The Little Red Story
In the heart of winter, when the earth’s breath turns to frost and the sun hangs low like a dimmed lantern above the pines, there lies a small meadow — neither wild nor tame, a hush between seasons. Its grasses, pale and soft as a maiden’s hair, bend under the weight of snow as though bowing to something unseen. And there, beneath the white mantle of silence, the forest remembers.
Long ago, before the world was divided by time and forgetting, there walked a people who spoke with trees and listened to stones. They were the First Keepers — those who carried in their eyes the echo of summer and in their hearts the warmth of perpetual fire. Their kind did not fear winter; to them it was a moment of inward bloom, a solemn feast of stillness. And it is said that once a year, when the frost grew tender and the moon stood as pale as milk above the firs, they gathered in the meadow for a rite of remembrance.
No trumpets marked their coming, no footprints their passing. Only a shimmer, a sigh of the snow, and then they were there — the pale dwellers of the grove. They carried with them the color red: the heart of the forest itself. Apples, berries, mushrooms — each a seed of hidden summer. To hold one was to remember the warmth of life. To taste one was to dream of dawns yet unborn.
Among them moved a woman tall and bright-haired, as if she had walked straight out of an ancient tale. She was the Keeper of the Branch, the one who gathered the green in the heart of white. Others followed her — the youth with the pomegranate of fire, the maidens who clasped one another against the cold, the laughing child whose small white dog ran before him like a flake come to life. Together they were not a family of blood, but of memory — the silent heirs of the earth’s old vows.
It was said that when the first snow falls, their laughter stirs the birches, and their bare feet leave no mark upon the frozen ground. For they walk not upon the world, but within it — guardians of what the living have forgotten. The red they carry is not mere color but a covenant: a whisper from the soil that life, though sleeping, shall rise again.
And so the meadow endures. Every winter, when the wind turns soft and the dusk turns gold, a flicker of red appears among the white — a reminder that even in stillness, the heart of the world keeps beating.
