Long, long ago, back when I was first really building Jenora as a character in my head, I had an idea of a triptych of stories placing her as a goddess of sorts to a world where she had shown up during exploration once. The first would have been set long ago, where she had previously saved an island from invasion, and come back generations later to discover she was being worshipped as a goddess. The second was more modern day (well, modern day for when I started thinking about this, which was... gah, 1995 by the timestamps on the story fragments) involving a church and a group of artists that she gets going to paint the church against the wishes of the current priestess. And the third was in the future, on a space station in orbit, where she'd end up having to protect the station from a sabotage attempt that would have taken out the main power systems and caused extensive damage.

This is the second of those three stories. It's also, well, not quite a Christmas story, but it is set around the Winter solstice, because what else would be one of the high holy days for a sun goddess?

As my stories often do, it kind of mutated during the writing... the original idea had the old artist being blind, and that was why he needed help. I just couldn't really get that working through my head, though, so focusing on the time constraint gave me ample reason for all the needed help.

This may be the longest thing I've written in one piece rather than serialized like most of my older story writing.