Chapter Text
brat: are you up rn?
Ice Queen: why
Icy’s hardly even put her phone down before it starts buzzing, and she curses under her breath as she snatches it up before either of her sisters can wake up. She does not care if it wakes up Riven, but he’s already cracking open his eyes to grump at her from under a curtain of Darcy’s hair.
“What the fuck, pixie.” She hisses as soon as she answers, but she’s already sitting up and reaching for her shoes. Bloom will call all afternoon about every inane and frighteningly insightful question she can conjure out of thin air, but she never texts first and she never calls past midnight.
“Can you cast a water-breathing spell? Or something like it?” Bloom’s voice is hushed, exhausted, and crackly with interference. With wind, Icy realizes, and she casts a sharp look to the thin blue-white thread of moonlight outlining the curtains. Cloud Tower doesn’t give to the elements, but she can see the shadows of clouds and passing creatures flitting rapid-fire through that sliver of light with a speed that indicates serious wind speeds. And Stormy’s conked out like she gets when a really big storm rolls through, all her pent-up chaos energy finally matched by the outside world.
“I could modify a suffocation spell, but it’d have a hard time limit and I’m experimenting with you first.” She says slowly, already calling up the spell in question and running through the possibilities in her mind. A flick of her fingers summons her cape and she clasps it on over her clothes as Bloom lets out a long, slow breath.
“I - those dreams. It’s - it’s in the lake. I can - I can feel it.”
“Are you there now?” She gets a hum in response, and Icy feels her face pinch in a frown as she stands. Riven’s hand twitches - he twists the ambient energy in the air just enough to catch her attention.
“Can you - can you -”
“I’ll be there momentarily.” She says coolly, and Bloom breathes out a thanks like a prayer. Icy ends the call and tosses the device onto her bed.
“You good?” Riven whispers, voice rough and crackly with sleep. Icy shrugs.
“If I’m not back by lunch the pixie brat murdered me.” Icy says flatly, and he smirks a little, eyes closing. His fingers twitch again and she shoots him the dirtiest look she can muster as his magic tags onto hers, a tiny little hook nested so innocuously she wouldn’t notice if not for the burgeoning coven-bond between them.
She’s too tired, too keyed up from Bloom’s call, to deal with this shit. She growls, soft enough to not wake her sisters, and reaches out to the Tower.
Even among the Cloud Tower witches, few would dare to call to it. It is, after all, one of them - prideful and powerful and so far above helping a lost witch find her class it’d be more likely to drop her in a dungeon for asking. But Icy and her sisters have always pushed harder; they’ve been challenging and been challenged in turn since their arrival, that sweet spot of respect and power so few witches can maintain in their professional relationships. It’s good practice for their future, because Icy does not intend to fight any more of her kin than she needs to. And if it’s endeared her and her sisters to the Tower itself in a way only the professors and headmistress emulate, if it’s granted them all the privileges that entails - well. That’s just a bonus.
It purrs at her call and when she steps out into the hall outside her dorm room, the castle’s entrance looms large before her. She’s a witch, not a heathen - she thanks it appropriately and lets her hands linger on the walls and door as she steps out into the wind.
She doesn’t actually get cold. The freezing rain sleeting down over the forest - rushing closer and closer with every breath she takes - will only be an annoyance in that she’ll be wet, but, well, she’s about to dive into a fucking lake because her idiot fairy called her at awful o’clock in the morning and not any of her friends and Icy -
Icy breathes deeply, scowls hard enough to hurt, and stalks forward.
The earth freezes beneath her every step, fractals and jagged lightning bolts of frost shooting out like minor explosions. There’s something to be said for her power, that even the natural world quakes at her will - Icy will not get mud on these shoes - and there would have been a time she’d have reveled in that, but - well.
She’s heard one too many teacher extol her power at the cost of her sisters’, as if her sheer strength could compete with Darcy’s creativity or skill, as if her consistency could hold a candle to Stormy’s unpredictability or adaptability. Her power bolsters her sisters’, but she’s had to learn finesse and strategy the hard way from them. Icy doesn’t particularly care for things like fairness - the world isn’t fair, she knows that better than anyone - but the injustice of her sisters’ erasure is no different than the injustice of the magical dimensions’ bigotry towards her and her kin. It’s just a different shade.
The Dark Forest opens its eyes as she walks through its paths, and Icy makes a conscious effort to reign her power in. The ground still freezes beneath her, but not so deep now as to hurt the roots of the Dark Forest’s trees. She thinks she hears it chuckle before its eyes close again, and Icy growls, because the rain hits her then.
She tells herself she deals with it for Stormy’s sake, because her sister will feel the storm on her skin through their connection. But she’s going to dive into a fucking lake in a few minutes anyway; better get the shock of being wet over with now rather than later.
Bloom is already soaked through, and looks somehow worse than Icy had expected, when Icy reaches the shores of the lake. She is dressed in a baggy lace-up shirt plastered to her skin - borrowed, because Riven’s worn that same fucking shirt and he stole it from the Zenith fairy - and combat boots. Those, Icy’s pretty sure are actually Stormy’s. Which.
Well. She’s wearing one of Darcy’s nightgowns, so. She doesn’t really have room to judge. But.
Bloom’s eyes are ringed with dark shadows and she looks gaunt with her hair slick against her scalp; Icy can’t help but raise her eyebrows as she approaches.
The fairy is waiting at the beach nearest Cloud Tower, which is a nice surprise. She doesn’t react until Icy is physically touching her, and then they both yelp and jerk back because -
“I thought you said you were having dreams!?”
“I don’t know what you just did but I can’t hear her anymore thank fuck - “
“No, that was a fucking spell I interrupted. Someone’s calling you. Or - something.”
Bloom makes an aborted gesture to her hip, and then freezes, and Icy starts preparing to turn and leave because she looks like she’s about to cry and Icy isn’t even getting fucking paid to deal with the current mess -
Bloom goes up in a poof of - steam.
She’s immediately drenched again, because storm, but. Well. Accidental magic and all.
“I had a vision of her. And I recognized her. She’s - that mural outside of Town Hall. I looked her up in the library and it said she was a nymph and that her name was Daphne and then the library fucking blew up and she was so fucking loud - I can’t keep her out of my head! But she’s - it’s coming from in there!”
Icy blinks her way through the word vomit, and she can’t help the scowl slowly pulling at her lips.
“That mural is dedicated to historic figures of myth and legend. Magical heroes. Guardians.”
Bloom swallows, and steps closer, until she’s about as inside Icy’s personal space as she can get.
“Guardians. Of - power that needs to be protected. Right?”
Icy stiffens.
“You can’t - Bloom, the likelihood of - “
“If it’s some weird monster or jackass with a megaphone, I’m pissed enough I could burn the fucking school down at this point and you’re here. But - “
“What are the fucking odds of this working out in our favor? Of it even being - “
“What are the odds that Alfea’s hiding something at the bottom of that lake and it is begging me for help?” Bloom hisses back, and -
Icy thinks her brain short circuits. Because.
Oh, fuck, that’s - far more likely than it should be.
She steps back, presses her hands over her face, bends at the waist, and screams. A roll of thunder drowns out the noise, but the release is still cathartic, in an entirely inadequate and infinitesimal way.
Something sentient calling out for help would only be able to reach a like power. Bloom’s - well.
That’s a whole bucket of problems Icy doesn’t want to get into. Even if it’s disguising itself as this dead nymph, it still needs to bear a connection of kin to Bloom to reach her like this, especially with the spell Icy accidentally interrupted. Why it would take on the face of a literal mythological hero to gain Bloom’s trust when Bloom doesn’t even know the first thing about magical history, Icy doesn’t know - it’s stupid. But.
“What do you know about the nymph?”
“Guardian. Like you said. She’s the only one with a surviving name. Couldn’t get anything else before the library flipped shit.” That, Icy takes at face value. Cloud Tower’s library is part of the tower; Alfea’s shouldn’t be sentient, but Bloom can do the impossible, and it’s not unheard of for places to get angry about people asking innocent questions.
“Stormy would know better. But - yes. I don’t know much more than that. Nymphs were…precursors to guardian fairies. The original, actual guardians. Guardian fairies today are meant to fill in the void they left.” Inadequately, of course, but the magical dimensions have yet to collapse so the guardian fairies must be doing something right.
“Void. They were killed.”
“You got it in one.” Icy says dryly, and that earns her a flicker of a smile. Lightning flashes in the sky behind Bloom, a quick stutter of blue-white light.
“Do you know what by?”
“No one does.”
“So whatever killed them was erased from history.” Bloom has to shout to be heard over the storm, but Icy’s nothing if not attentive, and…she nods. She can see where Bloom is headed with her train of thought.
It’s much too loud to continue the conversation, though. Icy turns towards the lake and gestures with an arm; Bloom nods jerkily, tense and pale and determined. She’s still steaming.
Icy’s incantation is quick and sharp, and her magic seems a little confused by the, ah, lack of violent murder - but it settles around Bloom’s head in a perfect sphere visible only in the way that rain sluices off of it. They wait a moment, and then Bloom gives her two thumbs up, and Icy repeats the spell on herself.
Bloom latches onto her arm before they walk into the lake proper.
She’s warm.