Katie and the Ice Cream

By the time the sun had lowered itself beyond the hazy western sky, Phosgene was so exhausted that she felt like she could go on no longer. The gravel road she had been following had twisted and turned through the icy pines. It seemed to go on forever and the trees obscured her views of both mountains. More than once, she wondered whether she was heading in the right direction or going backwards.

There seemed to be absolutely no life in the forest. Nothing grew apart from the eerie pines, there was no grass, no weeds. She hadn’t seen a single bird flying. No insects had crawled across her bare feet. But as much as she wanted to stop and rest, she knew she had to keep walking until she found somewhere warmer, or else she would never get up again.

Freezing to death is painless, she knew that all to well by now.

“After the first chill, your body goes numb,” she thought to herself. “Once you give in to the cold, you feel warm for awhile. Once the cold finished sucking all the life out of you, you become the cold. After that, you feel nothing at all. Lucifer is right, the cold will obliterate everything if I let it.”

Supposing Lucifer wasn’t lying, she had lost 20 years. Where had that time gone? She didn’t remember. All she knew was that the light was dying and she had to get somewhere warmer before the night fell. After climbing a large rock face, she found herself atop a small hill, giving a view down onto the forest below.

From the top, she could see the sun setting through the fog. Two towers broke through the smoggy sky. The sun hung in the western sky like a red ping pong ball. How was it that the sun had gone from being so bright and clear in the morning to being so dull and red?

Above the smog, a single star rose. It shone almost green in the dying light. Was it a star or a planet? She couldn’t tell.
The road she had been following twisted and turned through the forest, generally heading south. She’d spent the day going in circles, going from East to West and back. But she was no closer to the mountains than she had been this morning. To the North, she could see the lake. Cast in shadows, it looked more black than blue. The icy surface glinted red with the dying sun.

She could barely contain her disappointment. “If only Lucifer was here,” she thought to herself. “He’d help me. He’d tell me where to go.”

“You should be careful what you wish for,” a voice whispered in her ear. “You almost always get it.”

Phosgene jumped.

Lucifer stood, behind her left shoulder. She hadn’t noticed him creep up on her. His silver-blond hair looked almost ginger in the setting sun. In the shadowy light, he took on a more sinister appearance. The shadows made his gaunt features look almost skull-like. His eyes glowed as blue as ever.

She glared at him. “You were here all the time. You followed me!”
Lucifer grinned. “You still don’t get it, do you? Who do you think made that road?”
“I don’t care who made the road!” She spat at him in anger. “You shouldn’t have followed me like that!”
“Dude. you do realise whats happening to you, right? When you figure that out, you will figure out who is following who and why. I’ve already saved your life once today. I’m going to save it again. Don’t follow me. Seriously.”
“Then where do I go?”
Lucifer sighed. “All I can suggest is that you follow the light. See the star, just above the sun? That’s the Evening Star. Soon, she will disappear into the fog. She follows the sun. She goes through the underworld, on the other side of the Earth. They say she rises again in the East as the Morning Star. Only we can’t see her, because The Ice Cream and Katie are in the way.”
“But its the same star,” she told him, not sure where the conversation was going. “And its not actually a star. Its a planet.”
Lucifer smiled. “You can see it from either side, but at the end of the day, Venus is just Venus. Its just another planet orbiting the sun. Its not a goddess, its not an omen, its not a prophecy. It doesn’t even have any light of its own, it just reflects the sun’s light back to it. Tell me, Phosgene. I told you what your name means. Can you tell me the meaning of Lucifer?”
She was about to open her mouth with a reply, but he cut her off.

“See that?” Lucifer pointed towards the pine forest. A single orange light glowed amongst the trees.
“There is an inn just down the road. If you go quickly, you might even make it before sun sets. You don’t want to freeze out here tonight. Freezing is overrated. You know that now."
With that, Lucifer stepped back into the shadows. For a split second, his eyes seemed to shine like gas flames. Then he was gone.