5. Hibernation
...
Tourmaline and the mysterious spiky gem lived together in rather quiet peace for the next few months. It was everything he could’ve asked for, not having to fight, but it would be a little nicer if he could talk to the guy. He’d take what he could get.
Summer turned into fall and into winter, and the volcanic island was soon covered in a blanket of snow. Tourmaline had never spent a winter without hibernating before, and it was pretty to watch it come down. Gemstones were photosynthetic, so since winter was usually dark and cloudy it made more sense for everyone to sleep through the whole winter rather than spend half of the year in miserable exhaustion. Everyone except the winter shift, that is. The job was relegated to just one gem back home, who would take care of the building all alone, and fend off the moon people all alone, all winter long. Seemed like a lonely job. In Tourmaline’s case, there was not much in the way of housekeeping to do, the moon people didn’t come here, and he wasn’t alone either, so it wasn’t so bad.
He spent much of the winter lazing around in the shell. It was still too bright in the day for him to sleep all winter, but too dim for him to do anything. Even more, the spiky gem was water soluble and the island was now covered in snow, which was just water, so he couldn’t leave the shell. For the sake of Tourmaline's boredom and the spiky gem's health, he decided it would be best if they did in fact hibernate.
He got up and trudged through the snow. The way it fell so delicately captured his attention and he took a break to watch it, and caught a few flakes in his hands and on his face.
He then had an idea. If he wanted to hibernate through the winter, he could block the opening of the shell with snow. So, he scrunched some snow together and began to roll.
He rolled and rolled and rolled, and eventually the ball of snow was taller than he was. He continued to roll and roll and roll, until he couldn’t roll any longer, as he was completely out of energy having rolled so much snow for so long on a rather dim day. He stood there, unable to move, still in the same pushing position against the ball.
The sun began to set, wherever it was behind the clouds, and it got quite dark indeed. Then, the clouds cleared up to reveal the starry sky behind them, and it was a night full of narrow crescent moons too, so there was hardly any light to feed on. He had to wait until the sun came up, still up against the snowball. It had snowed a fair bit as he was stuck, so a thick layer of snow had built up on his head and arms.
Eventually, finally, the sun began to rise, after an agonizingly boring night of doing absolutely nothing. The sky shifted from inkily dark to a vivid cobalt blue, into green, into yellow, into red, and the sun exposed itself as a great big pink ball of fire coming out from the sea. As morning rolled in, he got enough energy to shake the snow off, and eventually to continue rolling the great big snowball back to the shell.
He arrived, and shouted, “Hey! Spiky guy! Check this out!” and gestured to the enormous snowball. “It’s too dark for us to sleep, so I’ve procured us a great big snowball to block the opening with! Then we can sleep undisturbed until spring when it melts!” He wasn’t really expecting an answer, because the spiky gem did not speak, but he figured he’d give him a heads up just in case he could understand him. He rolled the ball up to the opening, squeezed through, and was finally able to get a good winter’s sleep in the darkness of the shell as snow began to fall, eventually sealing the two inside.
