Every year, somewhere in the place where cold comes from, a door is unlocked. Every year, someone steps through the door.

She is not cold as much as she is the suggestion of it, like some little breeze that feels like nothing, but leaves you with goosebumps and an unexpected shiver. She passes by a wicker casket that bears no name, only the face of something half-remembered, the kind she dreamed of but half forgot when she awoke. The flowers atop it wilt much faster now that she's here, till there's nothing left but a touch of dust. 

A bouquet, she needs a new bouquet for the girl-woman in the casket. Alas, the last dandelions had shivered in the breeze and given out. The flowers in the garden beds are kissed by frost and the wildflowers have all but disappeared from the ridges. What can she do now?

There are leaves in the trees, yes, and she will paint them all with watercolors and bundle them up. Better than flowers, she gets to work, one drop from her palette of red, orange, yellow, and brown, which spreads slowly over the pale green of the leaf till it sinks in entirely. 

It was a little while after noon.

~~

Fall cannot seem to stop. At her touch, things ripen, become more beautiful. Crops are ready for the harvest, full and inviting. Leaves turn comforting shades of the warmest colors. Fat little squirrels are running around in search of the nuts that she has become accustomed to shaking loose for them. 

She cannot stop finding leaves to cover Summer’s woven casket with. She loves them all so much, they are all so pretty, and so she brings them back to rest upon the now cold frame of whoever had come before her. There were so many, now, you could hardly see the wicker edges of the casket, there is just the outline of it protruding beneath the painted leaves. A blanket, to tuck Summer in, tight and warm. 

The world around her was painted too, like the mirror image of her face in the pond, but rippled and blurred. There was her dress, the green grass’s death shroud, turning a slow yellow gold. She was the tree trunks and the leaves and she was the blue sky and the rainy one, depending on how the mirror pool rippled. There was the night and the cold, the day and the warm, she danced on the tip of a needle, balance. 

High in the sky, the sun reached out, to catch the horizon and pull it close.

~~

Now so many leaves sat atop summer's old casket that you couldn’t see it anymore.

You could not see the barest suggestion of it, only fall leaves upon fall leaves.

It was beginning to look a bit like a bed. Was it always a bed?  She realized a long time ago that it was never a bouquet she was making, something in her must have always known that.

Fall does not feel so giddy in her own power anymore. Over and over she thinks of some dreadful impossibility, some terrible idea forming in the corners of her mind. It felt as though she’d done it all before, the casket, the bouquet, the shape of the bed beginning to emerge. The people were warning her too, carving turnips and pumpkins and melons into angular expressions, some angry, some happy, some afraid. They are never sad, though, Falls knows without learning.

She has done this all before. Two forces at work now, somewhere within her, splitting it all at the seams. One half was cold and leaned towards the scythe, hovering above wheatfields, golden with promise. One half trying so desperately to lean away, back into that land Fall did not know, of green grass and lakewater. 

When she brings the next armful of colorful leaves back to summer’s grave, she finds a scythe there, unburied and proud. It's hers, for her she knew. She was the harvest, she was the scythe, she was the wheat, she was a tiny zephyr zipping ahead of a massive storm. It feels right in her hand. 

It’s for her, she knows, but not her’s to swing. 

The door bangs and flutters. She had not closed it behind her when she arrived. The sun kisses the horizon at long last, the sky blushing pink. The sun is beginning to set. 

~~

The sky was dark, and the casket was buried completely. Now there is a bed in its place, leaves upon leaves upon leaves. There is not much left to add, not much left for Fall to do. But she can’t stop- something will happen when she stops. Someone is coming, the bed is theirs. The sun is setting, the sky is painted pink and orange, and she wonders if the orange is for her, as if whoever paints it wanted her to take a little heart in seeing her heraldry in the sky.

Perhaps every sunset was orange, though.   

People were lighting the gourd lanterns now. Maybe thoughts were for her too, maybe they were not warnings, but little love letters. We love you, they called, we love you and you are loved. The building fear ebbs out, no final sparks, only flame hitting some damp point in the wick and fizzling out. 

She sits on the bed she's made. The scythe lies across her lap, her hands finally at rest around its comfortable curved handle. That half that longed for the unfamiliar summer waned and waned, until it became less than a sliver. She sits on the piles and piles of leaves with the symbol of the harvest across her lap, waiting. 

The year falls into dusk in a quiet, inconsequential peace. 

The sun has set.

~~

It was here. It was here. It was here, the bed was made. The sun had set, the sunset was gone, her orange banner gone, that standard she was meant to carry into whatever battle was ahead. She grips her scythe tighter. She was never going to use it, but it felt good to hold something. The sky goes from blue to black. Pinpricks in the felt, stars, appear, with a sickle blade of moon. What was it that shone through that divine fabric, the light behind the moon? The sun; the moon cannot even claim its own light.

The grass is already dead. It is growing pale in a line now, leading out from the bed where Fall waits. Gray to terrible, cold white. Frost, she realized, she remembered without knowing, the line was written in frost. It feels terrible now, waiting. She feels tamed. She should fight, something is coming! Had she killed Summer? She’d buried their casket. Who would come after her? Would they kill her too? Where did the carpet of frost lead?

Winter, she knew. Winter, Winter. She could not remember, but she knew. She knew Winter too and wondered if he remembered her, or if he knew her. Perhaps it was neither and perhaps it was both. 

The moon was a sliver, a foreign light it did not own shining through it. She was the moon, she knew, or something like it. Who’s light was it that shone through her?

Winter stood on the frosty carpet. She knew him then, he was the cold that came through the door with her. He was the winds at night that howled and were given names in old books of legend. He was death, and he was the death that had come from her hands and colored the leaves, that had darkened the skies early and ripened crops, growing towards the scythe, the coming harvest. 

He had been with her all along, they had made the bed side by side, arm in arm. She was the liminal moon and here before her was the cold, frosted sun. 

She smiled. 

The bed was for her to rest in, now that Winter was taking over. It was not a casket. That was kind. She put the scythe on one side of the bed. It was hers, hers alone and it would not be used on her at all. She was just going to sleep for a while.

Winter tucked her into bed. Her breath clouded the air, again and again until it finally stopped, a thin puff and then nothing. Winter left the bedside, snow falling light and fat. An extra blanket for Fall’s bed, he thought. She would need it. It was only going to get colder.

~~

Some long while from now, when the months turn away from the scythe and things start to grow, Winter will lie dead on the ground. His blood will be dark and full of stars. Spring will have a sword in his hand and a song on his lips. The dead grass will feed the new, living shoots. 

Fall will wake up, like one who has accidentally drifted off in a place not their own, and, full of sleep, slips away and returns. Winter will be dead. 

Spring will give her no trouble as she carries him back to the door to the place where cold comes from. Sleepy, she will close it tight and turn the lock.