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The palace still shook occasionally as its structure rumbled in memory, groaning as if it would deny what had happened. Streaks of fading evening sunlight smeared across the now-wet curtains and floor, over the carefully painted highlights and tapestries hanging on the walls of the ballroom. Ice overlaid the newly carved friezes of the new king and queen and their servants, who seemed to have attempted to walk before the madness grew quiet. The dead lay everywhere, men and women and children, struck down in an attempted flight by the blizzard that had flashed down every corridor, or seized by the icicles that had stalked them, or sunken into the wood of the palace, forever molded together to it by heaps of snow, almost alive, before stillness came again. In odd counterpoint, the colorful tapestries and paintings, masterworks all, hung untouched except where bulging wooden supports had pushed them away. Finely carved tables hosting drinks and food, made from cedar and inlaid with sapphires and gold, stood undisturbed except for the few that had their purple tablecloths soiled by liquids, toppled over by the last convulsions of those who lay beneath.
Elsa of Arendelle wandered the place, deftly keeping the balance when the floor threatened to give in. “Anna! My dear, where are you?” The edge of her transparent, icy cloak trailed through blood as she stepped across the body of a woman, her auburn-haired beauty marred by the horror of her last moments, her still-open eyes frozen in disbelief. A carrot crunched underneath her boot. “Where are you, my dear sister? Where is everyone hiding?”
Her eyes caught her reflection in a mirror hanging askew from a pillar near the window. Her clothes had been regal once, in purple and green and gold, embroidered across the chest and the cape sealed with a sapphire beneath her slender throat; now the finely woven cloth, brought by merchants from far away, farther than Wesselton, across the Northern Sea and from islands that had yet to be named, was torn and dirty, thick with the same filth that covered her hair and skin. For a moment she fingered the symbol on the edge of her cloak, a yellow crocus on a half-green, half-purple background, the colors separated by a straight line. It meant something, that symbol. But the embroidered crest could not hold her attention for long. She gazed at her own image with as much wonder. A tall woman just a drop or two into her adulthood, beautiful once, but now with hair already more brown than white and a face lined by strain and worry, blue eyes now darkened with the weight of someone who had seen too much. Elsa of Arendelle began to chuckle, then threw back her head; her laughter echoed down the lifeless ballroom and connected halls and into the empty courtyard below.
“Anna, my dear! Come to me, sister. Come. I look like a diseased snowman. You must see this. It will make you laugh.”
Behind her the air rippled, shimmered, solidified into a man who looked around, his mouth twisting briefly with distaste. As tall as Elsa of Arendelle, perhaps slightly overtaking her in height, he was clothed all in white, save for the lines of brown lace spreading down his sleeves, swirling around the cuffs and likewise extending towards his boots. It matched the color of his groomed sideburns, and he could even be called pretty. He stepped carefully, handling his step fastidiously so as to avoid brushing the dead. The floor trembled with aftershocks, the palace threatening to disintegrate, but his attention was fixed on the woman staring into the mirror and laughing.
“Queen of Snow,” he said, “I have come for you.”
The laughter cut off as if it had never been, and Elsa of Arendelle turned around, seeming unsurprised. “Ah, a guest. Welcome. Have you come for the wedding, stranger? It will soon be time for the vows, and everyone is welcome to hear them. Anna, my dear, we have a guest. Anna, where are you?”
The white-clad man’s eyes widened, darted to the body of the auburn-haired woman, then back to Elsa. “The blight take you, does the taint already have you so far in its grip?”
“That thing. Blight—“ Elsa shuddered and raised a hand as though to ward off something. “You mustn’t say that name. Not here, and not today. It is dangerous.”
“So you remember that much, at least. Dangerous for you, fool, but not for me. What else do you remember? Remember, you magic-blinded idiot! I will not let it end with you swaddled in unawareness! Remember!”
For a moment Elsa stared at her raised hand, fascinated by the rivulets of grime that slid. Then she wiped her hand on her even dirtier coat and turned her attention back to the man. “Who are you? What do you want?”
The white-clad man drew himself up arrogantly. “Once I was only the thirteenth son a small kingdom to the south, but now—“
“Hans. Of the Southern Isles.” It was a whisper from Elsa. Memory stirred, but she turned her head, shying away from it.
“So you do remember some things. Yes, Hans. So have my parents and people named me, just as they will name you Snow Queen, but unlike you I embrace the name. They gave me the name and low title to revile me, but I will yet make them kneel and worship it. What will you do with your name? After this day, men will call you Kinslayer. What will you do with that?”
Elsa frowned down at the ruined ballroom and remaining halls. “Anna should be here to offer a guest welcome,” she murmured absently, then raised her voice. “Anna, where are you?” The floor shook, a sign that the lower levels of the palace were about to give way; the auburn-haired woman’s body shifted as if in answer to her call. Her eyes did not see that.
Hans grimaced. “Look at you,” he said scornfully. “Once you stood first among the respected people of this country. Once you broke the mist of Northuldra and embraced the Enchanted Forest. Once you broke through your parents’ bindings and summoned your power to craft an elaborate ice palace and set the magic free upon this very kingdom. Now look at you! A pitiful, shattered wretch. But it is not enough. You humbled me in this very room. You defeated my plans of finding a home and ruling over a proper country. But I am the greater, now. I will not let you die without knowing that. When you die, your last thought will be the full knowledge of your defeat, of how complete and utter it is. If I let you die at all.”
“I cannot imagine what is keeping Anna. She will give me the rough side of her tongue, even me, if she thinks I have been hiding a guest from her. I hope you enjoy conversation, for she surely does. Be forewarned. Anna will ask you so many questions you may end up telling her everything you know.”
Tossing back his head, Hans flexed his hands. “A pity for you,” he mused, “that one of the trolls you’re so used to is not here. I was never very skilled at healing, and I follow a different power now. But even Grand Pabbie could only give you a few lucid minutes, if you didn’t destroy him first. What an ending for a piece of stone!” He mirthlessly chuckled. “What I can do will serve as well, for my purposes.” His smile turned cruel. “But know that my way of healing is very different from what you’re used to. Be healed, Elsa of Arendelle!” He extended his hands, and the light dimmed as if a shadow had been laid across the sun.
Pain blazed in Elsa, and she screamed, a scream that came from her depths, a scream she could not stop. Fire seared her throat; a blizzard she could feel rushed along her veins and licked her skull from the inside. She toppled backwards, crashing to the lacquered wooden floor; her head struck it and rebounded. Her heart pounded, trying to beat its way out of her chest, and every pulse gushed new flame through her. Helplessly she convulsed, impotent against the energy that probed her mind and laid bare her thoughts, crystallizing, convulsing and whistling in-between her ears and leaving her in pure agony with no recourse. Her hoarse screams reverberated through the palace.
Slowly, ever so slowly, the pain receded, leaving a dull sensation in her arms, unlike the pleasant afterglow of energy she’d feel after spilling her magic outward. The outflowing seemed to take a thousand years and left her twitching weakly, sucking breath through a raw throat. Another thousand years seemed to pass before she could manage to heave herself over, muscles like jellyfish, and shakily push herself on hands and knees. Her eyes fell on the red-haired woman, and the scream that was ripped out of her dwarfed every sound she had made before. Tottering, almost falling, she scrabbled brokenly across the floor to her. It took every bit of her strength to pull her up into her arms. Her hands shook as she smoothed her hair back from her staring face.
“Anna! Heavens help me, Anna!” Her body curved around hers protectively, her sobs the full-throated cries of a woman who had nothing left to live for. “Anna, no! No!”
“You can have her back, Kinslayer. This magic can make her alive, again. If you will serve us. If you will serve me.”
Elsa raised her head, and the white-clad man took an involuntary step back from that gaze. “Years, Betrayer,” Elsa said softly, the sound of a dagger being unsheathed. “For years your foul master has wracked the world. I was here, sworn to protect against your influence. And now this. I will…”
“’For years!’ You pitiful fool! This war has not lasted five, or ten years, but since the beginning of time. You and I have fought a thousand battles with the passage of time, a thousand times a thousand, and we will fight until time dies and my kind is triumphant, in this world or the next!” He finished in a shout, with a raised fist, and it was Elsa’s turn to pull back, breath catching at the glow in the Betrayer’s eyes.
Carefully Elsa laid Anna down, fingers gently brushing her hair. She was to be married, today. Tears blurred her vision as she stood, but her voice was iced iron. “For what you have done, there can be no forgiveness, Betrayer, but for Anna’s death I will destroy you beyond anything you can image being rebuilt. Prepare to—“
“Remember, you fool! Remember your futile attack on my servants the day before! Remember my counterstroke!
"Remember! Even now they are tearing this kingdom apart, and every day more and more join them. What hand slew Anna of Arendelle, Kinslayer? Not mine. Not mine. What hand and whose magic struck down every life that bore a drop of your blood, everyone who loved you, everyone you loved?” He motioned, and with that Elsa started seeing the outlines of bodies, carelessly strewn around. “Not mine, Kinslayer. Not mine. Remember, and know the price of your family opposing me!”
Sudden sweat made tracks down Elsa’s face through the black, murky rivulets of what once could have been considered snow. She remembered. The memory was cloudy, like a dream of a dream, but she knew it true.
Her howls beat at the walls, the howls of a woman who had discovered her soul damned by her own hand, and she clawed at her face as if to tear away the sight of what she had done. Everywhere she looked, her eyes found the dead. Torn they were, or broken or pierced by murky icicles, or half-consumed by snow. Everywhere lay lifeless faces she knew, faces she loved. Old servants, Kai and Gerda, and friends of her childhood, faithful companions through the long years of her solitude. And Kristoff. Someone she considered a brother by blood, sprawled like a broken doll, play stilled forever. All slain by her own hand. Her friends’ faces accused her, blank eyes asking why, and her tears were no answer. The Betrayer’s laughter flogged her, drowned out her howls. She could not bear the faces, the pain. She could not bear to remain any longer. Desperately she reached out to the source of her magic, to the everlasting pool of cold whiteness, and found it tainted. Wiggling. Almost alive and unrelenting to her demands.
She extended her palm and watched as a blob of murky water formed above it. She blinked, the bodies forgotten; all her focus was now on her ultimate creation, which wiggled and shimmered with an inner light, yet it still stayed dark. She frowned, and drew on the source deeply, and still more deeply. It grew more and more, into an elongated, sharp object with a pointed end and deceptively oblique sides, its creation requiring more power than she had ever directed into something. Her face contorted under pressure. Quickly she had drawn more of her power than she could channel; her skin felt prickly, as if simultaneously aflame and dunked in a lake of ice. She had failed to protect. She had failed Anna. Because of her pride she had believed that she could match Hans, could mend what she had started and he had broken.
“Anna, forgive me! Anna!”
She grasped the knife in her fist and her hand trembled under the strain it took to hold it. It was beyond anything she’d ever created; a tool with the sole intent of being used once and only once. With great pain and disbelief, she pulled it towards herself and put it on her throat. And in one soft move she slashed it.
But there was no pain, and nothing leaked; the Betrayer’s laughter reached her ears first. Carefully she looked down at her hand and saw it melt into the same dark rivulets that marred her hair with grime. It dripped along her arm and into Anna’s hair. She hadn’t willed it away. Not this ice.
Hans carefully stepped over a body and stopped in front of Anna’s. Horror mounting, her mind threatened to slide into the void, but something was holding it in place. No, she would not die tonight, and the realization made her choke on her spit. She distantly noted how daintily he kneeled down and ran his fingers through Anna’s hair. His face turned into something reminiscent for a brief moment.
“Anna…” He stroked her hair. “You were meant for so much more.” The intensity of Elsa’s glare did not disparage him this time. He gently closed her sister’s eyelids. “As for you, Kinslayer,” he said and she looked away, but he brought her chin up. She could not escape his gaze, half of her face illuminated by the setting light, and shuddered. “For what you have done, you do not deserve death. You deserve eternal company.”
Her eyes stayed put on the place where he kneeled. She could hear him walking behind, but it did not matter. Again she focused all her magic into a knife, a knife so sharp it could cut glass on contact. More liquid, this time black, seeped from her hand into her sister’s hair. She attempted it again.
“Oh, Kinslayer,” she heard Hans fiddling with something from behind. Her hand froze in mid-air, not by her own will. “If only there was someone out there who loved you.” His footsteps echoed outside of her sight and she let her hand fall lifelessly. His voice cut through her thoughts like water crashing on stone, irrationally strong and destructive. She threw it out of her mind and turned around. Or tried to, falling on her elbow, her face distorted in pain. But she opened her eyes.
“I promised… to protect her,” she breathed out. “You will—“
She noticed him turn to glance at her. His brows lifted up. “You’re already kneeling? Good; my brothers did not believe me when I predicted that. They will have something to believe in, now. But then, are you prepared to meet someone?” With that, he produced something from behind so suddenly, that it seemed as if it was already there: a marvelous painting, so tall and wide that he had to set it against one of the wooden pillars and hold it with his other hand for it not to topple. Elsa’s gaze fell upon the canvas, and her memory stirred; it was then that she wished herself long dead and buried.
The imagery presented a wide space in the castle, servants bustling around with plates of fruit, cheese and wine, offering them to many well-clad guests, some sitting and some standing, but none near the center of the room where the king and queen stood, the circle around them free. The colors used were lifelike, as if she were looking into a mirror, as if it were only a moment before everyone broke free of the spell and started moving. There were no painter’s marks nor touched-up parts. They just were, clear as an ice lake in the middle of winter. Expectantly, everyone’s eyes seemed to be looking at the empty space. A shiver went through Elsa’s body. The canvas reflected no light; instead, it absorbed it. They were waiting. Waiting to pounce.
It was a forbidden, lost artifact, a remnant of times that have long since passed, older than Grand Pabbie, so old that even he was not sure if its existence was true, yet he had heard of it and refused to even mention in fear of it surfacing to light. Hans couldn’t have discovered it himself. A remnant whose way of creation was forgotten, but not before it was used to terrible effect. Her mind raced, her thoughts spreading through every crevice of her memory like a wildfire, but nothing she’d ever heard or read revealed more than she’d abruptly recalled.
Don’t look too long… or the Woundglass will remember you.
She averted her gaze. And that took a great amount of willpower. Exploring the view was intoxicating and she felt the warmth starting to envelop her, emanating from the direction of the canvas, calling and drawing and pulling her in ever so gently. Her thoughts continued to leap one upon each other without her conscious involvement. Her breathing slowed. She wanted to succumb. She needed to sleep. But she shook herself.
The white-clad man stood, watching her battle the pull. It was a delicious thing to witness. Slowly, he stepped back once, twice, carefully eyeing it before turning his attention to her. The towering canvas stayed upright in its place.
“Do you feel it, Elsa of Arendelle?” Hans asked arrogantly. “They know you. It knows you, now. The Woundglass remembers who you were.”
She gritted her teeth, lifting her face defiantly, but the effort was hollow. Blood tumbled in her skull and she desperately reached for the source, pulling anything she could reach, but found it empty. With that, she extended her arm and the little drop of ice that flew towards the man fell weakly on the floor. Her arm trembled, then sagged. She blinked. The figures in the painting were no longer in their places. They had turned.
The nobles, the servants and the crowned all now stared directly at her. Scowling, turning, looking, their grating gazes inspired her fear. Their eyes shone with something malicious, something she instinctively knew was ancient and evil beyond recognition. She could feel their breaths and sense them adapting to the next visitor of the circle. All her memories were now theirs to know.
“I would have imagined that your sister would be there,” Hans bellowed nearby and Elsa felt another wave of energy searching her memories. She had to close her eyes. “After all, it’s company you yearned for all those years, correct?” His voice dropped, and his smile once again turned cruel. “You’ll never be alone again, Kinslayer.”
Elsa’s face was a grimace of pain. The warmth increased, crawling against her temples, prodding, peeling and invading her mind with cruel, delicate curiosity. She felt the Woundglass search her, tracing for a sign of—
And then it found her.
It was just a flash—Anna laughing through the winter sunlight, her arms wrapped tight around a snowman she’d built. Grinning. A whisper of her laugh sounded in Elsa’s ears. But it was enough of a preview. With that, the Woundglass pounded on that memory, stealing it from her. Elsa clenched her jaw so tightly it hurt.
“No,” she whispered, and blood trickled from her doll-like nose.
Hans mouthed something, but she didn’t hear him. Pain flooded her body like boiling water. The warmth—no, the heat—was now a furnace behind her eyes. It wanted that which it just learned about. It requested that which she would never part with. It needed Anna.
Abruptly Elsa severed the thread. She gripped the image of Anna—hers, and hers only—and drove it deep into her heart, behind a wall of love that the opposing force would need more time to undermine and break. She buried the memory of her sister, locking closed every path that led to it. You will take me, she thought, and only me.
The blistering heat that she couldn’t bear paused, letting her catch a breath and feel the blood on her lips. Everything seemed still. Then it roared, engulfed her, attacking from all sides. There was no part of her body that she didn’t want to part with. Her scream made no sound and her mind undocked from its place. The pull became absolute, towards the center of the canvas; back arched, her limbs stopped trembling, and her mind gave in. Consumed like a boat at sea and brought into the depths, the pain vanished all at once. Her vision flashed white. For a time the dull, inquisitive silence lay upon the room.
Hans blinked, watching her vanish. No fuss. No sparks. Not even the sound of her robes hitting the floor. The sun still marred the wreckage of the ballroom, but his eyes had to adapt to this reality. He caught movement in the edge of his vision; the canvas twitched and the faintest shimmer flickered across the painted ballroom. He walked around to the forefront.
Good. That was behaving as he was told. And as soon as the shimmer cleared, there she was.
Standing in the center of the circle.
“Well,” he said quietly, brushing something from his sleeve, and more to himself. “That went better than expected.” He allowed himself to laugh. “What are you so afraid of, Elsa? That you won’t be enough? But this is a royal gift; anyone would be happy to have this.”
Elsa stood among the nobles, her expression caught somewhere between waking and a nightmare. Her dress was frozen in motion, but her eyes—they seemed to move. Slowly. Terrified. The guests around her had closed in, just barely. Their smiles were wider now. Hungrier. Stuck in their poses—but Elsa felt them.
His face twisted in rage and contempt. “She kept you out, didn’t she?” He murmured to the figures. “Protected her sister, even in the end. How quaint.” To an outsider, the woman’s gaze would seem to pierce right through him; a masterclass of artistry. He smiled, all teeth. “Don’t worry. She’ll join you eventually. These things... take time.”
The nobles around Elsa shuddered, rippled, dimmed slightly. The painting’s light dimmed for a passing moment before it returned to how it was. Even sealed within, she hated him. He could feel it. It was as if the sun gave off less heat than before. And her eyes were still piercing.
“It is not done between us, Elsa of Arendelle. It will not be done until the end of time.”
Then he was gone, and the magnificent painting stood alone among the wreckage. Waiting.