The Utgard Cycle:
Prologue: Some say the world will end in fire, others in ice-Robert Frost
The day began like any other in the youth of Princesses Anna and Elsa of Arendelle. They were outside, running around in pleasure in the woods, their father's soldiers keeping watch on them just outside. As they ran and laughed, Elsa understood vaguely in a corner of her mind a sense of strange unease connected with a curious free-standing rock in the forest. It was a very strangely-shaped rock, long but with a pointed edge that stuck out with a sharp end, looking almost glassy. While Anna only remembered a vague sensation of something strange, Elsa heard an occasional rumbling laugh on the winds, a sound deep and inhuman. Almost like ice grinding together.
Anna threw snowballs at her sister, who easily dodged them, and went chasing after her, catching her right next to the rock. Anna, intending to tease Elsa, then pushed her. As she did so, the snow beneath them briefly changed in an unnatural fashion to a slick, smooth ice and Elsa panicked. The ice became more slick and she crashed her head into the rock, blood beginning to pour above one of her eyes. Anna screamed in horror, and rushed to cradle Elsa.
"Elsa, you'll be Ok. Please don't die. I need you sis. I need you. Please, please don't die. Help!"
Elsa looked at Anna uncomprehendingly. One thing she said was very strange and in hindsight rather terrifying but at the time was incomprehensible: "The wind's laughing."
Anna, heedless of her sister's blood on her face and on her dress and in her hair kept screaming for help, when Elsa looked at her again and said, "Why'd you push me?"
"I was just trying to be funny. I thought we were playing on snow. Elsa, I'm so sorry," she was babbling now, sobbing into her sister's body, not realizing that her always-cold sister's motions were slowly starting to lose vitality that her breathing was beginning to slow and rattle in her lungs. Then Anna heard it, too. A weird and strange laughter on the wind, like grinding ice. She almost fancied that the rock was an enormous knuckle of some transformed giant who'd hidden himself in strange woods that had appeared that morning shrouded in frost but the illusion vanished. Instead she held her sister even as her fathers' soldiers ran into the woods.
They tried to take Elsa to the palace but she found herself fighting like a tiger to keep her hands on her sister, to let Elsa know she wasn't going to leave her. She kept babbling strange words, though they heard her, after they'd begun to take her to the palace, trying to stand her up, only for her to pass out on the snow, the snow in front of her turning red in the pattern of a crystal, say "I pushed her on the rock."
They looked and there was indeed a large rock, its pointed edge dyed red. They said nothing to her and she marched back to the palace, wondering why the wind they'd heard earlier had gone silent. A storm like this shouldn't just disappear. Then into the palace, where her parents screamed when they saw Elsa had already bled heavily and was paler than usual. The long hours in her room as doctors were called in. A priest was called in, too, but there was nothing he could do that the doctor hadn't already done. Save, that is, to perform the rite of extreme unction. Praying over her in Latin, Anna was finally allowed in, not understanding why her parents wanted her to be there. When Elsa looked at them, she looked straight at Anna.
She said, "I feel the cold." Her smile was strangely peaceful and then she was still. Her parents sobbed and Anna ran to her, saying "I'm sorry I pushed you sis, I'm so sorry." Her parents, stunned at this, let her cry for a time before pulling her off of her sister's body even as she tried to fight them again. She cried that evening, when they decided that they would quietly bury Elsa in the family graveyard that night, and then gather people for a formal service the next morning. She was not allowed to attend the burial, and she saw the look of anger and hatred in her parents' eyes. She heard then the whispers 'she murdered her own sister,' and was still too young to understand the poison already taking root.
While it had snowed earlier that day, the ground was oddly dry where she was to be buried. Her mother sobbed, saying "She knew. Somehow she, she knew." They buried her then, the Priest reciting his prayers in Latin. Only her father and the soldiers that had found her noticed that the strange stone that had been there in the woods earlier that morning had reappeared outside her grave, no blood now on the sharp edge. That the stone, though the same rock, was at an angle almost like the change of a gigantic flexing finger. As the King turned, he saw something very, very strange. The ground she was buried in had been brown before the burial. Now it was almost pure, transparent ice. The ice around it formed a pattern like an enormous snowflake. Then the King saw that same stone had seemed to shift again, moving just outside the pattern of one of the prongs of the snowflake even though it would been right through one of them in its original position.
It was twilight, then, after a long afternoon in her room, alone, when Anna had a strange vision she could not explain, be it sorcery or some strange thing of the old Gods. Her sister's grave-site and the woods changed. An enormous gigantic hand that was a deep blue reached into the Earth, seemingly immaterial and called out her sister. In that hand she was like a speck, and there were strange red things. A voice spoke in an eerie tone, the grinding ice from before. The shroud twitched, and then she saw, for a moment, through Elsa's own eyes.
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What is this? Her body was covered in some strange white thing, but what it rested on felt odd. She, mistress of the Ice and Snow, was not used to feeling cold. Yet here it felt as though she rested in ice. Wind, then. From nowhere. It blew and the white thing covering her was gone. Her face….the blood that had blinded her left eye was gone. The thing that she rested in was not soil, it was an enormous hand, one that she looked and saw was surrounded by many others on prodigiously long arms, each as long as it was. Then she looked up and saw fifty monstrous faces, some leering, some frowning, others with ear to ear grins of fanged teeth.
The giant that held her then turned north and blackness swallowed her, even as fear caused there to be a rumble from the being when ice dug into its flesh and produced a strange silvery substance…
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The servants had found her twitching and crying for Elsa, and her parents came in and yelled at her. They told her that she had killed her own sister, that she'd never see Elsa again. They didn't use that murderer word, but they might well as had. Her own sister, her dearest friend, and she was no more. What was she going to do?
It was a long and sleepless night in the palace that night. But as the Royal Family was asleep in the wee small hours of the morning on the night of a full moon, clear and cloudless, the snow that had fallen earlier that day calm and waiting, a strange wind began to howl and snow began to blow in a fashion like a blizzard. The howling awoke Anna, who cried and moaned her sister's name, and it awoke her parents who looked at each other in fear. It was a strange sound, the moreso because the moon still shone brightly on the snow, the stars in the heavens gazing down heedlessly on a white and quiet world.
A foul light arose in the midst of the blizzard, in the graveyard where the Kings and Queens of Arendelle were buried. It glowed a bright and sickly blue, almost as bright as the Sun. Night became day, roosters crowed, and the palace awoke. The wind howled now in a fashion almost cruel, beating at the doors of the palace, whistling under doors and making the inhabitants shiver. The light seemed to fade, and then the servants who were already awake and clutched swords crept up to the palace. It was strange, they reflected, that there almost seemed something like a mixture of ice and snow creeping through the floor, beneath the door and its frame, crawling up them in a sadistic fashion. As it did so, it seemed to form a hand and the door opened.
Screams stalked the palace, as a strange figure walked through it, heading toward Anna's door. As the screams said, "It's going for the princess!" the King and the Queen ran to her door, and wrapped their arms around her. The Queen's face was white, as she had seen…it. A strange and lilting sing-song voice echoed through the silent halls, shivering teeth, and whimpering courtiers:
"An-na, do you want to build a snowman? Come on let us go and play, I never see you any more. Come out of the door, it's like you've gone a-way," echoing in the palace. The cruel voice of winter danced here, in a strangely resonant fashion. It was as though countless voices and the winds of previous winters echoed in the silent palace.
"An-na, it's like you've gone away, we used to be best of buddies and now we're not. I wish you would tell me why? Do you want to build a snowman? It doesn't have to be a snowman?"
The thing stood before the Princess's door and knocked. It knocked with the force of snow falling from a roof.
"Come out, sister dear. You dashed my head against the rock, but I live anew. Come out, come out, let us play together."
If this had been Anna, the grave had already been unkind. The being that knocked seemed entirely constructed of a blue translucent ice that glowed in the moonlight, balefire eyes glowing from empty sockets. Her face was deformed, the lower jaw extending with vaguely fang-like teeth protruding, and an enormous bulby nose. Her hands were somewhat larger and her proportions somewhat simian. No ears were visible.
Elsa knocked.
"Do you want to build a snowman? It doesn't have to be a snowman!"
She knocked all the night, but in the morning she seemed to fade. The icy howling wind was gone, but cold burns were seared into the palace, cold burns in the shape of the feet of a young girl barefoot in the snow. White-faced, only Anna heard her soft response: "I want to build a snowman…"