Elsa woke up feeling wonderful. She and Hiccup had spent the previous two weeks decorating every part of the castle with rock shards from the cave. To her, it seemed even more beautiful than before, especially since, once they found some of the smaller fragments, a few no bigger than her fingernails, the designs had become much more intricate and crept up from the floor and onto the walls in many of the castle's rooms. The black sections of the stones highlighted the glittery parts and enhanced the ice by contrast as well. Thinking about the ice fragments made her shoot out of her bed. They were going scavenging again today; this time for fragments for the formal dining room, and she was going to let Hiccup design the patterns for it.

For all that her friend didn't have hands, give him a piece of firewood big enough to put in his mouth and a heap of soft snow or a dirt floor, and the dragon was suddenly an artist. When they'd worked on the lower half of her bedroom walls, he'd drawn the designs right onto the wall by scratching with one of his paws. She looked over at one of them now and smiled.

It wasn't the usual snowflake design or an intricate geometric shape motif. That one was a portrait of her, with only the color of the ice and the stones. Hiccup had used the smallest stone fragments he could find to trace the delicate fringe of eyelashes above her solid stone eyes, the sweep of her gown, and even the creases in her braid. The best part was her smile, mischievous with a hint of humor. How he caught all that with nothing but stone and ice, she would never know.

But the one next to it was her favorite. It was a picture of her and Hiccup together. She was holding his face close to her own, letting their foreheads touch. Her hair was even wilder than usual, but her face was soft, almost content, and even though he was a dragon you could tell Hiccup was smiling in the picture. She sometimes wondered where Hiccup had gotten the idea for the pose, since they never held each other like that. But it was still her favorite.

The picture put her in such a good mood that she decided not to play with Hiccup this morning and simply go wake her big scaly friend up. She descended one of the grand staircases, which now had a cut stone fragment in each step. They'd found that, if Hiccup landed hard enough on a stone, he could crack it right down the middle and give one side a smooth surface that integrated well with the steps. Besides, they were too small for anything but the daintiest designs and too thin to bear up under the stress of the lengthy inlaying process. That involved multiple blasting sessions.

The entryway hadn't changed much except for the floor, which now had a much more complicated star pattern embedded in the ice. They didn't want to mess too much with the castle's foundations, after all. But still, there was a large empty space in one of the walls where they might put something. Perhaps that would be tomorrow's project.

The conservatory was a completely different room. Stone chips crept up the walls like ivy and bloomed in daisies, irises, and bleeding hearts on the floor. There were ice-crafted bushes that had pieces where flowers would be and even a large tree where rocks replaced apples. It was much more beautiful than it would have been if it had held real plants, but she was biased.

This room had a hint of childishness to it as well. Tucked away in one of the corners was an area where a checkerboard design was inlaid into the floor. She stepped over the tiny chipmunks molded out of ice near the mock picnic blanket, admiring the stripe of fragments running down each one's back. A fawn with the same color of spots entered the scene from the other direction, accompanied by its mother and father. She brushed her hand over the fawn's back and fingered the father's rack. That had been tricky to make, since the ice had to be formed around the rock instead of the other way around, but it was quite a sight. The mother's only ornamentation was in her hooves, but she was beautiful nonetheless.

Elsa wished her parents, or even her sister could see this place now and enjoy this beautiful side of her powers. She missed them, terribly, although she wasn't as lonely as she had been before. Her thoughts jumped back to the portrait of her and Hiccup in her bedroom.

The picnic area had been his idea, born out of one of the stories he'd told her during lunch a few days before. She still remembered how hard it was for her to figure out what he wanted with only his body language and the occasional warble or moan. Finally, he'd grabbed a piece of firewood and sketched what he'd wanted in the dirt at her feet. She'd laughed at the idea, but they'd spent the rest of the day finding the right stone fragments and forming the animals, removing the floor pattern for the new inlay of stones, and then enjoying the fruits of their labor by eating dinner amongst the animals. It had been childish and she had loved it.

She was beginning to love the things Hiccup came up with more and more.

But for him to do that, he needed to be awake. So she left the small picnic scene to its animal inhabitants and continued through the conservatory and into his bedroom. This room was much like hers, because the inlaid fragments formed pictures instead of designs. But the only one Elsa recognized was the portrait of the two of them that matched the one she had in her room. Most of the people were shaped very oddly, looking too broad in the shoulders and with too short of legs. A few had massive horned helmets on. Perhaps the dragon had a liking for the Viking tribes up north?

But it wasn't the drawings that held her attention this morning. It was something else, or rather, the lack of something else. Hiccup was gone.

This chapter doesn't have much action, but I needed to write it. Hiccup's leaving his mark on the palace. The portrait with the two of them is the same as the cover art. Did I got overboard with the rock idea?

With a cliffhanger like that, you all probably want the next chapter soon. So, I'll post after ten reviews. Good Luck!