The Lakes ⭒ Druig

5 : THE SNOW SPOON

Norway, 2021

⭒⭒⭒

     The decision to move to a tiny and snowy town at the top of the world had been intentional by Art. She wanted to be secluded with enough space to rove and wander but close enough to some sprinkling of humanity, so she wasn't disconnected, wasn't untethered.

     She'd been completely untethered once before, and she truly had become a wild thing for fifty years in Dacia—the land which is now modern Romania—settled between mountains and a calm lake that wove between deep, dark forests. Her heart had been cavernous, her stomach starving and body becoming as lethal as that of a silver-furred wolf leading a pack through the seasons.

     While she'd been untethered from her family and humanity, she'd been embraced by nature wholly. Closer to the moon and the woods but further from the people she loved enormously. She hadn't been troubled by anything in Dacia as her sorrow left her bones and sank into the soil and the cool water of the lake.

     Art had been free, all the strings of her heart severed. Still, after those fifty-odd years, her family had agreed that going forward, it was best that Artemis stay tethered to some sliver of humanity. It was better for her that she didn't lose herself in the chaos and the calmness of the wild, even if she preferred to rule the wolves and the moonlight, even if she liked it there.

     When she had returned, fingers threaded with his like she might sprint and scatter like a spooked animal—his hand another tether, a new string of her heart—Ajak had told her that only two things in the entire galaxy chose solitude and isolation when there was a world that needed them: Broken gods and wild beasts. Ajak had told her sweetly, while removing a diadem of nature and brushing leaves from Art's uncut hair, that she was neither a broken god nor a wild beast. She was an Eternal, and that she had a wonderful Purpose from the Celestials, one that she'd been designed for, born for.

     Moving to the itsy pit-stop of a town in Norway had been deliberate, the temperature petulantly low with more snow days than not. It was peaceful and cold and there were foxes in the forest that padded on fresh snow to the door of Artemis's trailer most nights looking for food. They'd pinch raw cubes of meat from her palm, little black noses wet against her skin. She hadn't gone looking for them on her first night, they had simply found her, like they realised the Goddess of the Wild Hunt and had come to bend the knee, pleading their trust and loyalty on winter-fogged breaths.

     Art had gotten a job quickly at the Snow Spoon as a waitress. Apparently, there weren't many girls that wanted to work nights at the bleak, neon-leaking diner in the middle of nowhere Norway. The clientele was mostly exhausted truckies passing through and the down-trodden residents of the tiny town living as best they could as the remnants of half the world. Everyone had lost someone in the Snap three years ago, and the new normal was tough and a little miserable in the tiny town hidden away in Norway.

     The Snap had been sudden, clearing away half of the Earth's population in a flurry of ash and dust. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, Apollo had said as tears dribbled off his stubbled chin. Art had been with Apollo in New York City at the time visiting a film series about the career of Vincent Price playing at the Museum of Modern Art.

     People had simply drifted away in the splashes of scenes projected on the walls like sweeping up biscuit crumbs from the kitchen floor. There was nothing Art and Apollo could do but watch in slow-motion as people visiting an art gallery floated into nothing. Art's shock and confusion had been a knife in her gut, twisting and twisting.