Maybe, at one point, there would have been a time where he had a lover.
Her eyes had glittered with radiant yellow light and his body carried the spirit of horsemen and entrepreneurs and warriors beneath her veiled muscles. In the cool blue light of the moon, she would have been a beacon of sulfur yellow light to which every man and woman around would be automatically, subconsciously drawn.
He thought despairingly of this memory. The collection of schemas that remained in the wake of this woman who was long gone from the same path which he trekked. There lay no beacons nor landmarks ahead in the snowy, untrodden ground, lain with such insignificance that it should never meet a human gaze.
Yet here he was.
He was no one’s beacon, no one’s radial light which laid a path of familiarity and effortless charm, instead he stood stock-still in the flutter of stars and snowflakes which merged together in a melody of the sky. His own gray hair tumbled from his form, his thin wrists concealed under a ragged blue cloak.
If she had been the light, he was a shadow. Left, wandering, without anything corporeal to take the shape of and reflect, that’s how he had gotten here, wasn’t it?
The wind died down for a single moment. He took the opportunity to pause, reach a shaking hand into his cloak and unsheath a single canteen of light he had brought. Upon reaching the air, the glass bloomed to life, though life was something so unthinkable in the barren polar plain, and yellow light crept slowly from the shaking hands of the hermit.
She raced, she bounded across the snow in a radius around the man, the cold wind had roared again to life, fluttering the snowflakes into the golden light. The hermit trembled as though the light was the lover, herself reincarnated into this lamp and now standing beside him once again.
His eyes closed, he took in a cold breath, and bathed in the lonesome light.