For those who have read the original, incomplete version of this story: I was previously known as mayomai, but I made another account and have rewritten the story because of reasons which are too tiring to type out (lol). The prologue stays the same, but the entire plot is changed. Because to be honest, I didn't know where exactly the last plot was leading.
"You can't marry a man you just met."
-Queen Elsa; Frozen
DISCLAIMER: A Jack/Elsa movie doesn't exist. Nuff said.
THE COLD EMPRESS
PROLOGUE
In the early days of kings and queens, castles and empires, cobblestone streets and villages, magic was anything but a figment of one's imagination. It was real, true and very much possible. Anyone with half a brain knew that. But one fact that every single mortal on the land of Earth perceived, was that magic and sorcery were banned, illegal, feared, and considered to be the 'devil's incarnate.'
Mages, they were called. They hid themselves in fear, terror and for some, in spite. For mages, witches, and anyone in any land or kingdom who had any connection with magic were hunted down and burnt at stake. Their magic was useless against the village mob and the Royal Militia. And so their secret was to remain a secret, if they wanted to live.
But there was a certain kingdom in the far west, where rumors concerning the Royal Family spread like wildfire. The Royal Family of Arendelle, rumor has it, was a family of mages.
"Time is running out." The king furrowed his eyebrows and opened an old trove. Outside the castle was one great, big and angry mob. Everyone turned on them. The villagers, the Royal Army, the maids and guards; every single villager of Arendelle screamed bloody murder and insisted on burning the Royal Family on the stakes, forgetting everything the royalties had done for them.
It was three o'clock in the morrow when their acquaintances, friends and business partners decided to gather, blasting cannons and trying to burn the mansion down. The family awoke with a startle and barely managed to block everything with ice. The rumor proved to be true, after all. Arendelle's rulers were mages of ice.
The castle gates, doors and windows; every single opening was blocked with sheets and sheets of thick ice. And inside the bare mansion was the Royal Family in a state of distress.
"Is everything going to end, mother?" princess Anna sobbed, clutching her older sister's sleeve with shaking hands.
The queen, who both the princesses look up to entirely answered with a gentle smile. "Hush, child. Everything's going to be fine." She hugged both her daughters, but not once showing a single emotion of fear.
The king led his family through the never ending halls and reached an underground passage. That was when the grand doors upstairs had suddenly opened with a big blast of the cannon. The king handed his family a brightly lit lantern and a peculiar ice key.
"You know the way, my queen. I shall stay here and fight." The king turned to leave, but his wife wouldn't let him as she desperately grabbed onto his arm. The two princesses continued to weep, and ran to hug their father tightly.
"We can fight together, we must fight together." The older princess suggested with a tear-streaked face, hearing the men upstairs cause various ruckus of sounds.
"Or we can leave right now." The younger one insisted. The king gravely shook his head.
"You have to pass through the borders and into the mountains; where you must live happily and peacefully. The men will catch up on us so I must stay and buy you time." The king pressed on, now leading his three most loved girls into the dark entrance.
"I'll stay by your side." The queen forcefully said, and the king, despite the situation, simply chuckled and tucked his wife's hair behind her ears.
He looked into her eyes; the same eyes he had been mesmerized and captured in for thirty long years. The royal queen's face was completely calm and serene, but her eyes betrayed her composure. They looked scared, frightened, and confused. The king left one lingering kiss on her forehead and whispered, "You've never looked more beautiful than you do now. Take care of our children." And with that, he had pushed them in and closed, locked and fastened the door. He smiled with relief as he made with way upstairs and faced the storm head on.
That night, the king had perished with the thought of his dear family, and with an arrow to the heart.
Princess Elsa's heart felt like it was going to burst any minute now. The king, her father, was in grave danger. Her grip on her sister's hand tightened.
"Father's going to be alright, isn't he?" princess Anna stuttered, and her sister reassured her with a tense nod.
'No one is going to die. No one.' Elsa thought, as their mother stopped in front of the stone door leading right outside the castle gates.
The queen then gently took off her necklace with a blue, tear-drop shaped stone and handed it to the younger princess.
She spoke calmly, but quickly. "This was passed from generations after generations of our family. It symbolizes our magic, and who we are." She looked into her daughters' eyes. "Never forget who you are."
"Mother, why?" the older princess whispered quickly.
'Because who knows what might happen outside these doors.'
"I love the both of you very much." She hugged both her daughters, them replying with muffled voices, and opened the door which later changed everyone's lives.
CHAPTER 1: UNDERGROUND
The Calm Before the Storm; A Hundred Years Later
The human population of Arendelle was on the verge of extinction; the people's lives filled with hypocrisy and their hearts tainted black with malice and covetousness.
Arendelle had been pronounced isolated for the past hundred years; and it was erased from the map on its twenty-fifth year of the curse. Trading was instantly cut off, livestock was out of the question, and the last tree in the kingdom had withered days after the befalling of the curse.
Weeks passed and the kingdom was in grave danger; there began with a strange sighting of a huge, monstrous, ice-powered beast.
It made its way into the domain; the people taken in shock and still ignorant of what exactly was happening. Lives were taken, houses and living quarters were either frozen solid, or crushed under the beast's gigantic feet. Hope seemed frail and null back then; until the most likely savior from a foreign land came.
The sweeping, majestic and kind Hans of the Southern Isles saved the kingdom with the only option left available; magic. He was crowned king after that; but sadly, the genuine truth on how the king slew the monster and started the construction of the great magical wall barrier was lost throughout the years; some say he was a powerful mage himself and brought the barriers up overnight while others say that the barriers were brought up by sheer human labor, which they later cast a spell on it.
And that was the very beginning of the reign of king Hans' bloodline.
The surrounding perimeter of Arendelle was then, therefore filled with various creatures of the cold and ice out for blood; their numbers growing largely within the passing years, and the only thing that kept the creatures out of the vicinity was the great mighty wall barriers.
Magic was slowly accepted in the society, but despite facing the predicament of the eternal winter curse, the townspeople still continued their hunt for mages within the walls of Arendelle under the order of the royal lineage. The ascertained mages were captured and taken into the royal castle; kept in the cold, dark dungeons as slaves who produced crops with their magic while others were sent out the barriers of the kingdom for a kill-or-be-killed way of exile.
Majority of humanity's intelligence and scope of reality was, indeed, very low. The governing royal family's system was rotten; with power, money, luxuries and influence the main basis of people's life as a villager. The poor and poverty-stricken were found near the walls, where sounds and terror of the barrier breaking any second filled literally every waking second of their lives, while the rich and greedy were in the center, away from disaster and drunk with sloth and grandeur.
In the careless wake of the royal lineage then formed a place within the kingdom of Arendelle full of crime, shadowy business, and sometimes, magic-related occurrences. This was where most of the magi in hiding were being captured, where most of the kingdom's most dangerous assailants were found and still being hunted. The underground society of Ravenloss.
"Blondie," his cold, monotonous voice filled the atmosphere whilst his startlingly blue eyes focused and burned through the alarmed golden-haired girl's eyes and soul.
There he was; Jack Frost, in his usual all-black attire, standing before her very eyes while his unusual, stringently clean and refreshing scent assaulted her senses.
"Yes?" She breathlessly replied, already feeling the oncoming weakness in her knees and her grip on the black cloak slightly loosening. She stared at his frost-like white hair, wanting nothing but to ran her fingers through them and feel if it was, indeed, as unusually soft as it looked.
His eyes darted downwards and roamed through her petite figure until finally settling his smoldering gaze on her lips. "I need you…" he said in a dangerously low voice.
"Pardon me?" she asked, her heart beating loudly in her ears as she stared at him with dazed, half-lidded eyes. He took a step towards her, and she stood frozen on the spot, her left hand strongly gripping the edge of the wooden table behind her while her right hand held the cloak much tighter.
"I need you; right now," he whispered closely. The golden-haired girl felt as if she would melt any second now; just one more cool, sensual and impossibly sultry syllable from him and she would be hitting the tiled floors in the form of a watery puddle.
"You do?" she asked, feeling the blood rush to her head and rendering her giddy and anxious.
"I don't take well to repeating what I say." His voice had tints of impatience, but strangely to her, the foggy, dream-like scene before her eyes started to clear.
"Of c-course, Jack." Her hand let go of the table and reached to pull his shirt collar towards her.
"Give it to me." The fog was already vanishing. Her eyebrows slightly furrowed as her hand continued to slowly and sensually move forwards.
"Right here? Right now? But we're in the kitchen." She timidly whispered, and at last, reality in the form of a cruel, hurtful needle, popped her bubble-like dream state.
"So?" suddenly, his passion-filled eyes attained the very color of boredom, his I-need-you expression leaving his features and in its stead was a face devoid of any emotion whatsoever, the very close distance a while back was also gone; he was, instead, standing a good few meters away from her and clearly out of an arm length's reach.
Rapunzel blinked a couple of times. Her left hand hovered in mid-air as she awkwardly stared at him.
"Are you going to hand it over or do you plan on staring at me all day?" he tediously asked, and she felt absolutely horrified, mortified, and petrified.
Rapunzel had actually daydreamed in front of him; in front of the underground territory's most sought-out assassin, in the kitchen, at five past six in the morning while he waited for her to hand his stupid black hooded cloak.
"I'm terribly sorry!" she exclaimed, immediately bowing her head and burning bright red while extending the cloak towards the unfazed delinquent.
Jack silently took the cloak, wondered for a split-second why in Merida's holy hair was the woman suddenly so red and fidgety, before finally exiting the kitchen; deciding he would begin to give a care after the sun fully rose.
"Good morni-" Merida DunBroch happened to walk into the kitchen moments after, stretching her arms and a cheery grin plastered on her face until she saw her comrade's disheveled state.
"Rapunzel?" Merida asked, as the golden-haired girl simply turned towards her with a what-am-I-going-to-do expression on her face.
Hiccup Haddock III then entered the quaint kitchen, mumbling a few 'good mornings' and settling in a random chair.
"What's with her?" he asked, yawning and grabbing the coffee pot. "It's something related to the Jack, isn't it?" he drowsily said, not even bothering to lift his eyes from said coffee pot.
Rapunzel remained silent and continued to stare at the floor.
"Guess so." Hiccup shrugged, mixing sugar and milk with the black coffee.
"It's not that serious then." Merida replied with a smile, patting the blonde-haired girl's back and proceeded to sit down.
The room they were currently in was dimly-lit, dusty and dingy.
A high-ranking government official found himself under the yellowish light of the single bulb overhead, sitting in a moth-eaten, worn out chair, and in front of probably the most intimidating people he will come to know in his life.
Cold sweat was running down the sides of the official's pudgy face as his eyes took in the four people, no, assassins in front of him. The four were all donned in identical pitch-black, hooded capes and with conspicuous, strange masks covering their faces.
"State the prey." The second one from the right stated in a deep, dark, monotonous voice. The government official inaudibly gulped.
"Your target is the corporal of the third squad of the Royal Militia. His name is Edward Greene." He took out an envelope and placed it on the small, round wooden table in front of them.
The fourth one to the left raised a finger; and the letter slowly levitated towards the second from the right. A gloved hand took the white envelope and began reading through the contents.
It contained the high-ranking official's full data, and in it, a personal hand-written letter of the request for assassination, the target, the amount of money in exchange, and lastly, a signature.
The hooded figure lifted its masked head and a second of tense silence filled the room.
"Your request is accepted." The cold voice once more spoke, "We will come to collect three days after the execution."
The hooded figure silently stood up and walked towards the quivering high-ranking official; he, in turn, begrudgingly folded the sleeves of his right hand uniform. The masked assassin tapped the skin just below his elbow, and the man slightly winced as the blood seemingly clotted to form a small 'S', before disappearing completely.
"Speak a word and the spell shall tear your soul and consume your body." the cloaked figure turned and walked towards his other three companions, and the official's eyes slightly widened as the dim light bulb flickered off; swallowing the room in complete darkness, before turning on again.
The man was left alone; staring at the exact spot where the four magi were seated in just a second ago. He had risked his life meeting those four; but it wasn't in vain. After all, he just made the most secure kill in all of Arendelle; he made a deal with the assassins of 'Sorcier.'
AUTHOR'S NOTES: I messed up big time last time, didn't I? Thanks for reading though. :)