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Mist lay low across the hills, a softening haze over a sea of tumultuous thoughts that rolled through a small gathering of mourners, limited now to the few who could have been called friends to the late King and Queen of Arendelle. Among these were a few closely trusted guards, the two servants whose work had maintained the castle during recent years, and their younger daughter, Anna. Perhaps it was a misnomer to call their relationship with Anna friendly – the relation of monarchs to their heirs was rarely casual in the best of times, and times of late had been far from ideal.
Years ago, in the fog of early memories jumbled together by time and a juvenile mind, Anna knew that things had been different. A sensation of life, and of a constant state of doing filled those earliest memories. Anna could not recall any faces, nor names of that public which was always before her then, but it was nonetheless a familiar mass of people. They had been her people, then, and perhaps it was still true that in some way they were her people now. For years, though, they had been separated by the thick stone walls and heavy iron-framed gates that shut Anna away from the happy days of her young childhood.
This is not to say that there were no happy memories to be had behind closed gates, but rather that these were too few: of what note is an afternoon of puppetry and pageants with a mother when faced with the long dark silence of evenings waiting, hoping, yearning for someone to share the bedtime stories Anna would eventually resign to reading for herself? What prominence, a tea-date with a doting father, when the royal charms put on for a single afternoon were afterword polished and stored away, sealed for months on end from their purpose?
When Mother and Father had left, Anna was, at first, little more alone than she had been for the decade prior. For the first few… days? weeks? months? of their absence, a kind of mist blanketed her life, much as it now blanketed their deaths. There had been stories, but they were the same stories they had been on her past thousand visits to the royal library. Food, but after the taste had faded, each day’s meal ultimately was the same, whether cupcakes or caviar. Art, whose historical heroes were just as frozen as its lowliest peasants. Time, even, seemed just as dampened as the rest of life – when at last Anna heard of her parents’ deaths, it stunned her not so much into a new reality, but from one unreal nightmare to another.
Arrangements somehow seemed to be made without needing Anna’s perspective – advisers would say, if asked, that they did not wish to trouble the young princess, but it was truer that they did not know how the young princess would trouble themselves. In short order, the countryside was filled with funeral-clothes and darkened faces, and Anna among them. She had walked with the empty coffins through the streets of her city, haunted by the kind words of sympathy from a thousand people who had once been hers. Faces she would never know wafted consolation to her, and florid comfort sweetened the moist air as the procession left town, its rulers already having made their final farewells.
Awash in so many faces, it would have been easy to overlook the empty spaces, to accept without wonder the sense of incompleteness as Anna walked alone between the caskets. Two lives were missed there by the masses of the people, but for Anna, there were three to mourn. Her eyes glanced to the back of the procession sometimes, hopeful that this once, her sister would leave her room and show at least a tribute to the love a family was supposed to have. Did she even know? Anna had not told her, and were it not for the occasional glimpse of an extra meal, or a dirty dish, she would have little confidence that the servants even knew her sister’s existence. Was Elsa alone by choice, or had Anna left her too quickly, depriving her sister of the very knowledge of her loss?
Anna stepped uncomfortably to the side, and turned away from the sun’s light, soft as it was through the veil of clouds high above. She didn’t belong here, not alone. She should be home, she should be locked away again, just like her sister. Even when she’d been torn from the walls surrounding her, she hadn’t said a word to a living soul – the same walls that held her in showed all too clearly that she was where she belonged. Alone. Perhaps this was proper. Perhaps, after all these years, Anna would accept that the gates were closed as much for who she had become as for anyone.
But… there was still a feeling, a memory of something that was not as it should be. Before… before she had been different. She had laughed, and she had smiled, and she had loved. Hope, and joy, and careless enthusiasm had faded from her, but the memory was there. Anna liked that her more than she liked… whatever she had become.
Perhaps not now, Anna resolved, for the time for mourning was still here. But soon, she would learn to change. She would reach as far as she could; she would hope when she knew hope was gone; she would dream again while standing amongst shattered dreams. Time and isolation had reduced her to nothing, but that would change. One day, Anna knew, the gates would open once more. She wouldn’t be alone. And when that came, Anna wouldn’t allow anything to stand in her way.