The Pond Part 28

As a temporary measure, Izolda cast a spell on the paths leading towards the pond, to discourage visitors. It was not a perfect solution, but it was the best she could do for now. Discovering the identity of the invading entity was proving more difficult than she could have imagined.

More time passed. Fewer people were drawn to the pond, and no one cared to use it for swimming anymore. Those that went there for a picnic often returned with tales of glimpses of a beautiful woman. Sometimes she was floating among the weeds, just under the surface of the pond, and sometimes she was strolling along the edge of the water.

There were a few who claimed she appeared on the far side of the pond. She never said a word, but would beckon them forward and they would find themselves walking towards her, almost as though hypnotized, stopping only at the touch of the cold water on their feet. They would watch as she continued forward, sinking beneath the surface. Often they would hear an echo of a woman’s laughter as she disappeared.

Rumours sprung up that she was some kind of forest spirit, but no one could agree on whether she meant good or evil. At least until another of the villagers was found floating face down in the pond. It was Tomas, Nikolai’s nephew, son of his brother Sasha who had died in the pit.

Izolda felt his loss keenly. He was not much older than Mikhail and the two were often to be found together. He was almost like another son to her. To her shame, while she had redoubled the protections on her husband and children, she had not thought to extend that protection to others.

She did not normally tuck the children into bed at night herself, she left that to Marta, the housekeeper, but this night she had a desire to make sure all was well with her sons and daughter. Dmitri and Pavlina were already asleep, but Mikhail was not.

“It was my fault,” he told her, working to keep the tears at bay.

“No, my son,” she said, sitting down on the bed beside her. “Tomas’s death was a tragedy, but it was not your fault.”

“She wanted me,” he said.

Izolda’s hand, that had been stroking his hair, stilled. “Who wanted you?”

“The spirit in the pond. We saw her, we could see right through her. That makes her a spirit, doesn’t it?”

“So it would seem,” Izolda said carefully. “What happened?”

He gulped, and moved just a fraction closer to her. “We were at the pond. I know we weren’t supposed to be there,” he said in a rush. “But we just wanted to see what all the fuss was about.”

“What’s done is done,” she murmured soothingly.

Emboldened, he continued. “It just looked like a scummy old pond. But then Tomas said there was something moving in the water. Then the woman appeared, right up out of the center of the pond. She didn’t say anything at first, just smiled. Then she kind of glided towards us.”

Izolda held her son a little closer. “What happened next?”

“She reached out and tried to touch me, but something stopped her. She kind of hissed, and looked angry. Then she spoke.”

“What did she say?” Unconsciously, Izolda’s grip on Mikhail tightened.

“She—she—she said to tell my mother that her protections would not last forever. Then she sank into the water and disappeared. What did she mean, mama?”

“She meant nothing, my son. You saw naught but a spirit.”

Izolda kissed Mikhail’s forehead, murmuring a spell that would fog his memory. She stayed sitting on the edge of his bed, staring into space, for some time after he drifted off to sleep. No, her protections would not hold forever, she needed to try something else.

She had a thought of something else to try, but it was somewhat drastic. And Nikolai was not going to like it at all.

Kouta Poetry Form

Traditionally, this Japanese form was a song of the geisha. The name kouta means “little song.”

There are two accepted variations of the Kouta. Version one is a quatrain (four lines) with a syllable count of 7-5-7-5, and version two, also a quatrain, has a syllable count of 7-7-7-5.

Schematic:

Variation One
x x x x x x x
x x x x x
x x x x x x x
x x x x

Variation Two
x x x x x x x
x x x x x x x
x x x x x x x
x x x x x

As with most Japanese poetry, it has no rhyme scheme or meter, nor does it require a seasonal reference. Though associated with geishas and love songs, the Kouta does not need to be romantic. It commonly celebrates the ordinary life, referencing mundane or personal, everyday topics.

Although it is a stand alone poem, it can also appear with other Kouta with the same theme. But each individual verse should be independent – it should not just pick up where the previous verse left off, expanding on the verse before it.

For my examples I did the first and last one in the first variation, and the second one in the second variation. As you’ll see, you can read them in whatever order you like.


Snow has begun to recede
the wind blowing warm
with a breath filling us with
anticipation.


Breathing in sun laden air
my thoughts turning towards spring
I watch melting snow sink back
into thirsty ground


The snow is melting away
leaving mud patches
behind – such a beautiful
sign of pending spring.

The Future Is . . .

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see, saw the vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be.
— Alfred Lord Tennyson

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
― Eleanor Roosevelt

You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past.
― Chuck Palahniuk

The future depends on what you do today.
― Mahatma Gandhi

The future is out there.

The future is coming.

The future is now.

As you might have surmised, I’ve been thinking a lot about the future lately. Specifically, my future as it pertains to my writing.

Fifteen years ago I was working on three novels at the same time and making good progress on all of them. I didn’t have a blog schedule, per se, but I was posting more often (although they were shorter posts) and I wasn’t struggling to write them.

It was actually a little depressing really to read those early posts. There I was, doing all that writing, and I still didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. I was writing more in one day than I’m writing now in my Sunday posts (my longest one). My future was no more defined then than it is now. And that’s just sad.

But it got me thinking about being a writer and where I’m going with this.

I first dreamed of being a writer back in high school. I had all these stories in my head and I was going to write them all down and publish them. I was going to be the youngest writer to have a story published in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Swords and Sorceress series.

Vera Nazarian beat me to that, but I couldn’t even bring myself to hate her for it because she’s a wonderful writer. She’s written (and sold) many short stories since then, wrote a bunch of books, had life throw her some curve balls, and kept going.

And that, my friends, is the big difference. She kept going. She finished what she started. She persisted in following her dream. She didn’t make excuses, she just wrote. I’m sure she has a whole crap ton of books in her future, just waiting to be written.

Now don’t start thinking I’m comparing myself to Vera, I’m not. I’m just admiring her work ethic, something I’m sorely lacking. I’ve been paying a lot of lip service about writing every day, and getting organized, and the list goes on, when what I really need to do is stop talking about it and start doing it.

The reason I’m writing hasn’t changed over the years – I still have stories to tell and I’m the only one who can tell them. And every once in a while I’ll do a post like this where I get all angsty and whiny and point out that I need to do better, and sometimes I even do for a while, but it doesn’t take long to slide back into my old habits.

I don’t want another 15 years to go by and look back and see my lack of progress. I can only blame my dysthymia for so much, the rest is on me. If I want to get to that future and look back with pride then I have to be willing to change my ways. Time to start making progress instead of excuses.

Otherwise, why am I even doing this?

* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *

WORDAGE REPORT

I have a confession to make. Early in the week I downloaded a hidden objects game. And then I started playing it. A lot.

I was having one of those weeks, I guess because when it got annoying that I’d have to stop when I ran out of gaming energy, I downloaded another. Then a third.

The turning point for me was when I ended up with a pinched nerve from spending such long stretches in my recliner doing nothing but playing those games. I smartened up, deleted the games, and went on to do other things.

Of course it was too late to salvage productivity for the week, but at least I didn’t fall behind on my blogging.

NEW WORDS:
2235+394+353+601=3,583
UP – 191 words from last week

Goals For Next Week:
Get some words written besides my blog posts.

EDITING:
0 pages
I guess the miracle of starting work on Elemental Spirit didn’t happen last week, maybe it’ll happen this week. *sigh*

You know, it’s not like I don’t have other stuff I could be working on instead. Maybe I should start looking at my backlog of novels and stories. This is starting to feel like Magical Mayhem all over again – look at how long it took me to finish it.

Goal For Next Week:
Start work on An Elemental Spirit or something else.

TECH & TRAINING:
Okay, this isn’t exactly computer or writing related, but it is using technology, so I’m counting it.

As you’ll know if you’re a Netflix user, they changed their policy recently. This means I can no longer share my daughter’s account. So, I had to get my own Netflix account, and since I already had my credit card handy, I got Paramount + as well.

Signing up was the easy part. Accessing them on my laptop – no problem. Trying to watch them on television . . .not so easy. Well, Netflix was fine, I just accessed it the same way I did before only I used my own password.

Turns out my smart TV isn’t much smarter than I am. It did not offer the Paramount + app in its app store, so I had to go through the Roku. I was able to add Paramount +, but when I tried to sign in I kept getting a message telling me my login or password was incorrect. After many fruitless attempts to sign in, I went to the Paramount site to trouble shoot.

The first suggestion was to reset the Roku itself. Which I did – I still couldn’t log in. Then it suggested I reset my password, which was a little more complicated than I expected. But when I did, suddenly I could log in.

Whew! Crises averted

Goal For Next Week:
Learn to use Dropbox properly so I can backup my files.

POETRY WEDNESDAY:
Last week wasn’t nearly as exciting as far as poetry went. I found a new form, one with plenty of information available about it for a change, and actually enjoyed wading through it all. I was fairly pleased with my example, too.

And when looking for my weekly form I found a bunch more forms I haven’t tried yet. With any luck, it’ll be months before I have to resort to the coded Welsh forms. :-)

Goal For Next Week:
Find another new poetry form to share.

CRAFTING:
The craft migration is done. All I need is a table to craft on and all will be right with my crafting world. However, I got no work done on the afghan. Not a stitch.

But when I was grocery shopping I noticed some plain dresses in the children’s section that looked similar to the one I embroidered for the granddaughter last year for Easter. I bought one in blue (blue being her favorite colour) with the intention of stitching on it for this Easter.

Goal For Next Week:
Work on the afghan. Figure out what to embroider on the dress.

WHAT I’M READING:
I re-read Sanctuary by Nora Roberts, and that was it. Just goes to show how focused I was on those stupid hidden object games.

Goal For Next Week:
Keep up my good reading habits.

GOAL REVIEW:

Well, in some respects it was a good week – I had no trouble at all with my blog posts – but in other respects it wasn’t so great. I got no other writing done and I started to slide into my bad gaming habits again.

I did start thinking about what I’d be working on after Elemental Spirit. Single book or series? And then I realized I only have two “almost finished” books that aren’t part of a series, and both have the potential for a sequel.

The rest of my unfinished books all begin multi-book series. So looks like once I’m done with the elementals I be looking at another series. Unless, of course, I come up with a whole new book.

You’ll notice marketing is missing. Yeah, it’s been so long since I’ve even made an attempt at marketing that I figured it was time to let it go. And I know it was a stretch for tech, but televisions are technology too.

Crafting was pretty much non-existent last week, but for all intents and purposes my crafting migration is done at least. Will this make a difference? Only time will tell.

The big surprise last week was the reading. One book. Guess I spent a lot more time on those hidden object games than I realized.

Maybe without the distraction of gaming and excessive reading, I’ll actually get something accomplished besides blog posts this week

The Pond - Part 27

There was a room off the kitchen that Izolda had taken as her workroom. This room was off-limits to the rest of the household. It was where she made her tinctures and potions, consulted the bones and cast her spells. It was also where she kept her spellbook, locked in her trunk.

The room had a small fireplace with a rocking chair beside it, and a work table pushed against the wall, shelves above it. There were no windows, but there was a braided rug in front of the fireplace that she'd made herself. This is where Izolda came to think.

Since her arrival in America, Izolda’s life had been almost idyllic. She had embraced her role of wife, helpmate, and mother so absolutely that her life before was all but forgotten. Her real life began with her marriage to Nikolai, anything that came before was of no consequence.

But now she could think of little else but the past. She may not be proud of some of the things she had done, but neither did she regret them. Her ambitions had brought her to where she was today. Had she been a different person, things may not have worked out for her as well.

The entity in the pond was connected to her past in some way, but who, or how?

“You know who I am,” the voice had told her.

She paced the room while she thought.

Someone from her past, that was obvious, and the past was her old village.

The old village had been flooded, but that didn’t mean someone hadn’t survived. The negative feelings she’d been experiencing began with the birth of Mikhail, and word of the flood didn’t reach them until after the birth of Dmitri. Could the feelings have been a foretelling?

But that didn’t make sense. She had been gone from the village for three years before the birth of Mikhail. She couldn’t possibly be held responsible for the flood. And surely any survivors would have been mentioned before this.

She had been very careful in keeping her abilities to herself. Even if someone had found the cave, there was nothing to connect it to her, she’d left no trace of herself behind. In truth, only two people had an inkling of how powerful she was – Varnya, and her mother. Both dead by her own hand, and both with enough power to return from the spirit world. Both spirits would have reason to seek revenge.

Of the two, the spirit of Varnya was the more plausible. Her mother had been a kind-hearted soul, she would not have harmed others in her quest for vengeance. Although she would have wagered that Varnya, too, would take the more direct approach. But if not one of these two, then who?

The dreams and negative feelings, were they premonitions, or a warning sent by the entity? The sightings, the near misses . . . they spoke more of a building up of power than of something with unlimited resources.

It was cowardly, this entity. It chose to hide itself, playing pranks and stirring up trouble, then becoming more aggressive. It was toying with her, she realized. It wasn’t just seeking revenge for some slight, it wanted to torment her.

Izolda unlocked the trunk and pulled out her spell book. Taking it over to the rocking chair, she sat down and opened the book. First, she needed to find a way to force the entity to reveal itself. Then, she would banish it.

Bob and Wheel

I found this form on the Writer’s Digest’s poetry site, where Robert Lee Brewer offered it as a stand alone quintain poem. I figured if it was good enough for Mr. Brewer, it was good enough for me. :-D

edited to add: I don't want to imply Mr. Brewer was giving us incorrect or misleading information about the bob and wheel, he just wanted to show it as a form in its own right.

This form actually surprised me. First of all, I thought it was a modern, invented form. And second, I thought it would be hard to find information about it. I was wrong on both counts.

Technically, the bob and wheel isn’t form on its own, but a device used in a longer poem. It’s usually found in Middle English and Middle Scots poetry, appearing at the end of a stanza. The “bob” is a short line that marks a transition between the rest of the poem and the “wheel.”

The most famous example of the bob and wheel is the epic poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I actually looked it up, and sure enough you’ll find it used at the end of every stanza throughout the poem. If you care to check for yourself, you can find an excellent translation HERE

For our purposes, it is a five-line stanza (quintain) or poem with a rhyme scheme of a-b-a-b-a. The first line (the bob) has two or three syllables, while lines two through five (the wheel) have five or six syllables. If you check out Sir Gawain, you’ll see that sometimes the wheel alternates five and six syllable lines, and sometimes they’re longer.

Using an even six-syllable line, for the wheel, the schematic would look something like this:

xa (bob)
xxxxxb (wheel)
xxxxxa
xxxxxb
xxxxxa

Easy peasy, right? And just to make it more fun, I did three verses in this style.


Kittens

They sleep
and wake to scurry
about the house, and leap
always in a hurry,
and often they will creep

and stalk
their prey – my stocking feet
or maybe they will walk
with faces oh, so sweet
then hop, as though in shock

and leap
and race around some more –
in anger, tails will sweep,
they wrestle on the floor
and then, they fall asleep.

When in Doubt . .

The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.
― Robert Hughes

Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will.
― Suzy Kassem

I don't believe anyone ever suspects how completely unsure I am of my work and myself and what tortures of self-doubting the doubt of others has always given me.
― Tennessee Williams

Wow. I wasn’t so sure of my post topic (ha! self-doubt at its finest), but when I started searching for quotes I was amazed at how many there were, and by a lot famous authors, too! It’s kind of comforting to know I’m not alone.

Early in the week I started going through my poetry to ferret out poems for a poetry reading I was to participate in on Thursday night. I read poem after poem and I hated them all. They were too amateurish, or depressing, or cliché, or just plain sucked. I had no business subjecting an unwitting audience to such drivel.

They weren’t really as bad as I thought, of course, it was just that niggling voice of self-doubt chipping away at my self-esteem. I read through them again, copy/pasted about 50 of the most promising ones into a folder, read them again and again, weeding some out each time. By the time I had it down to ten poems, I had started to like what I was reading again.

Self-doubt can arise from a fear, low self-esteem, a lack of confidence, or a combination of these things. It takes the form of a voice inside you that tells you aren’t good enough, you’ll never be published. Self-doubt can be an impediment to creativity and lead to writer’s block, and/or feelings of unworthiness.

But the thing is, almost every author suffers from self-doubt at one time or another, even famous ones:

Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.
― William Shakespeare

I'm afraid of failing at whatever story I'm writing—that it won't come up for me, or that I won't be able to finish it.
—Stephen King

Each day is like an enormous rock that I'm trying to push up this hill. I get it up a fair distance, it rolls back a little bit, and I keep pushing it, hoping I'll get it to the top of the hill and that it will go on its own momentum. I'm very deeply inculcated with a sense of failure for some reason. And I'm drawn to failure. I often write about it, and I'm sympathetic with it I think, because I feel I'm contending with it constantly in my own life.
—Joyce Carol Oates

Sometimes it’s external forces that promote self-doubt, like rejections. It doesn’t take many to make you start feeling like you don’t have what it takes, you’ll never make it as an author. But consider the rejections of these authors:

Louis L’Amour had 200 rejections before Bantam Books took a chance on him. Dick Wimmer’s Irish Wine received 162 rejections. The best-selling Chicken Soup For the Soul, by Jack Canfield & Mark Victor Hansen was rejected 144 times. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenace, by Robert Pirsig, received 121 rejections.

Murphy, by Samuel Beckett, was rejected 40 times. Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind received 38 rejections. James Patterson received 31 rejections for The Thomas Berryman Number. Carrie, by Stephen King, was rejected 30 times. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

But notice they persisted, and did not let self-doubt keep them from getting published.

Sylvia Plath was right when she said: The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. So how do we overcome this? First, take comfort in knowing that you’re not alone and that most other writers feel this way too. But the self-doubt isn’t going to magically go away, so feel it, face it head on, and keep writing anyway.

Use your self-doubt as a challenge to get yourself out of your comfort zone and improve your writing. Focus on your strengths instead of your weaknesses. Look at how far you’ve already come! Celebrate your achievements, no matter how small.

Give yourself permission to write badly. Words can be erased or deleted, but every time you put words on paper, it’s a victory over self-doubt. And if you keep going, you’ll start to improve, even if you begin by writing crap.

Have faith. Believe in yourself. Remind yourself of why you started writing in the first place. There’s going to come a moment where you write something and you just know it’s good writing. You are a writer, and you will keep getting better.

Above all, never compare yourselves to others. Sure their work may be amazing, but thinking that you are inadequate when compared to other authors doesn’t make it true. You have your own story to tell and your own way to tell it. Part of conquering self-doubt is about taking pride in your own work and knowing that you have something unique to offer the world.

Fortunately for me, this is one lesson I learned a long time ago. Everyone has their own voice and to compare myself to another writer is like comparing apples and oranges. I may wish for their kind of success, but I would want it for the kind of writing I do, not for the kind they do.

Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it.
—William Goldman

This is how you do it: You sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard.
— Neil Gaiman

So kick that self-doubt to the curb, and get writing.

* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *

WORDAGE REPORT

Well, here we are again. Another week filled with good intentions and not much else. The cluster headaches persisted through the first part of the week, and then they vanished as mysteriously as they appeared. Such is the way with cluster headaches.

My focus was on poetry last week. I participated in a reading Thursday night and spent a good portion of the week going through my poems and picking out ones to read. I’ve got a lot of poems. And I didn’t like any of them. It didn’t help that I’d be reading in the company of “real” poets.

Eventually I narrowed it down to a handful, printed them off, weeded out a couple that were better on paper, read them aloud, weeded out a couple more, and ended up with about 20-25 minutes worth of poetry to share. And you know what? I decided I liked these poems just fine.

Surprisingly, so did my audience. :-)

NEW WORDS:
1862+682+290+558=3392
UP – 47 words from last week

Goals For Next Week:
Get some words written besides my blog posts.

EDITING:
0 pages
Oh, yeah. That’s what I should have been doing with my extra time last week, not playing the hidden objects game that I “accidentally” downloaded. Oops! I may have to get tough with myself and delete it again.

But seriously, I really do want to get Elemental Spirit done so I can move on to other things. Maybe this week will be the week. You know, miracles do happen . . .

Goal For Next Week:
Start work on An Elemental Spirit.

MARKETING:
Yeah, nothing new here.

Goal For Next Week:
At the very least, I need to update my book page.

TECH & TRAINING:
Nope, nothing here, either. But thanks to the changes in Netflix I’m going to have learn how to delete the account my daughter was sharing with us and set up one of our own. Does that count?

Goal For Next Week:
Learn to use Dropbox properly so I can backup my files.

POETRY WEDNESDAY:
Once again, my poetry post was done and scheduled early. And further more, I kind of like the poem I came up with too. I thought about including it in my reading, but it reads better on paper than it does out loud, so I didn’t.

But going through all those poems made want to revisit the idea of a poetry book. I mean, what’s the point of all those poems if I don’t do anything with them. The problem is, I just write willy-nilly. Other than the fact 90% are written from forms, there’s not much connecting them. So I’m going to have to think on it some more.

Goal For Next Week:
Find another new poetry form to share.

CRAFTING:
This is getting ridiculous. I went ahead and bought a couple of under-the-bed bins for my unfinished yarn projects, and even went so far as to drag the big bin out of the closet to divide the projects between them. At the same time, I figured I’d go through the bags of unfinished projects the father-in-law had given me – yowsa, what a mess! It was a little sad to see these barely started baby sweaters, with no pattern to be able to finish them. And there were five knitted slippers, each one a different size.

There was also a big tangle of yarn – several different colours. I did untangle this one yarn that was a beautiful shade of turquoise. It took me a couple of hours, but there’s enough of it there that I think I can use it to make a big shawl with a lacy black edging. So, worth the effort.

Then I carted the bins with the unfinished projects upstairs and . . . they wouldn’t fit under the bed! They were just slightly too high. So, I’m going to have to swap them out for the ones I’ve got some summer clothes stored in that I know will fit under the bed. I was just too frustrated to do it at the time.

I had a stitchery group meeting on Tuesday, so I got several more rows done on the afghan. I’m at the halfway point now so the end is in sight.

Goal For Next Week:
Work on the afghan. Finish craft migration.

WHAT I’M READING:
Can you believe it? I did not read any Nora Roberts last week. But I did finish The Hungry Ghosts by Shyam Selvadurai. I can’t say I enjoyed it because enjoy just isn’t the right word. But it was a very poignant book.

Goal For Next Week:
Keep up my good reading habits.

GOAL REVIEW:

I must be doing something right. All the posts were up on time and I didn’t even have to stay up late to write them. Go me!

I might have actually gotten around to writing other things, but I lost half a day to the stitchery meeting, almost a whole day going through the bins and bags of unfinished projects. And I also spent considerable time reading and re-reading poems.

Believe it or not, I’ve been thinking a lot about those exercises Stuart Ross gave us to do during his seminar. I’d really like to give them a try, but I’ll have to find the USB stick with my stories on it first.

Even if I’m not writing anything new, I really could be editing something. Maybe I should start keeping track of what I’m doing during the day and when I realize how much time I’m wasting I’ll stop wasting it and be more productive. Kind of like the way a food diary helps you see how much food you’re eating.

As for marketing . . . that’s never going to be my long suit. I think I’m going to just take that off the table for now until I actually start doing some marketing. Ha! Maybe I can take an on-line class about marketing, and that would also contribute to the tech/learning.

Poetry was the shining star last week, and giving the reading had me re-visiting poems I’d forgotten I’d written. I just wish I’d kept up with keeping them organized. I really should think about an anthology though, maybe one using traditional forms.

Got some work done on the afghan, finally, but I still have a ways to go. And now I’ve got all these other unfinished projects dogging my heels too. LOL And the craft migration is almost finished, but that’ll be a post on the other blog.

I read in little bits and pieces last week. Shyam’s book was not one to rush through, although I did stay up late Friday night reading it. Hopefully I’ll be able to keep up the nice, slow pace with the next book I pick up.

The weather has been a roller-coaster of wind, rain, warmth, snow, ice, and a whole lot of greyness, which is really not conducive to getting anything done.

But while it wasn’t a bad week last week, I’m sure I can do better.

The Pond - Part 26

The deaths of the three youths hit the community hard. They had been well-liked with bright futures ahead of them. Many looked to Nikolai for blame, for it was he who tested the ice just two days before.

“I tell you, the ice was solid. Ask Yuri or Stefan – they accompanied me. Our families were going to be on the ice as well. We would not take any risks with our own blood.”

But neither Yuri nor Stefan could remember if they’d actually tested the center of the pond, where the ice broke. The edges, yes, but it had been very cold that day and they’d been in a hurry to return to the warmth of their homes.

Izolda felt a chill go through her that had nothing to do with the temperature outside. Something wasn’t right, she could feel it. The first chance she had, she wrapped her heavy, woolen shawl around herself and went to the pond.

“I do not know who or what you are, but I will find out, mark my words.”

In response, the ice in the middle of the pond cracked with a sound like a rifle shot, startling her. Izolda’s lips tightened in anger as a woman’s laughter drifted over her like an errant breeze.

“Do not underestimate me,” she said. “I have power you can only dream of. And I will use everything at my disposal to end you.”

A spiderweb of cracks appeared in the center of pond, spreading outwards. Izolda stood her ground as a column of water speared upwards. It spun furiously and took the vague shape of a woman.

“You will not prevail,” the entity whispered. “I will see you and all you love in your graves.”

“Who are you!” Izolda shouted.

“You know who I am,” the voice whispered.

The column of water collapsed, the wave flowing towards the edge where Izolda stood. She refused to be intimidated and did not move, but she was more shaken than she would have been willing to admit to anyone.

“We need to put a fence around the pond,” Izolda said to Nikolai that night.

“A fence? Around the pond? What nonsense is filling your head,” Nikolai said.

“It is too dangerous, I do not wish to see anyone else hurt.”

“Bah, you make too much of a few accidents. If you must worry, worry for our business.”

“Our business? What is happening with our business?” Izolda asked, a little alarmed.

Nikolai sighed. “The river has never fully recovered from the drought. The water level is lower and it does not flow as fast. We are losing business to the steam powered mills.”

Izolda thought for a moment. “What can we do about this?”

“There is nothing be done,” Nikolai said with a shrug. “At first we thought perhaps someone had built a dam to control the flow, but we have traced the river to its source and there is nothing to account for the lower level. If there is a dam, it is invisible.”

Something unseen, Izolda thought. Like a water spirit in a pond.