Earlier this week I put the call out for submissions towards this: A Christmas Advent Flash Fiction Fantastical Frenzy. (Is it easy to tell I am excited for December?)
If you would like to contribute, you can find the details below. đđ
The Aurora Archives: A Call for Historical Witnesses
Help me uncover the secret history of the âWinter Guardiansâ for a 25-Day Advent Challenge.
But without further ado, lets get started!
The Gift of the Long Night
Location: The Genesis Starship. En Route to the Galactic Center. Date: Earth Calendar, December 1st.
The corridors of the Genesis living quarters were usually sterile, quiet places. Cerebral, sophisticated and functional. Not today.
A blur of motion was terrorizing every deck. It moved faster than the security sensors could track, a streak of white fur and flapping red fabric, ricocheting off the walls and ceilings like a pinball that had escaped the machine. Behind it gifts were being deposited, and corridors were finding themselves inexplicably garnered in Christmas decorations
Casâshya was having a moment.
She had spent the morning performing acts of aggressive charity, now that the advent calendar had started properly. She utilized a gravity-pulled hop to place a festive, red-ribboned wrench on the highest shelf of the eastern maintenance bay. Left for a bewildered Anya who discovered it after it caused a security alert team to go and destroy it. Casâshya had also managed to leave a perfectly ripe fig inside the locked locker of a grumpy technician. She was buzzing with the specific, manic energy of a rabbit who knows that when December the first comes, she is allowed to get as excited as she likes for the Aurora festival. Or Christmas as the humans liked to call it.
âHappy ADVENT, you hairless apes!â she laughed to herself, executing a perfect mid-air twist to avoid a maintenance drone. She slapped her paw down and placed a âDo Not Open Until Christmasâ sticker on its back panel before landing softly on the deck plating.
Adjusting the red scarf around her neck, a nod to the old myths and the tribe of Sankt Nikolaus, she checked her mental list. One stop left. The hardest one.
She arrived at Eliasâs quarters. She didnât knock. Rabbits generally consider locked doors to be mere suggestions, anyway. She squeezed the release mechanism with a bit of well placed boop from her nose, and the door hissed open.
The room was dark. The air recycler was humming a low, lonely note.
Elias was sitting on the edge of his bunk, his back to the door. In his hands, illuminated by the pale blue light of a datapad, was a digital photograph. A woman in pregnancy. He wasnât moving. The stillness around him wasnât the peaceful stillness of a loving memory; it was the heavy, crushing stillness of a stone at the bottom of a well.
Casâshyaâs bounce evaporated. Her ears, previously perked with mischief, softened and lowered. She could feel it radiating off him, the string of his heart wasnât even vibrating with sadness; it was just silent. A snapped wire.
She hopped up onto the desk beside him. She didnât make a sound. She just sat there, the red scarf looking suddenly too bright in the gloom.
âI brought you a fake beard to go with that moustache, and then you can come be our Shipboard Santa!â She said quietly. âI stole it from some sheep out in the biome. Itâs made with real wool.â
Elias didnât look up. He swiped his thumb over the face of the woman in the photo. âLeave me be, Casâshya. I donât quite have the spirit for games today. Maybe another dayâ
âI know,â she whispered. âI mean, I am glad too, because the beard was a lie. I brought you something else instead. You arenât the first human to feel alone in the dark ya know.â
Elias finally turned. His eyes were red-rimmed. âItâs December 1st on Earth,â he said, his voice cracking. âItâs the start of the advent. The time of waiting. I used to love it. Me and my wife used to put up a spindly little tree that was missing half its foliage and write letters to Father Christmas. Now... it just feels like distance.â
âIt isnât just a human time,â Casâshya said gently. She hopped closer, nudging his arm with her nose. âTake your Father Christmas, why do you think your myths talk about a magical figure who travels at impossible speeds through the air to deliver hope? Why do you think he wears red? Why do you think he watches over the children?â
Elias frowned, the historian in him twitching awake despite the grief. âYouâre saying... Santa Claus is a rabbit?â
âIâm saying that⌠Well, Iâm saying we have some secrets, and I want to let you in on one of them⌠a little bit. My kind have been answering the call of the Solstices every year. We call it the aurora night when itâs the winter solstice. When the night is longest, certain among us listen to the strings. They are more resonant than usual when the seasons swing. And then they send out the message, so that some of us can go to where we feel the strings are weakest.â
She tapped her paw on a small data-chip she had placed on the desk.
âI have been compiling these. From our oral history and cataloguing them over the years. Christmas is my fave time, and I want you to be there with us when it comes, so I am hoping these will perk you up. They are letters. Twenty-five of them. From people throughout history, from the ancient past to the wars of the 20th Century.â
Elias picked up the chip. âLetters to Santa?â
âLetters to⌠to Santa I suppose, to a rare miracle, to the skies. Elias. Proof that even in the darkest winters of our history, someone is listening. Proof that you are never as alone as you think you are.â
She hopped down from the desk, pausing at the door.
âOpen one a day,â she commanded, a little bit of her spark returning. âDoctor Casâshyas orders. Start today. It might help you remember that the dark isnât empty.â
Elias looked at her quizzically.
âAre you a doctor?â
âAbsolutely not, why would I do such a thing? For this month only, I am a Christmas fairy. Now get reading!⌠And by the way, I lied about lying about the beardâŚâ
She slipped out into the corridor and threw in a messy ball of wool behind her before the door slid shut, leaving Elias alone with the small, glowing chip and a smile. For the first time all day, he put the photo of his family down, and picked up the archive.
RM Greta - Brazil during the 1700âs
The Aurora Archives: Day 1
ARCHIVE ENTRY: 1764-DEC-24 LOCATION: Vila Rica (modern Ouro Preto), Brazil SIGNAL RESONANCE: Localized / High Intensity OPERATIVE: Local Terra-Runner Unit (Sub-type: Cliff-Dweller)
TRANSCRIPT OF RECOVERED CORRESPONDENCE:
Dearest Menino Jesus,
I know I am not supposed to ask for things, only to give thanks, but tonight my heart was breaking. Mama was crying by the fountain. The silver coin, the one she scrubbed floors for a month to earn, the one meant for our pork and flour, slipped from her cold fingers in the mountain wind.
It did not stop at her feet either. It rolled and rolled, cruel and fast, into a deep fissure in the plaza stones, down into the dark ravine beneath where the water rushes and the rats live. It was gone. We were going to be hungry on your Holy Night.
I knelt by the crack and prayed, and that is when a shadow moved below. It was not a rat, Menino Jesus. It was small, with ears as long as my arm. It looked at me, and then it went down deep into the darkness.
It did not fall fast. It fell slowly. Like a dry leaf drifting on a summer breeze, it floated down into the dark with an odd scrap of red cloth tied around it. I held my breath.
A moment later, it came back. It did not jump or climb to the surface. It simply rose, drifting upwards like smoke from a candle flame. It hovered there just under the crack, right in front of my face, defying the air itself. In its teeth, it held our silver coin which it pushed gently back onto the street.
The coin clattered by my shoe. The animal twitched its nose once, and then kicked its back legs against the air and vanished into the dark. Its fur was dusty with gold from the mines. I think it must be one of the animals from your manger, come to tell us that we are not forgotten. I was so happy I told Mama about what I had seen and gave her the coin. She did not see the animal, believing I went down there myself, or worse, stole it. At first she scolded me, crying even more, but then she held me, the tightest she has held me I think ever. I am so happy to have my Mama treasure me.
Obrigada Menino Jesus, Maria
ARCHIVISTâS NOTE: Subject reported the entity âdriftingâ and ârising like smoke.â This is a textbook example of a Terra Runner utilizing Mental Gravitational Control to dampen their mass relative to the Earthâs core. Note the presence of gold dust on the coat, evidence that this operative had been navigating the deep geological fissures of the region, likely using them as a transit network.