ID: A frosted spiderweb with an intricate snowflake caught in it.
Safe for Work, Rated PG-13 for brief language and disturbing imagery.
A chime beeps from the wall control console. Incoming call from South loading dock, says the message bot.
“Answer,” replies the Snow Queen without looking up from her work.
“Hello?” cries a man’s voice in Mandarin, “is this the home of the Snow Queen?”
“Why do you care?” she answers in the same tongue, albeit dryly. She lifts an iced tea to her lips.
“One of our own has the Demon Sand Curse” – the straw stops – “and we heard that you know how to break it!”
Her shoulders straighten up slowly in her chair. The cup returns to its coaster. Her jaw flexes.
“Hello? Are you there?”
Her eyes close. A huge sigh lifts and lowers her shoulders. “Let them in.”
Minutes later, the doors to the icy workshop slide apart as three handsome demigods walk in. Well, two walk in while dragging an unconscious third in between. The man dragging his feet is Monster-Slayer, dressed like a 21st century soldier with a sash around his waist embroidered with lightning bolts. Under one arm, and on the verge of tears, is his twin Made-for-Water. He bears the same face, only iridescent fish scales shimmer under his brown skin, and he is fully dressed in the ceremonial attire of a Diné medicine man. The other demigod is Nezha, sporting fiery eyes, spiked hair, and a red denim jacket.
“Well?” he shouts across the room, “you gonna do something?”
The Queen puts a boot on the edge of her desk, pushes her rolling chair across the floor, and hops up when the momentum spins her around to face her distractions. Her shoulders tower over Monster-Slayer as she grabs his chin and lifts an eyelid. She stands over seven feet tall, staring down with black eyes and luminous blue irises; hollow moons in a midnight sky. Thin braids spiderweb over her head like a snowflake and unite in a snowy waterfall at her crown. Below is a heart-shaped face, bluer than death and even colder, with navy lips and freckles both black and white, resembling granite or the twilight. Her attire seems nothing like a queen: a blue honeycomb shirt, fingerless gloves, cropped black jacket, and matching trousers fit with a utility belt dangling with unknown tools.
Monster-Slayer’s brother grimaces at her intrusive method while the fire demon glances around with a wrinkled nose.
“Yep,” she declares in her native tongue, “that’s Demon Sand Curse all right.”
Nezha looks her up and down. “Well?! How did this even happen?”
She sighs again. “It’s a stupid long story, and none of us have the patience for it.”
“If it helps us understand why he’s this way,” speaks up the medicine man, “then we should hear it.”
---
A time ago so long, some demons forged the Disenchanted Mirror. In it was seen the most vile, disturbing, and wicked versions of everything it reflected. Beautiful meadows appeared like stretches of boiled spinach, colorful sunsets appeared like bloody smog, and glittering seas appeared like oily scum. Whoever stood before its glass was driven to madness, for in it they saw their most horrifying, disgusting, and flawed selves, within and without. Even those with open hearts and pure intentions -- those who desired to learn how they might improve -- were left with hopelessness and despair. The Mirror’s real treachery was that, when one stood before it and looked in, it was impossible to tell what was lie, truth, or half-truth.
After creating chaos among mankind and ruining nature’s charm, the demons set off to take the Disenchanted Mirror to the heavens so as to make fools of the gods. However, as they climbed the skies, they dropped it.
Down it fell.
And fell.
And fell.
And fell.
And shattered into countless pieces no bigger than grains of sand. These disintegrations blew all over the Earth, most mingling with the ground or sea, but some still migrating along the wind.
---
The Snow Queen falls back into her chair and peddles herself back to her desk and iced tea to resume whittling at her chunk of ice.
“So, what shall we do?” asks Made-for-Water, trying to sound patient.
“There is only one cure. He has to cry. The more the better. Was he much of a crier before?”
The hero twin and guardian glance at each other. “Not really,” they answer.
“Then it will be especially difficult for him. The very thing that breaks the curse is the very thing it prevents.”
After a minute of whittling an infinitesimal snowflake under a magnifying glass, the Queen still does not hear them leave. She wants to shoo them out, but she leans her head back on her chair and closes her eyes again.
---
In a village set betwixt towering mountain ranges lived two children named Kai and Gerda. Their families were not much to speak of, so their fondest joy was playing together as only children could. Winter in their mountain village was the most exciting season of all; there was sledding, ice skating, fort building, snowball wars, ice fishing, maple candy making, and cozy nights in sweet-smelling homes. Their favorite game was to pretend to explore faraway lands and to make up adventures of rescuing each other. Kai and Gerda had many winters’ worth of happy memories together.
Until one day, a powerful wind flowed through the valley, bringing with it remnant grains of the Disenchanted Mirror. As Kai stood atop a hill, staring beyond the borders of his little world under the first snowfall of autumn, the grains imbedded in his eyes. Kai staggered and fell from the burning, itching pain. He tried in vain to rub his eyes clean, but to no avail.
“What’s the matter, Kai?” asked Gerda, rushing to his side.
When Kai looked up, he could see nothing but a hideous monster with a hissing voice standing over him. He shrieked and scrambled away on slimy seaweed where grass was only moments before. Everywhere he looked, Kai could only see a hellish reflection of the world he once loved. Soon, his confusion, fright, and despair over having seemingly lost his whole world, burned together into anger.
Gerda tried again and again to comfort Kai’s inexplicable outburst -- she alerted their parents, asked the doctor to see him, even asked the village elders and priests to pray for him -- but everything she did only worsened Kai’s frustration. Normally a friendly boy, he cursed and threatened everyone he saw and took to holding himself up alone in his attic. He refused to open his door to anyone, even his parents or Gerda. He ate little, the meals left by his door tasting like ash and vinegar. He slept little, for fear of the monsters lurking about. He let in little sunshine, for even the sounds of crickets and church bells outside his window were like ominous drones.
His only comfort were the snowflakes.
For whatever reason, the only thing the Demon Sand Curse did not corrupt in Kai’s eyes were the snowflakes that blew through the curtains. He spent hours and days and nights obsessively studying them under his microscope and magnifying glasses, even attempting to sketch them, map their dimensions, and design new ones, even though his drawings did not appeal to him as they used to.
The winter months passed with Kai hunched over his snowflakes inside and Gerda sorely missing him outside. She watched his lighted curtains across the street every night and visited to bring his meals and invite him to play. But he either answered with a shout or nothing at all.
Then, as it always does, winter drew to a close, and the snow came less and less. In a desperate panic at the thought of being without his beautiful snowflakes in a hideous world, Kai snuck outside one night in an attempt to find the last snow pile. Gerda secretly followed him. As he struggled up the same hill as all those months before, Kai found a tiny pile of snow, as well as the Snow Queen.
The Snow Queen was as imposing and intimidating as an avalanche. But in Kai’s eyes, she was as elegant and beautiful as her snowflakes. When she noticed the mortal boy watching her, she arose and regarded him. He gave no greeting, so she unfolded her arms and resumed her field work. She corked a vial of snow and blew on it, frosting it in an instant. She pivoted on her heavy boots and sauntered away, towards an incomprehensible metal craft shaped like a sleigh with a dirigible on top.
“Wait!” Kai shouted, stumbling after her. “Please! Take me with you!”
She stopped and furrowed her brow. “To my Snow Factory?”
“Yes! Please!” Kai fell to his knees in supplication.
Her eyes shifted around. “You truly, sincerely, desire to ride with me to my Snow Factory.”
“YES!”
She, having eyes sharper than icicles and just as cold, thought she spotted a glimmer in his eyes. She stepped forward and leaned down, cocking her head to not overshadow the moonlight on the child’s face. Indeed, he had the Demon Sand Curse.
Why is my work the only thing he longs to see? she wondered. She had once read a rumor through the cryptid grapevine that there was only one cure for the Demon Sand Curse: to cry. If it was true, and the boy’s own home had not been able to help, then snow was his best chance.
Perhaps, thought the Snow Queen to herself, if I give him what he craves, and then take it all away, he will cry. For she was aware that one can feel sorrow by losing something one loves.
She suppressed a smile.
By the time Gerda summited the hill, all she could see was Kai flying through the sky beside who could only be the Snow Queen in her dastardly sleigh.
---
The Snow Queen’s home was the most amazing sight Kai had ever beheld, curse or no curse.
Strewn across several mountain peaks far, far away from any living being were towering skyscrapers and warehouses connected by precarious bridges. Where ice ended and metal began, one couldn’t tell. The night air buzzed with countless flying snowbots and smokestacks that drummed out clouds of snow for the mountains. Not that Kai noticed, almost leaning out of the sleigh, but Snedronning – as she was sometimes called – held him back by his cloak.
First, she gave him a tour of the workshop, the innermost sanctum of her cathedral. Kai asked the purpose of every device and machine and tool he saw, and she answered without frustration, even letting him touch some things. The walls bore dozens of illustrations of snowflakes, systematically documenting her methods over the centuries, and the boy awed like a patron in a museum. Not satiated by the workshop, Kai then got to see the massive engine rooms which housed the Northwind turbines, where the snow was delivered across the known world come winter. She showed the snowbot headquarters, where the versatile automatons built, rebuilt, and charged themselves. She even showed the maintenance buildings for tools, reparations, and surplus supplies, which she thought would bore him. But Kai loved it all. When he wasn’t speechless, he exploded in cheers and rushed around like a giddy puppy.
But like a puppy, Kai grew sleepy.
In a surprisingly quaint cottage on the far side of one of the peaks, Snedronning let her first guest borrow her bed.
---
Kai’s first months were an enraptured exploration of the Snow Queen’s home. Taking time away from her work, she chaperoned his boundless seeking – only to make sure he didn’t get himself killed, of course. She let him dabble in any job he desired – only to keep him out of trouble, of course. She indulged his every question – only so the questions would stop, of course. She had a room and bed added to her cottage – only to keep an eye on him, of course.
When Kai would not stop pelting her with questions about snowmaking, Snedronning began to teach him her favorite job, in the workshop. Along a conveyor belt, in a teeny claw, a parcel of frozen water crystals would halt behind a magnifying glass. Again and again, she would whittle away at the piece of ice with picks and chisels finer than needles, making sure that not one snowflake was like any she had ever made. When the boy asked how she could remember that she never repeated herself, she answered, “It’s a feeling. I start over or refer to my drawings for inspiration. And if I see a snowflake that I have never seen before, I get this indescribable feeling deep down. It’s never wrong.”
Since Kai’s eyes were not as sharp as hers, she had a special hat made for him, befitted with many magnifying glasses, so he could see her infinitesimal workings. With duller tools, and larger chunks of ice, he tried day after day to carve his own snowflakes, preferring to sit on the floor of the workshop while she worked at her desk. He wasn’t very good, and it took him months to finally manage to carve something resembling a snowflake that didn’t fall apart. But when he did, the woman, for the first time in nobody knew how long, laughed.
“Wouldn’t you prefer to work at your own desk, child?”
A sound both hearty and ringing, her chuckle at his terrible art encouraged him to keep on. With his childish trophy on the cottage mantel, Kai forgot about his home before and gave himself to his new life. He spent hours and days and nights working different jobs around the factory as he pleased, but most especially enjoyed sharing the workshop.
One winter cycle, once his snowflakes were the size of marbles, she let him toss them into the Northwind turbines to litter across the mountains with her own flakes. Kai raced to the windows to find them in the eternal blizzard, pressing his face and hands against the fogging glass. Snedronning spotted them and knelt to direct his eyes. Then the boy smiled wider than the crescent moon. Her fingers hesitated as she placed them around his shoulders. And the two stayed there for a long time, watching the snow together. Snedronning had an indescribable feeling deep down.
After several more winter cycles, Kai still had not made snowflakes suitable for the wider world. He struggled to make them smaller than his fingernails, yet he persisted. One day, Snedronning paused her conveyor belt, turned in her chair, and watched him use the tools and machines around the workshop with an expertise no other human had ever learned before. She had encouraged him not to use the batch ice that she made for rapid carving, but to make every ice piece himself in order to better appreciate the craft. Now, she watched as Kai went to the hydrogen amplifier and set the timer for exactly 5.6 seconds. He ran the tumbler, reconsidered, and ran it again. Inspecting the new ice under his glasses, he returned to his desk to start whittling.
“You’ve learned everything I’ve ever taught,” she remarked.
Kai grinned over his shoulder. He was a foot taller than when he first arrived, and his voice sat lower. “Soon, you’ll have no more mysteries for me.”
“I’ve taught you everything you know,” she replied. “But you don’t know everything I know.”
“Like what?” He leaned forward.
“My name.”
“It’s Snedronning.”
“No, that’s my title. ‘Snow Queen’ is what people call me. But it is not my name.”
“Then what is it?”
She teased a small smile and returned to her work. “That’s something for me to know and you to find out.”
---
Now and again, Snedronning caught Kai staring at the jagged horizon from their cliffs, as if he was trying to make out where her heavenly mountains ended and the hellscape began.
“Have you lost something?” she asked, approaching his side.
Kai shook his head as if from a daydream. “No. I – I just … it’s like my memories of my early years are all vague. I remember being happy, and everything was pretty, and then it’s like it all disappeared. I’m starting to doubt if any of it was real.”
“What if it was?” she ventured.
“Then, that would mean that there might still be a big, beautiful world out there that I can’t find.”
“Perhaps.” The Queen knew this wonder for his past was good, that it could likely help break his curse someday soon. And yet, she pulled him close under her arm. How would she help him crave his real home? The distant security footage and the literature on their sparse bookshelf held no beauty for him. Then an idea popped into her head.
“How about a puzzle? I’ve never made one before. And you’re fairly clever.”
---
Kai and Snedronning had many winters’ worth of happy memories together. She made pictorial puzzles for him – only to remind him of his real home, of course. They took up helping the snowbots with gardening in the greenhouses – only so she could get some exercise, of course. She commanded him to eat his fill at every meal, regardless of his curse – only so he wouldn’t starve, of course. She cut his hair for him – only so he wouldn’t go and hurt himself, of course. She bandaged his scrapes – only because sepsis would render him useless, of course. They had snowball fights – only to remind him who was boss, of course. She forgave his occasional outbursts – only so the betrayal would be more effective later on, of course. She had an indescribable feeling deep down – only so …?
---
As Snedronning sipped tea by the new hearth in their cottage, Kai sat on the wood floor, piecing together another ice puzzle. The mantel and walls boasted of his accomplishments: flat puzzles, mathematical puzzles, and puzzles that created different pictures with negative space when viewed from an alternate angle. The puzzles of the outside world were the only way it appeared as it once did in his eyes. This new one was the biggest and roundest of all, pushing the rugs and furniture to the corners. The tall boy reached to lay down the final pieces to the inner half of the circle before beginning the outer ring.
When suddenly the door burst in, letting in a roar of snowstorm. Kai jolted up and saw a monstrous silhouette looking at him. He shrieked and scampered to Snedronning’s side, swiping a fire poke for defense. But she only stilled his hands and stared back at the intruder with a set face.
“Who dares trespass on my property,” she demanded, rising to her height.
The hairy, bulky figure stepped inside and ripped off its own head to reveal a juicy skull, and then pointed directly at Kai. It made wheezing, chittering noises that made his skin erupt with more chills than the cold.
“Kill it! Quick!” he said. The monster screeched like metal against glass. Kai covered his ears. “What are you waiting for?”
The Queen flatly replied, “She says she knows you.”
“It’s crazy! It’s a monster!” He snuck the poker’s end into the fire behind him.
“Her name is Gerda. From your village.”
Dusty memories clouded his mind. “It’s a lie, that’s not the girl I remember!”
The monster clattered its teeth again. Kai thought he almost heard his name.
“She says she’s here to take you home.”
“This is my home!”
The monster rushed at Kai.
The Queen put out a hand to stop it, but the monster slashed her with knife arms, drawing purple blood from her fingers.
Kai roared and swiped the glowing poker at the monster. It stumbled backwards, through the open door and into the dying tempest. The boy whacked its bulbous feet out from under it and stabbed its half-attached head into the ground. Then he hammered his fists onto the alien skull, over and over, to make it stop its grating chittering and to pay for hurting Snedronning. He ignored the beetle arms clawing at him and the red sirens in his ears and raised his fists to finish the job.
The Snow Queen pulled him off the monster.
He struggled in her arms. “I’ll kill it!”
“Kai, stop!” she ordered in his ear. She had never raised her voice at him once in all these years. He noticed her blood staining his shirt where she held him.
The monster weakly gurgled, slow and quiet enough that Kai understood its few words.
Take Kai home.
He looked to Snedronning, but her face was a subtle mix of emotions he couldn’t discern. But it wasn’t angry like before.
“It’s the right thing,” she said to him.
He ducked out from under her grip. “What?! How could you say that?”
“You must go back with her.”
“Why?! What have I done wrong?” His voice began to crack.
She saw the opportunity, but avoided his gaze. “This is not your home. It was never your home. The day has come for you to leave.”
Kai shook his head, pleading to stay. He listed his many uses around the factory, promised to perfect his snowflakes sooner, and vowed to never act out of line again. On his knees, he gripped the hem of his Queen’s house robe, begging and pleading. His voice thickened and stuck in his throat. His shoulders shuddered. His eyes burned and blurred.
Kai cried.
And cried.
And cried.
And cried.
The Snow Queen clenched her fists until blood pooled around her cuticles, rigid as a frozen waterfall. She risked looking down only once, and spotted three tiny glimmers of glass laying in the snow at their feet.
She stepped back. “You have to take Gerda home, now,” she said as she yanked her robe out of his hands.
“No! Please!”
“Look at her, boy. Look at her!”
Kai’s sobs caught in his chest when he perceived the young lady laying half dead on their mountain, a dagger laying by her hand and the fire poke pinning her fur hood to the ground. Even with her fractured face, blood, and age, she still looked like his childhood friend. She gave him a broken and tearful smile as he tried to aid her wounds. He begged her forgiveness without end, but she only replied, “Let’s go home.”
The Snow Queen told him that the world he once knew was still out there – had been there all along – but she kept him from it. She was amused by his meager usefulness but had no more patience for a human boy. They had better leave her mountain before she had them thrown off.
Pretending the moon was interesting was all she could do to escape the look on his face. She pretended that she couldn’t hear him helping Gerda to her feet. Or hear him say goodbye. Or hear them trudge through the snow to wherever the girl snuck in.
---
The Queen closed the cottage door to a quiet she had forgotten. She looked down at the bottled sand from which she had rescued the snow, and then noticed the unfinished puzzle still on the floor. The inner ring was designed to be easier: a picture of her and Kai riding together in her sleigh over their mountain home. The outer ring, however, was supposed to bear complex calligraphy for a word she had long wanted him to figure out. But the pieces lay sprawled on the floor like shatters.
The waterfall melted.
Snedronning knelt to touch her incomplete gift, her words to Kai eroding her heart like wet paper. Her wails filled every inch of the cottage, bouncing back into her ears and making the walls shrink, closing her in a little wooden box. Her fingers trembled to her mouth as her whimpers turned to hiccupping sobs. She laid her forehead on their portrait, her tears being so cold that they formed bumps of melded ice on their art.
She wept as she never had in her timeless life. Even when a grain of glass fell from her eye, she wept for hours and hours. For she finally understood how one can feel sorrow by losing something one loves.
---
After a minute of whittling an infinitesimal snowflake under a magnifying glass, Snedronning still does not hear them leave. She wants to shoo them out, but she leans her head back on her chair and closes her eyes again. She drags herself around and gives the unexpected visitors a side-eye. “If he’s violent when he awakes,” she murmurs, rubbing her brow, “this place doesn’t exactly have a dungeon. But, you’re welcome to keep him in a spare room until you figure out how to cure him.”
Made-for-Water bows his head, his brother’s arm still around his neck. “A thousand thanks, Snow Queen.”
“Yeah,” says Nezha, more to his comrade than begrudging hostess. “But we’ll have to figure something out soon. Your Spider Woman, Quetzalcoatl, Baba Yaga, and Anansi still need us to find the Eye of Odin, the Fountain of Youth, and Excalibur before Ragnarök!”
Her head jolts up. “Ragnarök is happening already?” A peace settles her posture and her head lilts. “It would be the end of all things,” she states, almost dreamily.
The vast tulip meadows of the Netherlands. She once accepted gardening advice from a lonely sorceress there. A stunning black castle ruled by the crow-winged daughter of the Mórrígan and her prince. They were surprisingly hospitable and generous to her journey. The sun-kissed seaside of Greece with a band of robbers. They adorably thought they could get the jump on her, but their chiefess had a good sense of humor and respected her power.
If the world was ever beautiful, the people who made it so are long gone. All she has to look forward to is Ragnarök. After The End.
“Yes,” says the hero twin, “including us! All of creation – the land, the sea, the heavens, mortals and immortals – everything. Someone has triggered it before its appointed time, and only a few have been summoned to reset it. If everyone knew, the chaos would destroy Earth before Ragnarök!”
The Snow Queen almost smiles. “How unfortunate.”
Nezha curses her in his tongue and his knife-like eyes burn with flames. “I’m sure you’d love to watch that happen, icy bitch!” He spits on her floor, causing a sizzle.
“Nezha!” Made-for-Water scolds. He turns back to her with wide, supplicating brown eyes. “Will you come with us?”
She bites the inside of her cheek. These boys’ juvenility reminds her of someone.
---
The factory’s snowstacks blasted as the months dragged by. The Queen did not leave her workshop for days at a time. Service bots delivered meals that she picked apart. She whittled until she passed out at her desk. She sucked down bottles of tea that piled high in a corner. She used batch ice until she started copying snowflakes. She switched between machines and tools until her back and shoulders ached. She could not bring herself to dispose of any trace of Kai’s existence. Not yet. Churning snow was a fortress against looking upon his things. Shame festered like a fever. Relief did not come until she realized that one snowflake unexpectedly outlined his face from an alternate angle.
I wonder if he’s made it back to his village, she wondered. These mountains are difficult, and it is a long way. Have I sentenced him to his death?
Snedronning finally looked over at Kai’s work desk. A single navy fingernail clacked on her chair. Then drummed. Then buzzed.
“Fuck.”
She bolted out of her chair, swiped her crumpled jacket from the floor, and hit the intercom button on the wall. “SBB-74, prepare a trunk of supplies. I’m going out. M-Wing C, prepare my sleigh.”
The doors of the workshop slid shut before the snowbots could confirm the orders.
---
Kai – or Gerda – were not in the mountains. Snedronning tracked their last recorded sightings on her security footage and followed several plausible routes they might have taken, and the signs indicated that they successfully returned to the village. Under cover of a rainy summer night, she wandered around the streets in a concealing cloak, looking for any sign for his residence. In the window of an attic was posted a picture within a circle: The same image of them soaring through the night, with something written around the rim. Kai never got to learn her name, but the one he wrote was something better.
Next to the picture was a note:
Gerda and I are going to see the world. If you find us, I’d love to see you again. If not, I’ll try and see you back home. Love, Kai
Her fingers caressed the glass, creating intricate, frosty swirls of flowers, stars, bots, and puzzle pieces. Hope and fear blended into an excitement that put a pit in her stomach and a smirk on her face.
The Snow Queen had never taken a vacation before!
---
Snedronning hikes up a paved path far above her cottage to the place where the summit splits into two. Above the clouds, the little valley atop the mountain is still and quiet. The ground is paved with polished rocks of every color and mineral, carefully arranged like a rainbow tapestry depicting nothing other than a snowflake – the same lopsided snowflake that sits on her mantel. Surrounding the rock garden are runestones spaced to form the shape of a ship. At the edge of the cliff, a head runestone rests its back against the windy oblivion where the snowclouds like to catch sunlight like the seas of Heaven. The woman kneels before the runestone and brushes the frost off its carvings – a circular picture of her and a boy sailing together in her sleigh. Around the edge of the circle are carved dates and the names:
KAI OG MOR.
KAI AND MOTHER.
Like a puzzle turning to reveal a second image, the past and present fit within each other.
They found each other again at the foothills of their mountains. She had searched the Earth to see him again, to tell her name, only to find him beginning his journey back home to her. Freezing and with no one but Gerda as his companion. She had tracked their prints in the snow for days. She was so close. Could she rescue him before the cold took him?
“Mama?”
Her heart stopped as she knelt over the tracks. Did she hear right? Amidst the wind? She turned around.
A young man smiled at her. “Hi Mama.”
Her cold heart had burst and her tears with it. “My son!” He hopped through the snow to her and fell into her long arms, not minding her cold. “My son!” His warmth melted her, allowing her to cry into his shoulder on her knees as long as a song. “My son!” She cradled his dear head with a large blue hand. “I’m so sorry. I was a fool. A fool to let you go. There’s nothing I can do to remedy what I said.”
“You saw my note?”
“Yes.” She drew back and brushed his windy hair over his ears. His face still looked like the lonely child who begged to live with an even lonelier queen. Only now, his eyes were wiser, misting with tears nobody else had ever dared to cry for her.
Still on her knees, Snedronning looks beyond the runestone to the yellow clouds. She relives and reimagines that moment with the veil between them.
Kai stands on the clouds, giving that same look that shouts of both peace and excitement. “Can we go home now?” he asks with an offered hand.
All at once, Kai’s life flashes before her. His tortured and beautiful childhood. His youth of discovery. Marrying his childhood sweetheart. Living a simple, hardworking life in the snow factory with his mother and wife and snowbots. Exploring new corners of the world now and again with his favorite people. A long adulthood spent carving snowflakes for the world. Burying Gerda. A slow passing into the Ever After. Where he waits for her.
But to her, he’ll always be her little boy. The one whom, in all her immortal life and world-crossing, she has never seen another of.
“Can we go home now?” her imagination says again.
She had swept him up in her arms and spun him around in a tight, thrilled embrace. She had bellowed a laugh to the heavens and kissed his cheeks over and over. She had held him with her eyes buried in his coat for what felt like an eternity. But now, it didn’t feel long enough. How she longed to meet him again, do it all over again, cry every tear again.
“Not yet. Mama has to go on a journey. It may take a while longer, but I’ll see you soon. I promise. Thank you, my dear, but you don’t have to wait for me. You can go. You can explore and play. See all there is to see. You know I could never let you go.”
---
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