AVALANCHE

A subtle nod to shovels, solitude, and sovereignty.

High in the peaks of the Paradise Mountains, where summer spoke with honeybees in the air and fresh dew on the grass, there lived a man named Becer.

Becer was not famous. Not feared. Not rich. He carved wooden spoons from pine and spoke mostly to goats passing by. His cabin—modest, moss-roofed, and warm from a stove that never slept—stood on the south face of the Sunny Ridge. It was, as he often said, “Just enough to live.” But one winter, the mountain decided it wasn’t enough.

Out of the blue, an avalanche came like a white beast with a hairy back. Thunder without sound. A breath held too long by the world, then exhaled all at once. By the time it passed, Becer’s cabin was gone. Not destroyed—buried. Fifty feet under, like a frozen tomb.
 
The villagers said, “Come down the mountain. You can stay with us forever.”
 
The monks said, “Wait for the thaw. Spring will save you.”
 
But Becer shook his head, “If a man’s heart is buried, he does not wait to feel it beat again. He works.”

And so he dug.

With a shovel made from the spine of a broken sled and the iron of his stove door, he began to carve his way back to the hearth. Day after day, he tunneled through the snow—cutting cubes of ice with a mason’s eye, stacking them like forgotten prayers.

But instead of casting the snow aside, Becer kept it. He shaped it, and when he had shaped enough bricks he began to stack them high.
 
First a wall. Then a gate. Then towers. Then corridors, curving like frozen veins from his house outward—forming a ring, then another, and another. When spring arrived, the villagers hiked up to check on him—expecting to find a ruin, or a body, or at best, an old man sipping tea beside a damp hut. Instead, they found a castle.

A gleaming fortress, glittering like cut diamonds strewn across a sandy beach. Its walls were twenty feet high, its towers capped with pinewood spires. The original cabin sat in the center just like a heart inside a chest of armor. It wasn’t just shelter. It was sovereignty.
 
It was that soverignty—that avalanche of justice—which let him say yes to the lollipop of life, conquer his fear of death, and make his entree into this life once again. 
 
And so he said "OH MY GOD"