Disclaimer: I do not own Sailor Moon. Or Russia.
Theme: Family--Frost
Genre: Romance, Angst
Version: Manga
Rating: PG
One cold winter's eve, a peasant girl was going deep into the mountains to gather herbs for her sick mother. A blizzard began and the girl became lost. As night fell she despaired ever finding her way home, when she wandered into a cave. In the cave she found a man pale as the snow outside. He had no fire, but he offered her a drink from his flask and she felt the bitter cold no more.
They dwelt in the cave all winter, but they never had a fire or ate or drank except from his flask. But after a while the girl began to miss her mother and worry for her and miss the open sky, so she crept from the cave while her husband was sleeping.
She emerged to find it was, in fact, spring. But as she walked down the hill she tripped on a loose stone and fell from the tall ledge of a cliff. Her scream awoke her husband and he rushed out to save her. But as he pulled her back up, his hands began to melt like ice under his grasp.
He was a frost spirit and he could not exist outside of winter, but he had left the world of the spirits in spring to save her, so he melted away.
The woman returned to her village, only to find that it had not been one winter but a hundred and her mother had died long before.
She wandered the earth, distraught, until nine months later she had a baby, who she named Haruka. The next winter, though, she went off again to find the land of the frost spirits. Without the mead of the spirit world she could no longer survive the cold and went into the snow to be with her beloved forever.