I
Earth
Chapter One
Heiðrún streaked through the deep black of The Cosmos. Far behind, her sun diminished in scale, almost as if it were disappearing into a hole, the lick of its flames smoothed by distance. She never tired of the sensation, time and space bulging beneath the contours of each planet she passed, until at last her course met Earth’s swelling horizon, gluttonous blue, its atmosphere racing up to meet her.
Illuminated by the moon, her daughter’s island. Its feathered shoreline as if a snowflake, alone amongst the northern sea. A sparse volcanic land, where fractures riddled the mossy grey earth and mountains lay strewn with boulders. Glaring-white icecaps, tearing fissures, slow, grinding glaciers, fjords and pine forests dusted in snow. Her aurora, the borealis, as they called it, swam within a wintered sky. She found her way as she always did, by trailing the southern-most peninsula. Their house stood adrift, alone and exposed within the landscape, its red panels and white beams rich with promise, smoke climbing from its chimney. Embers swirled into the night, blowing out towards the ocean beyond.
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Tempering the fiery trail of her descent, Heiðrún slipped inside the house and flew into the little girl’s bedroom, her passing harmless as the flow of moonlight through a
windowpane. She adopted her human form and dipped into the shadows. Back against a wall, and sidled up to a wardrobe, she grimaced as she made her observations, fascinated as always by the tame artifice of human habitation. It was a white room with wooden floorboards, iron radiator and a single bay window. A writing desk filled one corner. On its surface, sat a knitted alligator with a clutch of red pencils in its jaws. Heiðrún was struck by the strange warmth inside this building. Stale heat thickened the air. Cross-legged and with hair tumbling forwards, a girl sat upon her bed in the centre of the room, pouring over a book of exotic folktales, torchlight swaying with her eyes. Gusts of wind beat the roof. The girl yawned. She rubbed her cheeks and scratched the birthmark that shaded her neck, otherwise completely lost in the words on her page.
Stepping from the shadows, Heiðrún moved into view, hair flushing white as she met the torchlight. The little girl screamed.