The Giant

by TwinEnigma

Disclaimer: I do this for fun and skills building, not profit. I do not own Frozen, nor its characters.

Warnings/Codes: (Norse) mythological references and allusions.

Elsa knows what this might look like to others.

She, her face flustered and her hair askew, stands with her hands half-raised and curled, magic dancing at her fingertips and the slightest edge of naked fear in her eyes. She must look a fright, like a thing half-mad.

Across the room stands something ancient and terrible in the shape of a man. Were it not for the unmistakable evidence of his nature and the complete lack of fear he shows at her display of power, he might have seemed a mere innocent at her mercy. But she knows better.

Oh, his disguise had been good, she does grant him that, but it had not fooled her for very long: there had been too many inconsistencies in his claims and his mannerisms, echoes of a bygone era that now only the trolls understood the full measure of. And so she had gone to confront him.

The graceful ease with which he had batted aside her power, however, had been entirely unexpected.

"Who are you?" she demands archly, her magic bristling with the full weight of her authority brought to bear.

The man – no, creature before her smiles and it is a jarring thing, all teeth, and it gives the impression of icicles like daggers. His eyes, once a warm brown, now shine the frigid blue of old sea ice, and his skin slips from fair to a deathly white. Hoarfrost crawls slowly from his skin to his clothes and spreads across the floor from his feet. "You know who I am," he says, at last, and in his voice is the rumble of landslides and glaciers separating.

And she does, in a way that defies her conscious ability to explain, but she dares not give an inch: she is the ruler here, not he, and that, too, is something she understands instinctively as paramount.

"Your name," she demands.

The illusion slips that much more and she can see the way his skin and hair shimmers beneath a thick rime of frost. "I have many names," he answers, stepping towards her. "I am Icicle."

He steps forward again. "I am Frost."

Again, he takes a step and though he is of a lean, sharp build, he is suddenly dwarfing her. "I am the son of the Wind and the father of Snow."

On the edge of her senses, Elsa can feel the storm in him: it is a blizzard that doesn't end, a blizzard that she had previously only believed to exist in myth and legend and one that makes her endless winter look like a child's effort by comparison. With each step he takes closer, he grows only larger and the storm greater still. It howls through him, around him, within him – he is the storm and the howling wind and snow.

"I come down from the north every year with my children," he intones, bowing his head as it begins to scrape the ceiling, "Tracing the mountain paths as I have done since ancient times. And I have watched the line of your people from the beginning, shared with your kin my blood and power."

And, in that moment, she knows him completely. All fear flees her and she lowers her arms.

The world stretches and slides and he is once more cloaked in the shape of a man, no more extraordinary than the next. It is such a laughably small container, she thinks, for one such as him.

He smiles at her, a too-wide thing showing far too many teeth. His breath issues from between his clenched teeth like smoke from a dragon's mouth. Overall, it is a grin that only serves to make him appear more feral.

But then, she supposes, given what he must truly be, it is to be expected.

"What business do you have with me, giant?" Elsa asks, after a moment. "Why have you come?"

His eyes gleam with the shimmer of ice-covered snow in sunlight and he laughs. "Have you not noticed? Summer has run its course, my dear, and so I have come, as I am bound to and as I have done for countless years and will do for ages to come. Only now, you can see me, for now you believe."

What he thinks she believes in he does not say, but she knows what he implies all the same. Her magic bristles and itches in her fingertips, thrumming in heart, and she lets it go, lets it fizzle as her irritation at his presumption is sublimated by reason. She watches him, confident in herself, in her power, in her authority.

"Rest assured, your majesty," he says, his smile razor-sharp with amusement, "I shall harm none that do not fail to respect my power, as it has always been for your kind, and I shall leave with the turning of the seasons, as is tradition. Whether or not you wish to continue to see me in the course of my travels – that, I'm afraid, is entirely up to you."

He pauses then and again his presence seems to dwarf her, smothering in its greatness. Snow gathers, swirling around him, and the windows rattle, shaking until they unlatch as his form becomes obscured in the whirling flakes. His voice booms, keening with the sense of a wolf's howl on a frozen mountain: "But know this – I see you now, too."

The snow gathers and rushes, blasting out through the open window in a torrent and melting into the raging blizzard beyond. Nothing is left in the room, save for Elsa and the lingering frost where he had once stood. He, the giant, is gone, but she can still feel his presence. It is everywhere, in the storm, in the wind, in the old snow and the new alike, and she can feel his eyes on her.

The shiver that slips down Elsa's spine has nothing to do with the cold.

She shuts the window anyway.

AN:

So this was basically one of the draft directions I had for The Champion but it didn't fit the mood and I ended up going another direction with the identity of the frost giant she is dealing with in that story anyway (in that one, the frost giant was Thorri, who is the grandson of Jökul).

Still, this was a decent thing and the presence of a "frost giant" more clearly delineated (not to mention that it snowed), so I cleaned it up and polished it.

Now, though his name is not mentioned in its original language, Jökul (also written as Iökul) does explicitly name himself and his lineage. The trick is in his name meaning. His name, as it is presented in Hversu Noregr byggdist, is translated as icicle or glacier. In the Orkneyinga saga, he is called Frosti instead, which is literally translated as frost. In this fic, he accepts both names as correct, albeit separate, names. The Wind, whom he refers to as his father, is called Kári (mentioned in the thulur as term for wind), while the Snow, whom he calls son, refers both to snow and to the ancient king Snær the Old.

This also ties him to the line of the Norwegian Kings, hence his noting he has shared his blood and power with Elsa's kin.

The bit about her confidence in her authority and intrinsically knowing ties into the concept of the relationship between a ruler and their land - they are tied together. As he is implied to be a form of winter incarnate, he is very closely tied to the land and the cycle of seasons, and so in turn to Elsa, hence the knowing.

The whole "You see me now/now I see you too" bit is a reference to the nature of magic: it is commonly held that once you notice it, it notices you and you can't get rid of it easily.

Also, as an aside, I am fully aware that there's this weird misconception that "Jokul Frosti" is a Real Thing (side-eyeing the ROTG fandom here). It's my big berserk button, because it's super erroneous: the whole concept is literally mashing together two separate names from two entirely separate documents with no regard for context at all and saying it's a thing (usually as part of a ridiculous stretch to make it connect to a modern mythic figure) when it's completely not at all and so, I will never ever use it.