IC: Midsummer Rising

[white_flowers]

Midsummer.

Longest day, brightest day, day of celebration for those of the Light and also of the Wild.

It will be a day of great power-- and had once marked the ending of the rising Dark in the world she had once called her own.

But here at the end of all the worlds, she intends to change things. The longest and brightest day it may be, but there is another side to it as well; for at the moment that the sun passes zenith, the time of Light also passes.

So begins the long slow fall into the Dark.

This time, the White Rider means to turn her carefully-gathered power to advantage at that precise moment, bringing the cycle to an entirely different ending -- for everyone.

She is smiling cruelly when she steps out of the forest and starts toward the bar, half-lost in her thoughts and her plans.

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[white_flowers]

once upon a time...
Long ago, so long ago as to have been almost lost to the ages and the mists of memory, a young woman had walked out of her home at night across snow-crisp fields. She had never minded the cold, or been afraid of the dark, and she climbed a high hilltop and there looked up at the cloudless sky and the ice-cold chips of light that were the distant stars.
watch, I can flash across the sky
There she made of the stars not a plea, but a demand. She demanded power, that long-ago woman-- she cried for power, that she might control all who would use her, bend all who would deny her, that she might shape the world itself to her bidding and nevermore be helpless before others' will. And it was power that came to her calling, but not the power of the stars nor of any light-- instead, it was the cold deadly strength of the spaces between, the empty void of the universe that answered her, that devoured her and filled her with the Dark.
A lightning bolt from up on high
And the woman known to those in the bar as Blodwen Rowlands, or sometimes as Anghared of Northgalis, that woman -- the White Rider of the Dark -- had smiled a cold cruel smile and leaped up into the wind of the howling storm that came to her calling, and had left that place, never to return.
And I can crash into myself
Or so she had then thought. Now, however -- now she stands, staring at Raven with wide eyes of a soft delicate blue, swaying on her feet as a dark cloud of purely malign force roils violently overhead, cheated of host and home.
Now a flower blooms in reverse
And as the Dark draws upwards away from her, bound apart by Raven's working, Blodwen-- or is it Anghared, or someone else entirely?-- lifts her shaking hands, looking down at them--at her fragile, powerless, mortal hands.
And a song takes back a verse
"No," she whispers. "No, you can't." But then there is nothing else for her to say, as she collapses softly to the ground.
A photograph fades to white
And as she does, the unleashed power of the Dark coils one last time above the fallen woman-- and then it strikes.