"Yoohoo? Anyone home?" Pitch moaned as the annoyingly cheerful voice of the winter spirit, Jack Frost, floated to his ears. After his defeat by his own nightmares, Pitch had simply wallowed in his own self pity for the past many weeks. No sign of any life, except for the annoying nightmares who ran rampant. Frost was now an unwelcome exception.
"I know you're here somewhere. C'mon, if I'm bored, you've gotta be dying!" Great. Frost was bored, and had decided to bother him to get un-bored. How wonderful.
"I don't associate with the likes of you, Guardian," Pitch replied, his voice clearly very annoyed and not amused in the slightest.
"Too bad, cause you're stuck with me! Where are you again?" Pitch moaned in agony. This was far worse than any torture he had ever imagined. Far worse.
"Oh, there you are! How are you? Never mind, you're probably doing terrible. I'm doing pretty great. I've got eight whole believers! I'm not meaning to shove it in your face, honestly. The other Guardians are just so busy doing their jobs that they don't have time to talk to me... so I came here! I mean, you couldn't be doing that much, right?"
Karma was indeed all that she had been made up to be.
"So, now that we've got that over with, wanna play 20 questions? I'll go first! Why in the world, after the who-knows-how-long that you've been alive, would you randomly attack the Guardians? Why now?"
Pitch was suddenly listening, though his hearing soon faded to only be able to hear the thundering pounding of his heart. His already slumped body seemed to slump more, and his eyes closed tightly. Without realizing that he was actually giving the brat the attention he was after, Pitch began to retell a memory.
Laughter. Dreams. Joy. Happiness. Innocence. Pitch Black felt like he might lose his lunch- a problem mostly because he hadn't had any lunch. The children of the world, no matter where he went, were just so infuriatingly happy. They feared so little, it made him feel queasy, sick even, every time he witnessed their frolicking.
Pitch was currently masked with shadows, standing in a patch of shade beneath an elm tree. The tree was standing alone, but tall, thick and strong. He guessed it to be at least 200 years old, and marveled at its magnificence.
The tree was located in the center of a small settlement. Pitch wouldn't even call it a village, it was so small. Barely 40 people, and that was measuring on the high end.
Pitch had been hearing many humans talk, in the past decade or two, of the 'new' land they had found to the west. The foolish Easterners, as he had always called them, refused to understand that there had been Westerners living on the western land masses they had 'just found' for as long as the Easterners had lived in their east. All that this 'new discovery' meant was more wars were coming. The Easterners saw themselves above the Westerners, because their customs were different, and the Easterners would use this as adequate reason to take over the west. They and the Westerners would fight. Pitch had seen this happen many times before, and would surely see these pathetic humans do it many times more.
Curious as to how close his predicted war was, he had gone to one of the small English settlements to observe. He took the shadows, and never left them. He hadn't in centuries; he didn't want to take the chance. After his defeat at the hand of those Guardians, Pitch had stayed hidden. He hated them with his every ounce, but his desire for revenge was left be. There was no point to trying to kill them. His life was fine as it was. What more could he want than his shadows and the occasional phobia to extort? Or so he told himself.
Suddenly, a slight pang of fear shook Pitch from his thoughts. It wasn't much fear; an adult worrying over something. He felt plenty of this fear all the time. It didn't make him stronger, but it wasn't necessarily bitter. Pitch tended to ignore this fear. But now, having nothing better to do, he followed the fear's direction to see two young children, a boy about 14 and a girl 7 or 8, walking into the woods, leaving their worried mother behind.
An evil, twisted, demented, and generally terrifying smirk crawled across Pitch's face. There were so many ways to scare young children in the woods.
Nearly giddy at the prospect of the fear that he himself could cause- even better than taking advantage of someone else's doings- Pitch followed the two children into the woods, of course, by way of the shadows.
The first trick he used to try to scare them was simply the manipulation of shadows. He darkened the woods significantly, especially along the path before the two. But, much to his frustration, the boy comforted the girl and neither of them were the slightest bit nervous, even in the middle of a wolf infested forest that was growing steadily darker every moment.
He next tried rustling bushes to make it sound like there were wolves nearby. Nothing. A shadow snake slithering by their feet. Just a startled jump backward. Trick and trick Pitch tried, but to no avail. These kids were fearless. Stupid, he would even go to say.
After a few minutes of Pitch's failed attempts to scare the children, they reached what appeared to be their destination; a small frozen pond. Pitch hissed under his breath, realizing they were here to ice skate. He detested the pastime. But rather than leave now that his opportunity was gone, he settled back in his shadows. He was going to wait until they headed back to their little settlement and try his luck at scaring them again.
Minutes lapsed, and Pitch's attention began to fog. He thought of random things, from how many more people in the world had brown hair than any other color, to which was better, swords or axes, to various things about horses.
He was jerked from his mind's wandering when he felt a sharp blast of a pain he despised and tried his best to avoid. The bitter, revolting taste of mortal fear. The fear felt when life was about to be lost.
Snapping his head up, Pitch looked toward the lake. He was on his feet in an instant, and his head began to whirl as he tried to decide what his course of action should be.
On the lake before him was a terrible scene. The young girl had strayed too far toward the thin ice at the lake's center. The ice beneath her was cracking, and would not hold her weight for very much longer. The boy, Jack, it could be assumed, from her incessant screaming, was panicked. He was about five yards from her, near the bank.
As Pitch watched, paralyzed by the two children's painful fear he was feeling and his inability to decide what to do, the boy coaxed the girl toward himself. He grabbed a shepherd's crook lying on the ice nearby and, once close enough, pulled the girl to the bank of the lake.
But while they momentarily celebrated her safety, Pitch saw the ice cracking faster under Jack's greater weight, and Pitch ran forward, onto the lake, trying to reach the boy. He got to Jack just as the ice gave way. Pitch reached forward and grabbed the boy in a hold that would prevent Jack from falling into the frigid waters- but Jack passed through his arms.
Pitch watched helplessly as the un-believer sunk through him and into the death below. He stepped back, unable to do anything to help the boy.
"I vowed to myself to do whatever it took to be believed in, so that that would never happen again," Pitch ended.
The silence was overbearing.
"I- had no idea," Jack whispered. Pitch was oblivious to the tears streaming down the winter spirit's face, to his shaking, and to his unbroken gaze on Pitch.
"No one ever does. No point in feeling guilty, or whatever," Pitch replied nonchalantly.
Now that he had told his story, he felt like a strange weight had been lifted from himself. Pitch closed his eyes, and for the first time in at least a century, he was able to slip into a peaceful sleep. His exhausted mind and body were thrilled for the break from the pain and misery.
Jack was staring at Pitch as he dozed off. He knew that Pitch had no idea, and he couldn't decide whether or not he should tell him. Tell Pitch that the boy he couldn't save that day was the very same boy that had caused his defeat at the battle of Burgess. That he, Jack Frost, was the boy who had inspired Pitch to rise up again.
Thank you for reading! If you have enjoyed "Cracked Ice", then you may want to go check out "Dark Nights & Snowball Fights", which is a one-shot series I'm writing to continue this.