Drabble 195 – Lucelent

I have the Aurora Borealis on the brain entirely because I’ve been re-reading the His Dark Materials series. It’s one of those things that doesn’t sound real to me; I’ve never seen it in real life, and imagining dancing lights overhead, no matter what the scientific explanation, sounds like something out of a fantasy novel. I’d love to see it one day, but for now it remains a mystery that I’m curious about, something existing just on the other side of realism.

That, too, is something on my mind a lot lately, in no small part because I’m re-reading His Dark Materials, but also because I just like learning things! I like that there are things I don’t understand in the world and that maybe I’ll never understand them, but that I still have something to gain by trying.

Anyway, here’s a drabble.

LUCELENT

(a.) from Latin luculentus—”full of light, bright, splendid”

Clear-headed, clear in thought or communication.

Magda isn’t one for crowded coffeeshops. She doesn’t study in parks full of chatter, nor in libraries filled with the gentle hush of whispers and turning pages. She seeks silence, utter and complete, made all the better by chilly air. 

Magda knows she’ll never recreate it perfectly. Always, she thinks of that bright expanse of the aurora above her, the crisp silence of an Alaska winter enveloping her. Never has she felt more awake, more alive, more ready to bask in infinite curiosity, than outside her father’s cabin, swathed in a sleeping bag, watching the lights dance silently above her.