Chapter Text
The snows came early and often these last years, it lays heavy and thick in this valley, as winter lingered in the mountains.
Even as that snow piles high where it lands, above, on the crest of the highest heights of the tallest mountain, the palace of the Ice Queen remains trapped in ice. Those who have seen it say that it is dripping with thick, jagged icicles, hanging from every railing and encrusting the big chandeliers that hang far up above. The floors are coated with ice, they say, as is everything here, and frost lingers in the air even throughout the warmest days of summer.
The rage of the Winter Queen is apparent there — just as it is in the mountain villages below.
It’s been this way for an age — her people can barely remember a time when the seasons were gentle in transition, springs and falls temperate, summers long, sunny and warm, the winters fierce yet short.
Those halcyon days are gone.
For the Queen’s pain and grief express themselves in rage — she lashes out.
Since the grievous loss of the Winter Queen's beloved Summer Solstice, nothing has been easy or gentle or mild when it comes to the seasons. The summers here now are short, far from bright, while falls and springs are a glimmering mirage.
Winters, in particular, are long, harsh and icebound.
The Queen rages, and thus the cold northern winds howl. As her people talked in whispers of their Queen’s rage, they lowered their eyes in turn as they spoke of her loss. She’d always been the gentlest of frost gods, their beloved Ice Queen, and they struggled with how to soothe her wrath. Her people brought symbols of the forest and spring into their homes, festooned their mantles with the boughs of the green trees that thrived in their mountains, and prayed for their warm winter goddess of gentle frosts and temperate winters to return.
It fails to assuage her grief, and thus, they shiver as she mourns.
Winter raged on, longer and longer than it should, and the people of the Ice Queen froze, sickened as the ice freezes the blood in their veins even as they offer tokens and make prayers in vain. They suffered, did not know how they would make it through the winter.
The Ice Queen rages, her people stagger on, and so it is until, on one especially vicious stormy day, a tall man, so handsome as to be unworldly and dressed in a tattered black cloak, staggered into one of the highest of mountain villages.
Despite their struggles, they do their best to care for him, do the people of these ice-bound mountains, as they feed him what they can and tend to his fever. Offer to replace his tattered clothes with warm ones, to gift him a cloak less ragged and torn – yet he refuses all they offer, but rather pleads for the directions to the frozen fortress of a Queen trapped in the ice of relentless grief. Begging indeed for that alone, he had turned away all attempts to shelter him while he rests and recovers, or even to provide him a guide for the perilous journey – for he could not pause, even for a moment, he had told them.
There wasn’t time.
Indeed, one bright, frozen morning, they yet found him gone; indeed, the truth was, he was gone that night. Though they never learned of even the stranger’s name, and though they never knew his fate – and how it intertwined with their own – they yet wondered if he might have somehow been their deliverance. For even while never seeing him again, they noted that his arrival and departure coincided with a decided thaw that arrived shortly thereafter.
Making those conclusions that seem natural, they can only be thankful and hope he is well.
For the legend that grew in the small mountain villages in the dominion of the Ice Queen says that as he prostrated himself on the floor before her throne, sprawled at her feet, ice dripping from his beard, skin blue, his face thin, eyes feverish and breath all but gone, his cloak an inky stain behind him, his gaze had nevertheless burned in devotion.
“My Queen,” it is said he had whispered, a plea. “Forgive me.”
Legends say that, leaning over to examine him, she had raised his head in her hands and that her lips frosted his in benediction and release all at once as she had welcomed him home. As she did, it is said, she had smiled, at last, as, outside, the sun had finally broken through the lingering winter’s haze.
What had been lost, her people said – when, they rejoicing, they later spoke of these legends – had been found.