s report, I confirmed the validity of the artifact's authenticity, cataloged it, and went to put it in storage.

 The storage room is in the basement, and it is huge. There are hundreds of shelves filled with various numbered boxes. The dim room’s white walls have an orange glow due to the 80-year-old lightbulb, which is so old that it is practically an artifact in itself.

I squeezed through the cluttered shelves until I got to the Rose mountain section, and put it in the vacancy that fit its number. A shudder rose up my spine when I turned around. I quickly checked the time, only to see that it was 5:30 a.m. I had to hurry home before the sun rose. I did not want to risk falling into the Eye’s dominion today.

After clocking out, I put on my winter coat and searched my pockets for my LED flashlight. With it in my hand, my mind wandered back home. The lonely morning streets caused me to think back. 

My investigation into his disappearance wasn’t getting anywhere. Phel was also asking for information, she is coming home for winter break tomorrow. I glanced at the moon and realized it would soon be day. I sped up, careful to get home before sunrise. The fact that I believed and scheduled my life around this ‘superstition’ always made Don laugh. Perhaps it was that thought that caused that letter to arrive. When I returned home, I saw a letter that was slid underneath my door. At first, I was going to throw it away, but it was ‘from Don’. At least that was what was written on the face of the pale white envelope.

ElijahRyne

Hello! The author notes in this series will be a bit sparse, but there are a few things to mention. 1, the chapters will be around 2,000 words. 2, this is a bit of an experiment so please give your thoughts in the comments, I will also do my best to answer any questions you have there. 3, thank you for reading! It means the world to have others listen, or in this case read, to my stories, even if there is only one or two others who see this. Thank you!