A Prompted Story by /u/prompted-writing
You are a private investigator. Your specialty is missing kids who have been abducted to fulfill “the prophecy” of different fantasy worlds.
(reddit link)
You are a private investigator.
Your breath is a pastel-coloured cloud of ice crystals in the hours-long Arctic dawn. Soon the sun will crest the horizon. Those rapidly shortening hours of true day are when your thoughts are clearest. When you puzzle over your target, the abductor. In the day, you try to predict his next move. At other times, the dark times, all you are is the unquenchable drive to find the bastard. You will find him. You will save them. Beneath that drive, you feel the rage. Old. Familiar.
As the days have shortened, you've been forced to make progress by travelling in the twilight. Each day, you pack up your camp as the first hints of light make the barest outlines of things visible. It is cold, cold and dry and still and empty. It takes hours for the sun to rise. It happens in stages.
Slowly the outlines gain detail, depth. You press forward through the snow.
Gradually the world becomes visible. Poplars and willow, but twisted and shrivelled. Miniature, impoverished versions of those trees, clinging to life at the very limit of possibility. You push on. You became sure days ago that you had done permanent damage to your toes, but to unwrap them now would only worsen the situation. The ache from your feet has deadened. Did the children walk this same path? How did they endure this?
Then, finally, before true direct light breaches the horizon: the colours. As the edge of the world's shadow passes overhead, stretched out by the extreme latitudes, the world is filled with refracted colour. Pinks and purples, oranges and red, the pastels, scattering as they filter through the delicate, perfect ice crystals that cling, undisturbed by the still air, to each and every evergreen needle.
The scattered colour suffuses the snow-covered ground. It is never still, always changing as edge of that refracted rainbow passes over you.
For a moment the beauty overcomes you and you stop. You are at the top of a small rise. Around you, the world briefly glows with colour that no-one but you will ever see. You wonder whether the lost children saw sights like this? Was each of them halted by the quite, transient beauty of this desolate, untouched world? What had kept them going?
You've already established beyond reasonable doubt that each child was suffering from fantastical delusion. Each child's delusion was distinct, however each believed themselves a hero on an important quest---the protagonist of their own fantasy world. You have spent years tracking and reconstructing, but now you are sure. Their questing inevitably led them north. This way. You will find them.
The rainbow has passed. You've learned that this means you'll have a few scant hours, fewer every day, of direct day light to make progress. You cannot waste this time on reflection. You set off.
Deep inside you, something is screaming, but it has missed it's chance to be heard. You are not a private investigator.