MagpieVon

1: The Solstice Child The winter came early, the year I was born. ~ A shrieking north wind raked the moor with bitter talons, driving the snow before it in lances of stinging ice. It lowered the sky in iron-grey clouds, their billows cloaking the moon, and flayed the gorse and the dead brown sedges, riming the world with milky hoarfrost. The mud and sucking sands froze hard, their customary treachery exchanged for the new danger of slippery ice for the duration of the winter. Moor ponies slid and broke their legs, slipped through the ice into the wintry water beneath and died in the teeth of the gale. The cleverer of the fowls and beasts,