Snowflake: A Tale of Love

The life of a wandering bard can be rough. I live day to day, hand to mouth. I
sing tales and stories for my living. Sometimes folk are generous, and I'll earn
enough to put up somewhere for the night. Sometimes hard times come around; when
the prices of meat and fish and bread are too high for peace of mind, nobody
cares for a story. Those are the times I sleep under the stars.

But I am a Bard, of vast talent and unending resources. I don't really live on
meat, fish and bread, and I don't need plush comforts. I live on words and
melodies; I thrive on tales and poetry. And there's no better way to hear the
best than to wander as I do.

I am the famous Azalea Wyatt. You'll have heard of me, though most wouldn't
recognise me. I travel quietly, see? When folk look at me, they'll see just an
ordinary human with a lute and a dusty cloak. No suspicion they are gazing upon
one of the greatest Bards of the Basin. Mostly I give them the usual tales, the
tame stories, the crowd pleasers. The best tales I hear, I save for the most
discerning clients. The comedies, the heartbreakers, tales of the gods. And you,
reader, are one of the more discerning clients. I can tell.

A tale of the gods, shall it be? Agreed. Here is the one about the Snowflake.

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If you've ever looked closely at snow, you'll have noticed something peculiar
about it. Great wet lumps of half-frozen water, isn't it? But catch a glimpse of
a single flake before it melts in your hand, and you'll see some of the most
beautiful patterns ever beheld by mortals. If that effort seems wasted on some
of the most miserable weather conditions ever designed to torment mortalkind,
then perhaps this story will change your mind.

If you've spent any considerable time in the Clarramore Cloud Gardens, you may
have heard the gardeners talking. I suppose it's dull work, trimming and digging
and pruning and planting and not getting very far with it. They tell stories of
Xyl and Trillillial the most. It stands to reason, most of them being feathered
flutterers with an occasional walking sculpture thrown in.

It rarely snows up there in the clouds. The upper levels never see a whisper of
a snowflake, but sometimes down among those soggy lower clouds the temperature
falls far enough for a few flurries. Maybe it's because the gardeners see the
snow so rarely, they've never learned to detest it, though I'm not sure it's
quite necessary to romanticise it instead.

Anyway one day some years ago I was ruining my new leather boots with a stroll
in those drenched cloud gardens, and one of those rare snow flurries came along
by. Perhaps it noticed the excellence of my footwear and couldn't resist the
opportunity to ruin my morning. I found the spice gardeners sheltering in the
greenhouse - it stinks, that place, have you ever noticed how powerful the smell
of welkin can be? - and anyway they were swarming around the stoves and swapping
stories. Here's what I heard.

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One day an unimaginably long time ago, the Elder God Xyl sat alone, brooding.
That is to say, the Great Gears of His Mind were bent upon one rather surprising
object. Not a matter of great mathematical import, this time, nor some idea of
dizzying philosophical depth (though perhaps that last part is debatable): on
this occasion, the endlessly logical Xyl pondered the question of Love.

I know it seems unlikely. If you've ever met any of His shards (and we all
have), you will know how gods-cursed immoveable they are. Perambulating
sculptures, all of them. It's hard to picture the great Xyl Himself spending a
grey afternoon staring at His shoes in a fit of morose despair, but so it was.

He had spent approximately seventeen months in much the same posture, ostensibly
considering the construction of His shoes while in fact His mind turned over the
question of how best to court the Lady of His desires. Here is another curious
fact: no question was too complicated for the formidable intellect of Xyl the
Astonishingly Astute. Ask Him to rearrange the Planes into alphabetical order,
and he would present you with a monstrously sized and monstrously clever
contraption to accomplish that very task. But ask Him to woo an Artiste and He
and all His intellect were stymied.

The Fair Lady was Trillillial, of course. We all know how that story ended. But
for the sake of romance, let's try to forget that for a while, shall we? Bask in
the days of pink skies and soft clouds and sunshine and flowers and all of those
lovely things. Wallow in the sheer dizzying romance of it all. Bask in the
tragic glory of Xyl's despair as He reflected that no Artiste could love a being
so deeply and unalterably rigid, logical and ordered as all knew Him to be.

At last he abandoned the unequal struggle and sent for Isune, sister of His
Fairest Lady. He laid the problem before Her in typically unemotional language.
Being Isune, she naturally produced enough emotion for both of them; but once
She had finished with Her swoonings and sighings and gigglings and all of those
kinds of things, She turned Her own Artiste's instincts to the problem at hand.

"Now, Xyl," She said, and there was a sudden hint of ruthlessness in Her tone
where before She had been a breathlessly enthusiastic, giddy sort of creature.
"You are not at all at a loss, not really. Such an intellect as Yours can never
be subdued! Think harder. My sister must have a gift, something unique.
Something personal, meaningful. I will help with this, but You must conceive of
the idea Yourself." So saying, She wrapped Herself in Her gorgeous wings, all
filmy and laced with purple and pink that day, and seemed to forget the issue.
She drifted and floated and trailed about, and as She did Her wings flushed with
blue and green and gold and silver and every other colour imaginable.

Xyl focused His mind, and ideas began to form. Gifts for an Artiste might be a
tall order for a being of pure logic and order, but as the Lady Isune said, no
question was too difficult for the great Xyl.

As He thought and Lady Isune drifted, the air cooled around them both. The sky,
already grey, grew steadily greyer, and fat droplets fell from the sky. They
froze as they fell, becoming great horrible fat clusters of gloop as grey and
depressing as the heavens from which they fell. Isune came out of Her daydream,
frowning, and gestured. Waves of blue and white and silver and other such pretty
colours began to trail in from the east, shoving the grey clouds before them
until the slate-coloured masses were compressed into the smallest corner of the
firmament. Those lumps of goop were confined, falling only on an uninteresting
part of Lusternia that nobody cared about anyway.

But Xyl raised His head and stared in the direction of the awful grey stuff, and
ordered Isune to cease Her activities. Puzzled, the Lady Artiste released Her
grip and the disgusting greyness came creeping back. Some of it fell on the
great Xyl, poor soul, settling on the crisp fabric of His robes and melting on
the cool crystal planes of His face and hands. He caught three or four of those
lumps of goo and held them in His palm, as His flesh flickered with those
strange colours lucidians go when they are experiencing something akin to
emotion.

"What do you think of this, Isune?" He held out His hand to show Her the pieces
of grey sludge, but as She returned to His side She found they were no longer
sludgy. They were reduced in dimensions to a neater, more ordered, more
manageable size, and instead of a chaotic mess of frozen stuff and
half-wet-and-wet-and-cold, each was now worked into crystallised patterns of
such logical brilliancy that Isune allowed an involuntary gasp to escape Her.

"See, Xyl, I knew You had it in You. Logic has its own beauty, does it not? Now
let us see what Logic and Beauty can do together."

She smiled at the grey patterns in Xyl's palms and the colours faded and paled
until He held collections of pure, dazzling white crystals in His hands. A close
look might have revealed hints of colours in there, too; little bits of purple
and blue and silver and even grey - the nice kind of grey - and all such pretty
shades. She nodded Her feathered head, and Xyl uncurled His fingers and threw
the patterns into the skies. Around them the wet stuff transformed to mimic this
new form. It settled quietly, coating the ground in layers of soft, fluffy
whiteness. Glancing about, Isune smiled again.

"They are all different," She noted. Xyl nodded gravely.

"The formula is quite simple," he stated in his cool tones. "Each construct
begins with a core format and repeats the layout with minute variations until
the structure completes itself. I arranged for nearly infinite formats, so the
chance of any layout repeating within a cycle of eight thousand years or so
should be approximately somewhere in the infinite millions. Of course, there is
a fallacy in that if -" He was silenced as Isune caused a puff of cloud to wrap
itself around His mouth.

"Stop!" She said, giggling. "Save it for Trillillial. I will send Her to you."
And She disappeared in those streamers of colours of which She was so fond,
leaving Xyl standing alone in the snow.

Nobody quite knows what happened next, or not in any detail. That's the way it
should be. Even the Gods need privacy, don't They? But, as I said, we all know
how that story ended. We can assume that Xyl presented His gift, and we can
assume that Trillillial, Lady Artiste, was pleased both with the gift and with
the great Xyl Himself. Have you ever noticed how snow sparkles in the sun? I
heard that the twinkle was Trillillial's contribution to the forming of the
snowflake, and that seems quite likely to me.

Personally though, sparkle or no, I still detest the stuff. It ruins my shoes.