Coming Seeds

Coming Seeds

For Hannah

Winter still clung to the earth and the sun lingered low, the people of the valley gathered to light fires along the frozen fields, calling to the ancestral women who guarded their bloodlines and the land itself.

Among the spirits who listened was Hervonia, the eldest of her clan. She walked the boundary between seasons, her cloak woven from the last snows of winter. Each year she watched over the sleeping soil, ensuring that frost did not bite too deeply and that the seeds beneath endured.

But this year, winter had grown stubborn, wilful. Ice refused to melt, and the winds howled with a hunger that even the gods found troubling. She feared along with the villagers that their fields would never wake.

Hervonia descended from the unseen realm and sought her younger sister, Bloom, whose breath would usually stir the first shoots of spring, but Bloom lay weakened, trapped beneath a crust of unyielding frost.

Hervonia knelt beside her and pressed her palms to the frozen ground.

“Little sister,” she whispered, “rise. The people have called us. Their fires burn for us. Their hopes cling to us.”

“There is no hope," Bloom responded, "the hate burns too strong. I can’t rise.”

Hervonia tried to break the ice, using fists, wood, axes and tears but could not melt it alone. In frustration she lifted her frost‑woven cloak and cast it into the sky. It dissolved into a thousand shimmering shards that drifted down like silver dust. Where each shard touched the earth, the ice cracked. The frost loosened. The soil breathed.

Freed at last, Bloom rose, her hair bright as new wheat. She touched the ground, and the first green shoots pierced the thawing fields.

Together the sisters walked the valley, one melting winter’s grip, the other coaxing life from the softened earth. The people felt the change in the air—the promise of growth, the return of warmth—and they offered thanks with feasting, song, and loud remembrance of the women who came before them.

When winter is loosened and spring awakens the seeds will grow safely, the fields revive, and the people endure.