Feathers and Frost
I do not own Fire Emblem or any of its characters.
Eirika still could summon up the feeling of excitement she'd had as a child, when the frost-faeries painted their patterns on the nursery window. It only happened a few times a year, and each time the patterns were different- sometimes they looked like flowers, sometimes like ferns or feathers, and sometimes it seemed that strange butterflies clung to the glass with wings upraised, taking in the strengthening sun until they vanished.
There was not so much wonder in frost-patterns now, but she still did remember that feeling. Sometimes, she paused on her way to the chapel and looked up at the small arched windows in the gallery to see if any faeries had visited Castle Frelia in the night. What she saw most often was not delicate tracery, but something that looked more solid, like the translucent skin of a dragon stretched across the window, each scale alight in the dawn.
Frost was not frost from one end of Magvel to the other. Nor were the snows of Frelia the same snows that dusted Renais; here, she never saw the great clumps of white, like goose-down from a pillow, that drifted to earth with a tinkling sound, the sound of tiny glass bells. She had never known before that snow might take so many forms- small white granules like the sands of Jehanna that formed drifts as solid as the dunes, little star-shapes of intricate design that could be molded into perfect balls for throwing, transparent flakes that glittered in the moonlight and blew away at a breath. She had never known before that snow might be silent.
Winter in Frelia crept up like an assassin; she would realize with a start that the skies were growing dim at four hours past noon, that the snow heaped in the courtyard would swallow her to the waist, that the flagstones were coated with ice too subtle to see. She would draw in a breath and feel that the air was rushing out of her lungs rather than in, or that her eyes were turning to ice... which summoned up memories of Fimbulvetr and the horrors it could make of living flesh. And while she was given protection from the cold- stout walls and fragrant fires, pelts of seal and martin and ermine- the darkness was harder to bear. To have the sun not bright until ten in the morning, and gone entirely before five each evening... all the candles and bright lanterns and hearth-fires could not quite make up for the simple lack of sunlight. Eirika felt starved of light at times, like the white stalks of asparagus that could ever only turn a healthy green at their tips, when they burst free of their burial mounds.
She thought of that whenever pickled stalks of white asparagus turned up on her plate at dinner.
But if the brief days of winter seemed to cast a shadow on her soul, Eirika did learn to look upwards and see beauty in the night. The stars over Frelia glittered like gems on black velvet- white and red and rare sparkling gold. She had never seen them so bright in Renais, where a soft haze would drift across the valley skies at sunset. The silver moonlight worked enchantments with the ice, turning imprisoned saplings into figures of solid light. And in the darkest days, the longest nights, it seemed that some unseen artist would paint the horizon in color, lending to the darkness the green of summer fields, the red and yellow of autumn leaves, the rose and blue of spring wildflowers. The color flowed like waterfalls, undulated like fire, drifted like a banner in the heavens. Eirika would stare into it, seeing celestial castles and temples of light, another world revealed in the skies.
After the rapture of the winter night, she would see new wonders in the day- the brilliant blues and greens of the ice along the northern shores, the perfect line of pale yellow when the sun vanished on a glass-clear evening, the stark silhouettes of fir trees against the horizon. And that first glimpse of leaf-green breaking its way through the white crust of old snow was all the more precious, all the more welcome... all the more magical.
Winter crept up on Eirika and stole away a part of her, so that after ten winters in the land of white wings and silent snow, she could say with an honest heart, "I do belong here."
The End
A/N: Just a little piece I'd been kicking around for some time and wrote up for Meta Month after reading wolfraven80's musings on climate. I've moved around the U.S. a fair bit, so relocated characters (whether they relocate voluntarily as Eirika does here, or not) speak strongly to me.