Chapter Text
There is a land beyond north, where an unforgiving kingdom of ice stretches endlessly beneath a merciless sky. Here, the sun holds no reign, and life itself lingers as a faint echo swallowed by the cold. Few humans have dared to cross these frozen plains, and even fewer have returned. Those who lived to tell the tale spoke of mysteries no sane mind could conjure.
Among their stories, was one of a woman. No, she was not some icy ghost risen from the snow, though there was something otherworldly in her stillness. She was a warm-blooded, human, and yet her face carried the pallor of death, as though the cold had stolen more than her breath. She was among the few souls who crossed the sea of ice in search of a land no man's footsteps had ever fallen.
It was there she met Captain Robert Walton, who had himself journeyed to that desolate, white world. By the time he found her, his ship and crew were trapped in the ice, the masts rising like skeletons against the horizon and men falling like the snow that surrounded them. He had long ceased to mark the hours of the day, for the sky held onto darkness stubbornly, yet suspected to have come across the ominous figure at late noon.
He first saw her lying motionless in the snow several feet from his ship. At a distance, she looked like a doll discarded by a child, yet as he drew nearer, he saw that she was rather a woman. Her hair stiff with ice, her skin pale like the blinding snow in the air. Walton believed her dead, until a snowflake drifted down and melted upon her nose, and in that fragile moment, he saw the faintest twitch, the smallest stir of life.
For a long moment, Walton simply stared, uncertain whether the briskness of the air had deceived his eyes. As strange as it may be for a woman to be in no man’s land, he couldn’t simply waste manpower carrying a corpse back to his ship. Yet there was no mistaking the movement, so faint, so fragile, and yet undeniably alive.
He knelt beside her, brushing away the thin crust of snow that clung to her face. Her lips were pale, parted slightly as if caught mid-breath. Strands of frozen hair framed her brow, and beneath her lashes, dark as the polar night, he thought he saw the faintest quiver.
“Alive,” he whispered to no one but the wind, which answered with a hollow wail.
Using his shoulder to support her weight, Walton lifted the woman from her icy grave. Her body was rigid, the cold having claimed every muscle, yet she weighed little, as though made of the same frozen air that surrounded them. He carried her toward the ship and yelled for his men when the frozen prison came into sight.
The cabin into which they laid her was dimly lit, its lantern swaying gently with the groan of the ice below. Walton draped her in blankets, his hands trembling, not from the cold, but from a strange unease that had settled in his chest. There was something about her presence, even in unconsciousness, that defied explanation.
Hours passed before warmth dared to touch her cheeks again. When at last her eyelids fluttered open, they revealed eyes of deep, rich brown, alive with a light that both startled and unsettled him. They were eyes that spoke of heat and earth and life, everything this frozen wasteland had forgotten.
“Where am I?” she murmured, her voice raw, as though it had been unused for centuries.
Walton could find no words. For in that moment, as the ship groaned beneath them and the Arctic wind screamed through the hull. This woman carried a story and with it a dark aura. He was both frightened and electrified in her presence.
The woman did not speak again for a long while. Walton watched as she drifted between consciousness and fevered sleep, her lips murmuring words he could not make out. At times, she trembled so violently that he feared she might shatter, like the ice closing in around them. He ordered the fire kept alive at all hours, though fuel was scarce, and stayed at her bedside even when exhaustion clawed at his mind.
The crew whispered among themselves. Some said she was an omen, an angel of death. Others, quieter but no less fearful, swore she was the white witch, conjured by the storm to punish them for trespassing upon forbidden lands. Walton silenced them with sharp command, but in the hollow of his chest, doubt stirred. There was something unnatural in her survival.
On the third night, when the storm had subsided and the ice groaned softly beneath the hull, she woke with a clarity he had not yet seen. Those deep brown eyes fixed upon him, piercing through the dim lantern light.
“You are the captain,” she said, her voice faint but steady.
“I am,” he replied. “Robert Walton, of the Prometheus. You are safe now.”
A ghost of a smile passed over her lips, though it was joyless, bitter. “Safe,” she repeated quietly, as if tasting the word and finding it foreign. “No one is safe here. Not anymore.”
Walton frowned but said nothing. She looked toward the frost-laced window, where the night pressed close like a living thing.
“He will come here soon,” she continued at last, her voice low, trembling with a strange mixture of fear and fury. “When he does, he won’t stop at nothing until he has what he wants.”
Her words fell into the silence like stones sinking into deep water. The candle flickered. Walton felt his throat tighten, though he could not say why.
“What do you mean?” he asked softly.
Her eyes turned to him again. Dark, haunted, and full of unbearable knowing. “Captain,” she whispered, “you must release me. If you do not, he will bring death upon you and everyone else in this ship.”
Walton stared, caught between disbelief and a creeping sense of dread. There was no deceit in her face, only a terror so absolute it chilled him. The wind blared against the panels of the ship like a siren’s calling.
“Who is he?” he demanded, though his voice faltered. “What danger could reach us here, in the middle of this desolation?”
She turned her gaze toward the window, where frost had woven intricate veins across the glass. Beyond, the world lay silent, endless, and white. “He is not bound by the world as you and I are,” she murmured. “The cold cannot claim him. The ice will not stop him. He will come for me as he always does.”
Walton felt the weight of her words settle like lead in his chest. He was now certain the cold had driven her mad, yet she had instilled a fear that held him in a vise. That night, he could not sleep. Every creak of the ship, every moan of the wind, felt like a warning. When he finally stepped onto the deck, the air was sharp and soundless, the stars distant and cold. Then, from far beyond the rim of the frozen horizon, a sound rose.
It was not the wind.