100TWC - Day 25: Breaking Away

Silence reigned. Silence, and frost. A frost so ancient that nothing alive remembered its falling. So deep that it could swallow a mountain. Yet all it chose to swallow was more frost, the new joining the old. Compacting under ever newer layers, crushed by the years, the centuries, the millennia, until no single flake or shard was distinguishable from the rest. Only a solid mass of frigid blue. It stood, apparently motionless, over the land. Guarding the bedrock like a shield, the frost was absolute. Impenetrable.

But only apparently motionless. To the casual observer. On another scale of time the frost flowed. Like a crystal river it coursed across the land so ponderously that it had its own word: glacial. A close as anything can come to stationary and still be moving.

The frost was absolute in its solidity; resolute in its movement. The silence was neither absolute nor resolute. Its reign was temporary. More of a regency, really. Disturbed at a visceral level by the gargantuan creaking of the lethargic ice, the silence gave way to the voice of the glacier. A gut-wrenching moan of deliberate agony. A slothful yawn. An occasional crack, like the bones of a leviathan, stretching through a valley hidden deep beneath its glassy flesh.

Yet though the frost appeared infinite, the land beneath it was finite. And though the frost crept infinitely slowly towards land's end, still eventually was that end attained. At which point the frost stood at the brink, peering out over the chill sea as if searching for lost brethren on the horizon, or deciding how to continue its journey on such comparatively uncertain footing.

That decision, ultimately, was not one for the frost to make. It was one for physics. For gravity. Overhanging the edge of the land like a gelid curtain, the glacier knew stresses and strains previously undreamt of. The torment called fresh moans from the frost, until with cold inevitability the land-locked mother ice bid a noisy farewell to its new-born daughter as a quarter-million-ton chunk broke free and crashed majestically into the calm waters below.