Chapter Text
Everyone in the village told him not to climb the mountain.
Daniel had received the warning from the woman who rented him his room, the old man who sold him a pair of replacement gloves, the cashier at the small grocery store, and two different people at the outdoor supply shop. By the fourth warning, he'd stopped finding it charming, and by the sixth, he'd started wondering whether the entire village had collectively decided tourists were incapable of walking uphill without dying.
It was a mountain, a large mountain, admittedly, and one considerably farther north than anywhere Daniel had climbed before, but still a mountain. He had climbed in Colorado, Canada, Switzerland, and Nepal. He had crossed glaciers with guides, spent nights above four thousand meters, and once finished a descent through a storm bad enough that his eyelashes had frozen together. He knew what he was doing.
Which was why the expression on the bartender's face was beginning to annoy him. The man had been looking at Daniel that way for the better part of five minutes, ever since Daniel mentioned where he planned to go in the morning.
"You aren't listening." Daniel sighed.
"I'm listening."
"No. You're waiting for me to stop talking." Daniel lowered his beer and looked across the counter. The bartender was somewhere in his late fifties, broad-shouldered and gray-haired, with the perpetually unimpressed expression of someone who had spent several decades watching tourists make predictable mistakes. His English was considerably better than Daniel's Norwegian, which Daniel appreciated right up until the man started using it to lecture him.
"I checked the forecast," Daniel said. "Clear through tomorrow afternoon. Wind picks up tomorrow evening, but I'll be down before then."
"Forecast doesn't matter if you get yourself lost." The bartender gruffed.
"I have GPS." Daniel added.
"So did the last ones."
Daniel paused. "Last ones?"
The bartender picked up another glass and began drying it. "Two Germans three winters ago. Went farther than they were supposed to. Storm came down faster than forecast. Rescue team found one before midnight and the other the next morning with frostbite."
"Did they survive?" Daniel asked. This was a dangerous hobby after all.
"Yes."
"Then the rescue team did its job."
The bartender stopped drying the glass. "That is what you took from that?"
Daniel smiled slightly. "I'm saying I understand the risk."
"No. You understand that other people took the same risk and survived it. That's different."
Daniel had to concede that was a good line, although he wasn't going to give the man the satisfaction of saying so. He took another drink instead and glanced toward the window.
Beyond the glass, the village was disappearing beneath another light snowfall. Warm yellow light spilled from houses along the narrow road, illuminating parked cars and roofs buried beneath layers of white. Farther away, the mountains were invisible in the darkness. The tallest of them rose north of the village, and Daniel had come specifically for it.
It wasn't particularly famous. There were higher peaks in Norway, more difficult climbs, and certainly more photographed ones. That was precisely what had attracted him. He'd first seen it mentioned on an online mountaineering forum almost eight months earlier, where someone had posted photographs of a beautiful northern ridge and mentioned that locals strongly discouraged climbing beyond a certain point during winter.
Naturally, half the replies had immediately wanted to know why. Avalanches, according to some, unstable ice, according to others. Sudden storms, bad navigation, and unpredictable winds were mentioned repeatedly. One person claimed compasses behaved strangely near the upper ridge, while another insisted several hikers had disappeared there over the years.
Then someone had posted a comment that Daniel had initially assumed was a joke.
The Snow Queen doesn't like visitors.
That had started an argument lasting eighty-three replies. Daniel had booked his flight three weeks later.
"You've climbed in winter before?" the bartender asked.
"Many times." Daniel nodded.
"Alone?"
"Sometimes." He admitted.
"You know this mountain?"
"I've studied the maps."
The bartender snorted. Daniel looked back at him. "What?"
"You think because someone put lines on paper, the mountain agreed to them?"
A laugh came from beside the fireplace. Daniel turned and found three older men at a small table, cards and half-empty glasses spread between them. They had been playing when he entered, though they'd apparently abandoned any pretense of not listening to the conversation.
One of them raised his glass toward Daniel. "American?"
"Canadian." He corrected.
"Ah."
Daniel wasn't entirely sure what that was supposed to mean. The old man beside him said something in Norwegian, and the others laughed.
Daniel looked at the bartender. "I'm assuming that was complimentary."
"No."
"Thought so."
The bartender put the glass away and reached for another. "You should climb somewhere else."
"Why?"
"Because people who go too far up that mountain have a habit of needing rescue."
"So do people who climb every mountain." Daniel pointed out.
"Some aren't found."
Daniel waited for the bartender to elaborate, but the man simply continued working. That answer interested him considerably more than all the previous warnings had. "That's it?"
"Should be enough." The bartender shrugged.
"It isn't."
The bartender finally looked directly at him, and Daniel wondered whether he'd actually managed to offend him. Before either could say anything else, one of the old men beside the fireplace interrupted them. "Tell him about her."
The bartender's expression immediately soured. "No."
The old man grinned. "He should know."
"He should know the weather changes quickly and the northern ridge is dangerous. That's all he needs to know." The bartender protested.
"Tell him about the Snow Queen." The old man continued anyway.
Daniel couldn't help smiling. The bartender saw it and pointed his towel at the men near the fireplace. "This is why tourists keep doing stupid things. You tell them stories and suddenly falling off a mountain becomes an adventure."
The oldest man laughed and beckoned Daniel over. "Come. If you're going to ignore everyone anyway, you may as well hear why the children know better."
Daniel glanced at the bartender. "You mind?"
"I don't care what you do tonight. Tomorrow is apparently another matter."
Daniel carried his beer to the table and accepted the empty chair. The fireplace crackled beside them, filling that end of the room with enough heat that he immediately regretted still wearing his sweater.
The old man gathered the cards and placed them aside. "You know the story of the Snow Queen?"
"Hans Christian Andersen?" That was a weird way to start a story.
"Yes."
Daniel shrugged. "Sort of. I haven't read it since I was a kid."
"What do you remember?" The old man asked.
Daniel searched his memory. "There's a magic mirror that makes people see everything as ugly. A piece gets into a boy's eye, I think. The Snow Queen takes him away, and his friend goes looking for him."
"Gerda and Kai." He corrected.
"Right. Gerda finds him in the Snow Queen's palace and saves him." Daniel didn’t particularly care.
The old man nodded. "Good enough."
Daniel looked around the table. "And I'm guessing you're about to tell me she lives on your mountain."
The old man smiled. "Depends who you ask."
The bartender called from behind the counter. "Nobody sensible."
One of the other men laughed. The oldest ignored him and leaned back in his chair.
"The story here is a little different. Children used to be told the Snow Queen lived somewhere in the mountains to the north. If they wandered too far in winter, she might find them."
Daniel raised an eyebrow. "That sounds like an excellent way to keep children from wandering into the mountains."
"Probably." The old man shrugged.
Daniel hadn't expected the admission. "That's it?"
"What were you expecting?"
"I don't know, a secret ice palace, missing children, a cursed mirror." The basics really.
"We have those versions too."
"Of course you do."
The old man smiled. "Stories change. Some say she has a palace somewhere beyond the ridge, made entirely from ice. Others say you can only see it during a storm. My grandmother told me that if you saw blue lights moving high on the mountain, you were seeing the windows of her palace."
Daniel glanced toward the window despite himself. There was nothing outside except falling snow and reflected firelight.
"And the missing children?"
"That's Andersen, mostly."
"Mostly?"
The old man shrugged. "Children disappear sometimes, adults too. It's a mountain."
Daniel laughed. "You people are remarkably practical about your ghost stories."
"Fairy tale.” one of the other men corrected.
"She's not a ghost." said the third.
The bartender sighed loudly enough to be heard from across the room. "She's not anything."
Daniel looked over. "You really hate this story."
"I hate pulling tourists off mountains because someone told them there's a magic woman at the top."
"Has that actually happened?" The bartender gave him a long look and Daniel's smile disappeared. "Seriously?"
"Six years ago. Two university students from England decided they wanted to find the ice palace. One broke his arm. The other lost three toes."
The men at the table became noticeably less amused. Daniel looked down at his beer. "All right. That's pretty stupid."
"Yes."
"I'm not going looking for an ice palace."
"You're going onto the same mountain."
"I'm climbing it because it's a good route."
"Of course."
Daniel decided there was no point arguing further and turned back toward the old man. "So where did the local story come from? Andersen?"
"Probably."
The answer surprised him. "Probably?"
The old man rubbed his chin. "Nobody knows anymore. Andersen's story is old enough that people forget how much older their grandparents' stories really were. Someone tells a story to their children, those children tell their children, and after a hundred years everyone swears their version existed first."
"So there's no ancient local Snow Queen legend."
"Maybe there was, maybe there wasn't. Anyone who tells you they're certain is lying." The old man shrugged.
Daniel liked him considerably more for saying that. "That's disappointingly reasonable."
"We can make it more exciting if you want."
"Please."
The old man smiled. "There are people who say Andersen didn't invent her."
The bartender muttered something in Norwegian.
Daniel leaned forward. "There we go."
"They say stories about a woman connected to winter existed throughout the north before Andersen wrote his tale. Not exactly his Snow Queen, sometimes she was a spirit, sometimes a witch, sometimes simply a woman who couldn't feel the cold, then Andersen wrote his story, everyone knew it, and all the old stories became his story." The old man said somberly.
"Folklore getting overwritten by something more popular." Daniel nodded along.
"Exactly."
Daniel nodded. That, at least, sounded plausible. "So now every mysterious woman in a snowstorm becomes the Snow Queen."
"More or less."
"And people have supposedly seen her here?"
The old man glanced at the others before answering. "People say many things."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the best one you're getting."
Daniel laughed and leaned back. "Come on. You've already got me sitting here."
The man beside him spoke before the oldest could answer. He had been quiet through most of the conversation, nursing the same drink since Daniel sat down.
"My father saw her."
The table fell silent. Daniel looked at him. The man appeared to be in his seventies, perhaps older, with a weathered face and hands that looked as though they'd spent most of a lifetime outdoors. "When?"
"He was seventeen. Hunting with his brother." The older man said.
Daniel did some quick arithmetic. "So what, nineteen-sixties?"
"Fifty-eight."
"And he saw a woman on the mountain?"
The man nodded. "Storm came unexpectedly. His brother slipped and broke his leg. They couldn't get down before dark, and the temperature kept falling."
Daniel waited.
"My father said a woman found them."
"A local?" Daniel pressed.
"He didn't know."
"What did she look like?"
The old man stared into his glass for a moment. "Young, younger than him, he thought. Very pale, with almost white hair."
Daniel felt the story clicking into place before the man finished. "And she was wearing white."
The man nodded. Daniel glanced at the others. "And that's why he thought she was the Snow Queen."
"No. He thought she was some crazy woman who was going to freeze to death."
Daniel laughed despite himself. "Okay. That's better."
"She wasn't dressed for the weather. No heavy coat, no gloves. He couldn't understand how she was standing there." The man’s eyes looked distant.
"Did she help them?"
"She told them there was a hunting shelter about half a kilometer east."
"And there was?"
"Yes."
Daniel considered that. "Maybe she knew the mountain."
"Obviously." The man scoffed.
"So she was probably local."
"Probably." The old man's willingness to agree was beginning to ruin the ghost story.
Daniel gestured for him to continue. "What happened to her?"
"My father and his brother reached the shelter. She didn't come with them." And that was it?
"Did they ask her to?"
"My father said she looked annoyed enough that he didn't want to." That got a laugh from everyone at the table, even the bartender.
Daniel grinned. "The terrifying Snow Queen."
"My father called her something else."
"I can imagine."
The old man smiled faintly before continuing. "Rescuers found them the next morning. My father asked about the woman. Nobody knew who he meant. Nobody else had been reported on the mountain."
"That doesn't mean she wasn't there."
"No."
"Did he ever see her again?"
The man's smile disappeared. "Once."
Daniel waited.
"Forty-three years later." The room suddenly seemed quieter.
Daniel frowned. "The same woman?"
"That is what he said." The man shrugged boredly.
"How could he possibly know?" Daniel asked.
"He remembered her."
"After forty-three years?"
"He remembered the woman who saved his brother's life." Daniel couldn't argue with that. The old man continued. "He was driving north with my mother. They stopped at a petrol station. He saw a woman standing outside near the road."
Daniel already knew what came next.
"White hair."
"Yes." He confirmed.
"White clothes."
"No. Jeans and a gray coat." That caught Daniel off guard. The old man's mouth twitched. "Disappointed?"
"A little."
"He said she looked exactly the same."
Daniel leaned back, there it was, the impossible part.
"Forty-three years later."
"Yes."
"And your father was sure."
"Completely."
Daniel considered his response before settling on the obvious. "People misremember faces."
"Yes."
"Especially after forty years."
"Yes."
"He'd also spent decades hearing stories about the Snow Queen."
"Probably."
Daniel stared at him. "You're making it very difficult to argue with you."
"I wasn't arguing."
The bartender returned to the table and collected two empty glasses. "His father was a good man, also stubborn and half blind by then."
The old man nodded. "Also true."
Daniel laughed. "Finally."
The bartender pointed one of the empty glasses at him. "The story isn't the point."
"I know. Mountain dangerous."
"Very."
"Weather unpredictable."
"Very."
"Tourists stupid."
"Extremely." The old men laughed.
Daniel finished his beer. "And if I see a beautiful white-haired woman wandering around in a blizzard, I should assume I'm suffering from hypothermia."
The bartender considered that. "That would be a good start."
"And if she offers me a ride in a flying sleigh?"
"Get in. Saves us the trouble of rescuing you."
Daniel laughed and stood, but the bartender didn't laugh.
By nine the following morning, Daniel was on the mountain.
The weather was almost offensively pleasant.
The sky was pale blue, visibility stretched for kilometers, and the wind was barely strong enough to move the loose snow along the exposed sections of trail. The village gradually shrank behind him until the houses resembled pieces from a model railway scattered across the valley.
Daniel stopped on a ridge and looked back. He had to admit it was beautiful. He pulled out his phone and took several photographs before sending one to his brother.
Still alive and no evil snow witch yet.
The reply arrived before Daniel had finished putting the phone away.
Ask if she's single.
Daniel snorted and shoved the phone back into his jacket. The trail became less distinct as he climbed. That was expected. Most recreational hikers apparently turned around well below the ridge Daniel intended to reach, and while there had been occasional markers lower down, those disappeared after another hour.
Daniel checked his GPS.
Still good.
He continued. By eleven, he reached the first warning sign. It stood beside the trail, half buried beneath accumulated snow, its Norwegian text accompanied by an English translation.
DANGER. UNSTABLE TERRAIN BEYOND THIS POINT. WINTER TRAVEL NOT ADVISED.
Daniel examined the slope ahead. Nothing immediately concerned him. He checked the avalanche forecast again and studied the terrain before checking the time.
He had plenty of daylight. Daniel walked past the sign.
Twenty minutes later, he found another warning. This one wasn't official. Someone had carved two words into a wooden board and nailed it to a tree.
TURN BACK.
Daniel stopped long enough to photograph it.
"Very subtle."
He continued climbing. The forest gradually thinned as the elevation increased. Wind strengthened along the exposed slope, blowing fine streams of powder across the snow. Daniel adjusted his goggles and pulled his hood tighter.
He was enjoying himself. The route wasn't particularly technical, but the isolation made up for it. There were no other hikers, no ski lifts, no buildings visible above him and no sound except the wind moving across the mountain. Daniel understood why places like this accumulated stories. Spend enough time somewhere empty and the human mind started filling the empty spaces with things that weren't there.
Ghosts. Spirits. Witches. Snow Queens.
At 12:47, his GPS stopped working.
Daniel noticed because the route marker froze in place. He tapped the screen, waited, then restarted the device.
It still had power, but it couldn't establish his position. Daniel frowned and took out his phone.
Same problem.
"No signal?" He immediately shook his head at himself. GPS didn't require cellular service. He knew that.
Daniel opened the compass application and the indicator rotated slowly without settling.
That was stranger.
He removed an actual compass from his pack and held it level. The needle swung north, trembled, drifted west and slowly returned north again.
Daniel stared at it. "Okay."
Magnetic anomalies existed. Mineral deposits could interfere with a compass, and mountains were hardly famous for being geologically simple. There was undoubtedly a perfectly ordinary explanation.
He checked his watch. The upper ridge wasn't far, an hour, perhaps less. He could turn around. Daniel looked downhill for several seconds before looking toward the ridge.
He'd come all this way.
"One hour." He put the compass away and continued.
At 1:16, the wind stopped. Daniel noticed immediately because the mountain didn't merely become quiet. It became silent.
He could hear his own breathing inside his scarf and the crunch of snow beneath his boots. Nothing else moved. Even the loose powder that had been skittering across the surface moments earlier settled completely.
Daniel stopped. A strange sensation crawled across the back of his neck.
He looked around. Empty snow stretched uphill toward exposed rock. A few twisted trees clung to the slope farther below. Nothing moved.
"Get a grip." His voice sounded strangely loud.
Daniel continued climbing and the temperature dropped.
He felt it through his gloves first, then through the insulated layers beneath his jacket. He stopped and checked the thermometer attached to his pack.
Minus nine Celsius.
Daniel frowned. It had been minus two less than fifteen minutes earlier.
"That's fast." The wind returned.
It hit him hard enough to make him stagger sideways. Daniel planted one trekking pole and turned his shoulder into the gust as snow exploded across the slope. Fine powder became a solid white curtain in seconds.
"What the hell?" He looked up, the blue sky was disappearing.
Clouds rolled over the ridge with astonishing speed, swallowing the summit and pouring down the mountain. Within moments, the sunlight was gone.
Daniel's stomach tightened. The forecast had been clear until tomorrow afternoon.
Weather changed.
Every climber knew that. Forecasts were predictions, not promises, and mountains made their own weather.
He turned around, it was time to go.
Daniel began descending. Five minutes later, he realized he couldn't see his tracks. Snow had already covered them. He checked the GPS again.
Nothing.
The compass needle spun.
"Shit." Visibility dropped below fifty meters.
Daniel forced himself to slow his breathing. Panic killed people faster than cold did. He knew approximately where he was. He knew the general direction of the village. He had emergency supplies, food and shelter.
He was fine.
A gust nearly knocked him over. Daniel planted both poles and waited for it to pass. The storm screamed around him. Somewhere beneath the wind, he thought he heard something. Daniel raised his head. There it was again.
A voice.
He turned toward the sound. "Hello? Is someone there?"
The wind swallowed his words, but Daniel listened. For several seconds there was nothing, then, faintly, from somewhere uphill, he heard it again.
"Go back."
Daniel froze for a few seconds and he turned slowly.
"Hello?"
There was no answer as Daniel stared into the storm. Something moved through the snow.
A shape.
Human.
"Hey!" Daniel took several steps toward it. The figure disappeared.
He stopped. The bartender's voice came back to him with irritating clarity.
And if I see a beautiful white-haired woman wandering around in a blizzard, I should assume I'm suffering from hypothermia.
That would be a good start. Daniel looked at the thermometer. He wasn't hypothermic, not yet.
"Hello!" The figure appeared again, farther uphill. Daniel could barely make out the silhouette through the snow. A person stood motionless on the slope, apparently unaffected by wind strong enough to make Daniel brace himself to remain upright.
"Are you okay?" No response.
Daniel took another step, the storm shifted. The mountain cracked beneath him.
Daniel looked down, the snow under his right boot collapsed.
And the world disappeared.
He fell.
Daniel screamed as snow, ice and loose rock carried him down the slope. His shoulder struck something hard enough to spin him around. One trekking pole vanished from his hand, then the other.
He tried digging his boots into the slope, but nothing was caught.
The world became white, then blue.
Daniel broke through a crust of ice and dropped into darkness. He landed hard and pain exploded through his right leg. For several seconds, he couldn't breathe.
Snow drifted down through the opening above him. Daniel lay still and forced air back into his lungs. He tried moving his left leg.
It was fine, then his right and agony shot from his ankle almost to his knee.
"Fuck!" His voice echoed through the darkness.
Daniel rolled onto his back and looked around. He had fallen into some kind of crevice. Walls of ancient blue ice rose on either side of him, narrow enough that he could almost touch both if he stretched out his arms. Less than a meter from where he'd landed, the floor disappeared into darkness.
He looked up. The opening was at least six meters above him, maybe more.
Daniel reached for his radio.
Gone.
His pack was gone too.
"Great." His phone remained in his inner jacket pocket. Daniel pulled it out.
No signal.
Of course. He laughed once, although there was nothing funny about it.
"Okay. Okay, think."
He still had his emergency whistle. Someone would eventually notice he hadn't returned. The bartender certainly would, if only because the miserable bastard seemed to be expecting this exact outcome.
Daniel leaned his head against the ice.
"Idiot."
Something cracked above him.
Daniel looked up sharply. Snow shifted around the opening and spilled into the crevice, scattering across his jacket and face. He dragged himself backward as far as the narrow space allowed, biting down when the movement sent another bolt of pain through his injured leg.
Then he heard footsteps.
Daniel went still. They were faint at first, almost impossible to distinguish beneath the wind blowing across the opening above him. Then they came closer, the steady crunch of someone walking through deep snow without any apparent hurry.
"Hello!" Daniel shouted. His voice echoed strangely between the walls of ice. "I'm down here!"
The footsteps stopped and a shadow crossed the opening.
Someone looked down.
Daniel's first reaction was relief so overwhelming that he nearly laughed. He didn't care who had found him or how they'd managed it. His leg was probably broken, his equipment was scattered across half the mountain, and he had absolutely no intention of spending the night inside a glacier.
"Thank God!" Daniel called. "I fell through. I think my leg's broken!"
The figure didn't answer. Snow blew across the opening, obscuring them for a moment before the wind shifted again. Daniel squinted upward, trying to make out whoever had found him.
A woman stood above him.
She looked young, perhaps somewhere in her twenties, although Daniel couldn't make out much from the bottom of the crevice. Her hair was so pale it appeared almost white against the storm. She wore a sleeveless white dress that looked like snow, and the wind that had nearly knocked Daniel from his feet seemed to bother her no more than a summer breeze.
Daniel remembered the tavern, he remembered the old man's story about his father. He remembered a woman appearing during a storm without proper winter clothing, showing two stranded boys the way to safety before disappearing.
Then he remembered Andersen.
A frozen palace. A sleigh crossing the winter sky. A beautiful woman who ruled over snow and cold.
"The Snow Queen." The words escaped before he could stop them.
Something changed. One moment Daniel had been struggling to see her through the blowing snow. The next, it was as though a veil had been pulled away from his eyes. Her features sharpened with impossible suddenness. He could see individual strands of nearly white hair moving around her face and the brilliant blue of her eyes staring down at him.
Daniel forgot about the pain in his leg. The woman closed her eyes for a moment.
She looked irritated, not sinister or otherworldly. Not like some ancient creature deciding what to do with the mortal who had trespassed into her domain.
Just irritated. When she opened her eyes again, she looked at his injured leg.
"You were warned."
Daniel blinked. Before he could respond, she stepped away from the opening.
"Wait!"
A blue light appeared beneath him and Daniel stopped.
It spread through the ice like sunlight passing through deep water. Delicate lines of frost raced outward from beneath his body, branching across the walls in intricate patterns.
The crevice groaned as Daniel pressed himself against the wall.
"What the hell?"
Ice rose beneath him. He shouted and grabbed instinctively for something solid, but there was nothing to hold. A smooth platform formed beneath his body, curving carefully around his injured leg before beginning to rise.
Daniel stared at it. There were no cables and no machinery, nothing supporting it. The ice itself was moving.
He looked up. The woman stood at the edge of the crevice with one hand extended.
Daniel stopped struggling.
The platform carried him upward. It moved slowly enough not to jostle his injured leg, rising through the narrow opening until Daniel emerged into the storm. The wind struck him immediately, but a curved wall of ice formed along the platform and shielded him from the worst of it.
The woman lowered her hand and Daniel stared at her.
Up close, she looked even less possible. She was young. That was what disturbed him most.
The old man's father had supposedly seen a woman like this in 1958 and then again more than forty years later. Daniel had dismissed it as faulty memory, the sort of detail added to a story after decades of retelling.
Now he wondered. The woman looked at his leg, then toward the slope below them. She didn't ask his name or how he'd gotten there. She didn't seem remotely interested in hearing an explanation.
She simply raised her hand again and snow gathered beneath the platform.
Daniel felt it begin to move. He gripped the edge instinctively as the ice carried him downhill. The woman walked beside it without difficulty, her steps light across snow deep enough to reach Daniel's knees if he tried standing in it.
The storm changed around them. Daniel noticed it gradually.
The wind still howled through the mountains, but not where they were. Snow twisted around them without ever quite reaching the platform. Whenever the terrain became too steep, a smooth path of ice formed ahead of them, carried Daniel safely downward, then vanished beneath fresh snow once they'd passed.
Daniel didn't speak, and neither did she. He watched her instead.
There was no sensible explanation left. The woman he'd seen higher on the mountain hadn't been a hallucination. Neither was the moving ice beneath him or the storm bending around them.
Daniel had spent the previous evening laughing at a fairy tale.
He wasn't laughing anymore. They descended through the forest until a flash of red appeared between the trees below.
Daniel heard voices soon afterward.
Search and rescue.
"Here!" Daniel shouted.
The woman stopped, but the platform continued several meters farther before settling gently into the snow. Daniel turned toward the approaching lights, relief flooding through him as several figures appeared between the trees.
"Here! I'm over here!"
He heard someone answer. Daniel looked back.
The woman was already walking away. For a moment, he considered calling after her.
But he didn't.
He watched instead as she moved between the trees. Snow swept across the forest, pale hair disappearing into white until Daniel could no longer distinguish her from the storm.
"Sir!"
Daniel turned. Three rescuers emerged through the trees. One immediately dropped beside him while another called their position over the radio.
"Don't try to move," the first rescuer said. "Where are you hurt?"
"My right leg."
The rescuer began examining him while Daniel looked back toward the forest.
There was nobody there, and no footprints crossed the fresh snow. Even the strange platform beneath him was changing. Its perfectly smooth surface softened around the edges, frost becoming powder until there was nothing beneath Daniel except ordinary packed snow.
One of the rescuers followed his gaze.
"Was someone with you? It’s a miracle you made it back.”
Daniel looked toward the trees. He thought about the bartender, the old men beside the fireplace. Andersen's fairy tale and the warnings he'd dismissed because he'd assumed generations of people living beneath this mountain couldn't possibly know something he didn't.
"No," Daniel said quietly. Above them, the storm continued raging across the north mountain.
Daniel stared into it.
He believed them now.
A/N
Finally trying my shot at a Jelsa fic.