Every winter has a last night, and on that night the Baron comes.
No one invites him. He walks out onto the white field in a tall hat and a face that is all teeth, sets an iron barrel in the snow and fills it with fire. Then he takes something red on a long spit and turns it slowly over the flames, the way people have always turned offerings over fire when they wanted the year to change.
The old custom says that at the end of winter, winter itself must be burned. In the villages they burn her straw effigy and shout her out of the land. The Baron keeps the custom his own way. Into the barrel go the long nights, the frozen roads, the silence of the cold months, everything the snow has been keeping. The smoke rises blue on one side and pink on the other, and the snow around him blushes, as if embarrassed by so much warmth.
He never stays for spring. By the time the first water runs, there will be only a black ring in the field and a smell of smoke. That is the difference between ash and fuel: one is what remains, the other is what lets the world move on.
That winter the masks began to arrive in the collection. The living faces of the earlier years stepped back, and the creatures of the night came one by one, for a whole season. The fire lit here would go out, return years later in the hands of the one who speaks with fire, and at last give birth to a phoenix.
(Fine Art Photography. Created in 2023.)
