#calamitous snowy mountain

[trainerjoshie]

Love the Pokémon TCG settings illustrated by AYUMI ODASHIMA 🤩

[hadesburns]

there are two lies set before the world, humming with a burning hope too bright to be true, too perfect to ring aligned with reality, spun from the tapestry of time and woven together by the whispers of winds through trees, of light over windowpanes, of waves against shorelines, and the first is this: that love is eternal and stronger than death.

he finds out this is a lie when he is eight years old, the first time his parents bring him down from the snowy mountain he’s come to memorize so well, carrying him from tall ice walls, crystalline barriers that steam out breath and fog like token clouds, all sharp and angular and jagged, barely habitable but home nonetheless. he doesn’t cry or whimper or shy away from the cold or the journey, a silent child, silhouetted onyx soul against a world of ivory snow, bracing himself against the frost the way his parents do, the way his grandparent did, his ancestors and their ancestors, the winter freeze wrapped around their bones, infecting their blood, engraved in their skin, as much a part of who they are and what they are as their heightened gifts, each generation bestowed with the ability and responsibility to maintain balance, order, equilibrium.

for all life, there is death– for all summer, there is winter. they bring him down and travel south with him, south to where the trees gain color, shift from stark, lonely gods to bushes and forests of greenery, where the mornings feel warm and clingy, where the snow melts away and creates puddles, rainstorms, humidity. south, to where a town grows old and a summons from the council demands a balance brought to five whole families, and haneul has to watch as his father sentences them, twenty-nine people in total, old and young, creased and confused, to the unending winters of the afterlife. south, to where his mother explains that life consists of strings between people, between existence and the incorporeal, light and dark, shattered and soft, explains that women give birth to children and spirits dance in shadows and while all life is sacred, all life is delicate. south, where his father scars his irises, brands him with the knowledge that souls are hollow cords and they are the shears to cut them loose.

the first time haneul touches the forehead of a damned man, he is surprised at how easy it is to visualize the thread, loosen it, unravel it, feel it burn down his throat like a heavy, forbidden drink before floating away to the sky, a wayward, monotone balloon. and all that kept that man on earth, his fears, his hopes, his histories, his love…. gone, blinked out of this realm as though nothing more than a forgettable, unimportant dream.

love is not eternal, love is not stronger than death; like life, it is a memory, a single strand in the glowing twilight. and then it fades.

the second lie is one even his own mother believes in, has coated her atmosphere in, sewn into the fabric of her clothing and her skin and the long tresses of her bark-stained hair, something she has been whispering to him on the coldest of nights, in the blinding noontimes, over dinner and daybreak, and summons after summons after summons: balance exists in everything.

he stops trusting these words much sooner than either of his parents or any of his relatives, allowing them to continue on in their folly when it has nothing to do with him, allowing them their cheap convictions, their hopeful ideologies, too stout and rigid as an icicle to speak against it unless confronted or mused over. by the time he is an adolescent, he’s come to understand that death needs no agents, no companions, no assistance; they are not protectors of order against the chaos, they are the chaos, wilted down, diluted thoroughly to be accessed as pawns in a grand game they have no control in, the council-members’ empty promises of protection and acceptance unneeded and, in his opinion, unwanted.

with this revelation and awareness, he makes himself a maelstrom on the inside, a human blizzard patched together beneath the thin film of his bitter flesh, his blood rivers of glaciers, his anger like untapped avalanches, locking his heart and all its sympathies and weaknesses inside a mountain-sized pillar of ice. the spirits do not speak to him, do not care for him, do not want for him, and neither he for them, for even though he fulfills his orders, follows his government, follows his predetermined destiny like the stone-gravel paths leading him all across ansong and grows into the duties and obligations he has been raised for, he knows there is little justice in this, there is little redemption in this.

they all hate him, the people in the south, disgust stuck in their teeth, abhorrence tangled around their tongues, they all expect the gruesome monstrosities in his wake, the havoc and desolation he wears across his shoulders as a shroud to infect their pretty, kaleidoscope live. they kiss prayers to their gods and their spirits and their sanctuaries whenever his horse strides tall and ebony beside their houses, and he ignores the way they spit on his trail once he passes, attempting to cleanse the shadow he leaves. he tries not to grit his teeth too hard, clench his jaw too tight, reign down the pandemonium they so brazenly dare him to, the cold, perpetual stiffness in his body causing the crescent nail marks in his palms to last for days. he is as loathed as death itself, draped in the same shades, the same angles, the same biting cold, and so he must reconcile himself to returned hostility.

it takes less than ten minutes for his father to convince him of the chaos spirits’ better plan for the world, convince him that what is happening now is worse than whatever could be happening, the multitude of possibilities they’ve been shutting out for hundreds of years, convince him that perhaps it was a mistake to lock the chaos away and disdain it. the world is uneven, disproportional, drenched in illusions it cannot seem to break free from, and only haneul and his father have seen through these deceits– no one else wants to be enlightened, the education too drastic for their malleable senses, their desperate dependencies to old traditions and tar-spewing ghosts making them delicate, inadequate, feeble.

so when the summons of a different sort comes to the winter home up on the mountain peak, a call for the only son of their calamitous lineage to once again venture south, this time alone, this time for life instead of death, for hope instead of corpses, he exchanges nothing more than a glance with his father. it’s come far too late now; he’s already unveiled the lies of the world, unraveling their plots and ploys like yarn, snipped away the dizzying filth of their summer-born pollution.

he’ll answer the edict. and they’ll wish he never did.