PROLOGUE
Katerina never expected to see another world.
All she knew was that she could never dance. She knew she had no talent for ballet. Her older sister, Natasha, far surpassed her. She was jealous; she was not going to hide that fact, but she mostly spent her days dreaming of what could never be, rather than trying to show her sister up. Katerina loved her sister.
Then one day, something completely unexpected happened.
Katerina was wandering through the woods and found a pair of abandoned ballet slippers. They were pink, and just about her size. She suddenly felt a great longing – one that she could not explain at all.
The girl took a deep breath and took off her black Mary Janes. Then, she put on the pink shoes.
At once, she found herself standing perfectly on point, something she had never been able to do. The next second brought even more surprise, as she saw that the world around her had completely changed – she now stood in a beautiful garden next to a fountain, and a girl of fourteen with lavender hair stood beside the fountain.
Curious, Katerina approached her.
She gasped. Aside from the hair color, the girl looked exactly like she did! The girl looked surprised, too.
"You…look exactly as I do!" the girl told Katerina. "Except your hair, it's…brown, and mine –"
She seemed too shocked to continue.
Katerina then learned that the girl was named Kalmia. She also had an older sister, named Nieve. Kalmia was apparently a princess of the crazy land. She had beautiful pink ballet shoes just like Katerina's, and her tutu of sea foam green was embroidered with lovely yellow flowers. Upon her head she wore a crown of flowers.
Katerina and Kalmia quickly became friends. To her delight, Katerina found she could dance perfectly while in this land. She even met the reclusive Nieve, who didn't seem to happy to see her. There was one thing Katerina noticed about the older princess: she was as icy and cold as her sister was warm and cheerful. Nieve's tutu was ice blue, embroidered with snowflakes, and her hair was white, with a tiara of icicles woven into it. She somewhat reminded Katerina of her own sister, but Natasha wasn't nearly as cold as this.
Katerina kept the pink shoes with her, and when she began to grow out of them, Kalmia made her new ones. She even made pairs for Katerina's sister and friends, but none of them believed her. When Katerina grew up and began working as a seamstress at her sister's ballet studio, Kalmia gave her shoes of all sizes, so any student of hers could visit.
Though Katerina never did forget Kalmia, her attention was turned away from her and toward the ballet students. And one fateful day, in Kalmia's world, her sister Nieve became queen of the land, and ruled with a heart of ice. She locked her sister in the dungeons of her new ice castle, and froze anyone who didn't do what she wanted into a statue of ice.
However, not everyone believed Nieve to be a tyrant. Many snow faeries served her, and some of them saw her as just, for those faeries' hearts were as frozen as the Queen's. And one faery troop in particular adored her. Nieve had gone around the land to find young maidens who had been scorned by their lovers. She froze the young men and transformed the girls into immortal faeries. The girls, in gratitude, became Nieve's most loyal servants. Stories of them began to spread, and they came to be known as the Wilis.
The people of the land feared Nieve's reign would last forever. But, as fate would have it, the first rays of the dawn were breaking through the snowy night sky, though none noticed.
AN: A bit of trivia. "Nieve" is the Spanish word for "snow". "Kalmia" is a type of flower. The Wilis were originally ghosts of scorned women in the Giselle ballet (they've been changed since Giselle survives in this version).