For Love Of The Snow Goddess

She had run downstairs to try to catch them and ask them what they wanted, yet when she had opened the door, her beloved older brother was laying on the step instead.

The runaway himself didn't know what to make of it. He had some snow burns, but he barely remembered how he got them. He barely remembered anything about his time alone in the snow. But every night when he slept, he dreamed of a beautiful woman with pale skin and long, flowing white hair like a waterfall, and eyes as blue as the deepest oceans. Soon she came to occupy his waking thoughts too: he would sit and wonder about her, about where she had come from and how she had saved him when he'd been so far from home. She was almost goddess-like, he mused, then his eyes widened a little as he remembered what he had thought as he had been lost. Yuki-Onna, the Snow Woman. Could the Goddess of all things winter have saved him?

He shook his head and dismissed the notion from his head, labelling it a childish fantasy. After all, there were no such things as Gods and Goddesses, especially not stunningly attractive young snow women who were far more likely to take the life of a lost traveller than save it. But still...who could it have been, if not her?

The more he thought about it, the more it began to occupy his attention every day. Becoming withdrawn from his family, he retreated to his room and tried to work it out. Yet no matter how many different angles he looked at it, there was no way that some equally lost woman would have saved him, and if the Goddess didn't exist, then what exactly did save him?

He started to take long walks. His mother watched him go anxiously every time, willing desperately that he would come back.

He would walk wherever he wanted, wherever his feet took him. They took him some strange places, yet never did he get lost as he tried to. Somehow he would always see something that he could recognise and that would guide him home. And the snow didn't seem to fall as heavily or as often as it used to; there were no great blizzards any more. Spring was coming.

Over the year he slowly came to forget the Goddess, yet something of her seemed to lurk in his subconscious. He would shy away from relationships with other girls, because somehow they didn't match quite what he was looking for, without knowing what it even was that he was looking for. Yet to all intents and purposes he returned to normal. He got a job in the store of the small town serving customers. And over time the townsfolk forgot about the mysterious circumstances of his reappearance in the Winter and stopped looking at him strangely or talking behind their hands to one another as he walked past. After all, he seemed fine now and nothing untoward was happening around him any more.

And yet, by late Autumn, something seemed to be stirring at the back of his memory. He would dream about a person he was sure he knew, yet he could never remember their face. As the season drew to it's close, the dreams got stronger. He was sure he knew this person, and he certainly wanted to see who they were, but his mind refused to show the face of the stranger, as if that knowledge was something he should no longer see.