A frozen Star

Children like to make up stories. Everyone knows that, perhaps this is the reason that adults tend to ignore their children's words, words that they think are unimportant and filled with fantasy. It is because of this that they fail to notice when a child actually has something important to say, something that rings with important truths. Children, after all, notice more than anyone else. In fact, it was a child who first noticed the sun's illness.

Letting out a deep sigh, Ten shook herself from her thoughts. She had just begun to notice the feeling leaching from the tips of her fingers and nose. She had been outside too long. If she didn't seek shelter soon she would be in danger of hypothermia, something that happened often to those who lost themselves in their thoughts while wandering around outdoors.

It hadn't always been like this, in fact there had been a time when people could spend hours at a time outside, basking in the sunlight and playing meaningless games. Now though, the sun no longer provided warmth, in fact it no longer produced even the necessary amount of light, instead casting down only a few feeble rays. Rays that refused to sink through a person's skin and warm the blood in the veins, leaving that job to be taken over by fire. Ten hated fire. Fire was cruel and unforgiving. It devoured life and killed emotions. Yet she had no choice but to rely on its heat for survival.

Blinking the ice out of her eye lashes, she carefully reached up, pulling her hood farther down on her head, Setting down her paintbrush and canvas. Carefully pulling on her goatskin gloves, she pulled her coat tighter around her shoulders and picked up her supplies once more, turning and making her way off into the snow and ice covered landscape.

Most people were used to the cold now, barely noticing it when they stepped outside, some even forgetting to put on their bundles of layers before leaving their homes. Those people never returned, although they could be seen in the roads, frozen statues, stuck eternally in whatever position they had met their doom. The streets were grim and stank of death, well actually snow and ice, but Ten had long since come to associate the smell with life's end. She was sure that when it was her turn to knock on death's door, that was what it would smell like. The soft fresh scent of frozen doom.

Her lips felt like chunks of ice when she reached home, it took her a great deal of effort to open the door, her fingers were stiff from cold. The warmth of the inside rushed out at her, enveloping her as she stepped quickly inside closing the door with a click behind her.

"Mom, Dad." She called as she made her way further into the house. " I'm home."

The sound of rushing footsteps could be heard from another room, and then her mother burst through the door, a worried look on her face. " Tenisha." She said sternly. " Where have you been?! We thought...we thought," He voice trailed off as she hugged her daughter, immediately flinching back and brushing away the ice that had come off on her sleeves.

Ten quickly apologized to her mother, using the usual excuse that time had run away from her. She waited until the woman looked slightly more at ease before shaking off her coat and making her way into the living room, where her father sat on the couch huddled under at least three blankets. Like Ten he had never grown accustomed to the new freezing world around them and was unable to escape its chill, even indoors.

The man smiled at Ten as she entered, and she made her way over to him, flopping down onto the couch next to him, the torch on the table in front of them flickered and Ten gave it a dirty look, which her father saw but chose to ignore. Usually he would have lectured her on how important fire was to living in this icy new world, but today he seemed to be too absorbed in his book to bother.

Her father loved books, he drank down their words like unfrozen water, something that was a rare luxury in today's society. Ten had never understood her fathers interest in dry dusty paper and ink, but never mentioned this. After all, it was one of the rare forms of entertainment now. Two years before the world had grown so cold that it was no longer able to sustain the necessary equipment to carry electricity to anywhere but the most high class houses or expensive snow bunkers.

Ten and her family had proved to be too poor to afford electricity and now relied completely on fire to keep warm, as did many other families in the world. There was no more tv, no more radios, nothing remained of the old world's advanced technologies. Even the vehicles had eventually failed due to the cold, leaving no means to travel except by the underground railroads.

For a while she sat there next to her father, listening to her mother rummaging around in the kitchen making dinner. It was hard to get food now, but there were some underground farms and ranches. Some cattle made it out every year and froze, but most were used to feed the remaining people in the city. Plants and anything of that sort were a rarity, but every now and then Ten's mother would return with a basketful of fruits and vegetables in her arms.

When her mother brought the food, Ten ate the small pile of meat in silence, before dismissing herself to her room. Her room looked the same as it had when she was a child, pink carpet and fairy printed wall paper, she had never really felt the need to change it. Pushing back the periwinkle curtains, she gazed outside, carefully not touching the glass that separated her from the outside. The glass made in today's world was thicker, better at combating the cold, but still touching it was enough to give you ice burns.

The landscape outside was as white and beren as ever, showing no signs of life at all. Flickering her eyes upward, she found the sun in the sky, which was just beginning to sink downwards towards the high white mountains. Once, adults had warned her about staring at the sun, telling her that if she looked too long she would go blind. That was back when it had still been strong, shining down on a world full of life and color. Now it was merely a faint yellow ball, feedly attempting to glow through the endless pitch black that was the sky.

She remembered the day it had begun to die like yesterday. It had been a warm summer's day, something that was now nonexistent in this new ice encased world. She had been seven.

Ten had held her mothers hand, watching the clouds drift by above as she skipped next to her mother on the sidewalk. They had been on their way to the park to have a picnic under the shade of the oak tree that Ten had scraped her knee climbing on the week before.

She had been licking an icecream, clutched tightly in her left hand, ignoring how it dripped down onto her little hand. It had been good, sweet and cold on her tongue. A butterfly had been floating in the air a short way in front of her, its wings had been a delicate blue. Ten followed its path with her eyes as it fluttered slowly upward, at least until it flew across the sun above her and it was far too bright for her to see.

She remembered yanking her head back to it's usual position, trying to blink away the dots in her eyes. For some reason they had been green instead of red. A christmas colored green, the kind that can't be found in nature but is often used for paper decorations and sugary chemical filled candies.

As kids sometimes do, she decided to look at the sun again to see if the dots would go back to the normal red, and that's when it happened. A small explosion on the side of the sun. Gasping, she had tugged her mothers sleeve. " Mommy," She said, her voice had been awed and small. " Mommy, look what the sun is doing."

Her mother had simply squeezed her hand tighter and said. " Don't stare at the sun Tenisha, you'll hurt your eyes." And no matter how much she tried to direct the woman's attention to the sun, she had ignored her, to focused on setting up their little picnic basket in the perfect amount of shade.

The next day the sun explosion had been mentioned in passing on the television, no one seemed to think it was all that important. At least not until two years after, when the light began to leech out of the flaming ball that everyone had so come to rely on, but overlooked in their everyday lives.

Glaring out at the stars that were visible from many light years away, she scoffed. There they were shining brightly, unharmed and beautiful, most likely supporting planets of their own with plenty of warmth. It was like they were mocking Tenisha and her poor dying planet, laughing about how her sun had failed her, while they themselves remained strong and powerful.

Slamming the curtain shut once more she collapsed backwards onto her bed, staring at the ceiling with the blank stare she had become accustomed to using. She turned her head and stared at her fingers, spread out of both of her hands, worn from years of painting. On the walls hung several portraits of cold snowy landscapes and bodies encased in ice and snow. As she stared at them, she slowly drifted off to sleep, dreaming of a cold snowy land that froze away all its life.

Soon, there would be nothing for those stupid sparkling stars to laugh at. Ten's world would become so cold that fire would no longer spark to life and then freezing would be the only thing left for humanity to do, Their bodies forever preserved in endless white caskets. In the end, all that would be left for the stars to look upon would be a world encapsulated in ice and frost. Life, would not succeed.