Chapter 9
"You're ready." Pitch had crept up behind Elsa. Goodness knows he'd been creeping up behind her for long enough that she didn't even flinch anymore. She'd gotten used to his shadowy ways in the past two hundred years. She no longer shuddered when he whispered in her ear, and no longer feared going to sleep leaving her world for the nightmares.
"Am I?" Elsa asked but she knew he was right. She could feel the power running along her nerves, fast and powerful and cold, with no hint of the strain it used to take. It came easily and in fact now she was having trouble again holding it back.
"Tonight the eclipse will block my old foe and you and I will begin our work. By the time that Old Man is able to see us again we will be too powerful to stop. Those meddling Guardians won't be able to stop me this time. The world will fall to fear again, and it will be all thanks to you." Pitch smiled carnivorously at Elsa and she smiled back. This was it, two hundred years of practice leading up to tonight. No one would ever be able leave her alone again. Everyone would know who she was and it would be perfect.
Though to Elsa it seemed only seconds had passed hours later the moon was rising and Pitch was once again standing beside her. He was rubbing his hands together maliciously and grinning at the full Moon. "Here it comes."
Elsa stared in wonder at the blue-silver moon as slowly a creeping dark circle covered it. She turned her pale face to Pitch and smiled, "Let's go." They set off in different directions. Pitch walked down the street, walking slowly until he seemed to expand, swirling nightmares and black sand exploded from each step and blew into the world. Elsa walked the other way, but a similar phenomenon occurred. She gained speed as she practically flew over the city, cold sweeping behind her, mixed with more of Pitch's fear sand. As the cold air blew into every child's bedroom through every open window or small crack under the door, the child shivered, curling up under their blankets but unable to escape the icy fear that crawled into their dreams.
Once upon a time Elsa had frozen Arendelle by accident, covering the land in winter. Now she did it again, not through cold and ice over every tree and flower but with a persistent cold that hung in the air, changing good thoughts to darkness when someone walked through. Elsa had been working on that with Pitch for decades. As he spread darkness in one direction and she spread cold in the other they mixed their powers. Cold became darkness and darkness began to freeze. Every time a child was touched, their heart was frozen.
They started where the eclipse was strongest and spread quickly. Elsa was freezing Manhattan when the first sign of trouble came. At first it seemed like a street light, but soon Elsa could see this was something different. In the black wake behind her, Elsa saw a light. It was gold and it was getting closer. Elsa spun to face it, summoning a veritable battery of ice covered snowballs.
Something gold and shiny came hurtling out of the darkness. Elsa ducked as a sparkling gold baseball whized past her head. A tiny glowing gold man, made out of sand, flew at her, chucking random sandcastles or other items made out of sand. She snorted, finishing them all off with a well aimed ice dagger. This was nothing.
And then a bunch of fairies started attacking her. Which of course, she froze easily with a blast of snow, confusing the fairies so that they bumped into each other, confused and bumbling around.
"My baby teeth!" a bigger fairy cried out, which Elsa presumed was Tooth. Pitch had debriefed her on all of the Guardians. "You're going to shatter their enamel, if you keep this up!" she cursed Elsa.
Elsa shrugged, carelessly deflecting the gold man's sand sculptures. Sandy, Elsa recalled.
"If only you were a nice person," Tooth tittered. "I really appreciate how white your teeth are."
"Thanks, but you're in my way," Elsa said softly, freezing another child's heart and implanting the name "Jack Frost" in the child's head as the reason for his future antipathy. She noticed that Sandy and Tooth both weakened a tiny amount in their efforts to stop her, which meant that Pitch's plan was working. Without the Moon to protect them, each loss of a believer would mean the difference of life and death to the Guardians.
She worked quickly, maintaining a shield against Sandy and Tooth's attacks while still freezing children's hearts. They had flown across several states when they hit Maine, where a gigantic Russian man used his ice picks to tear down her carefully constructed ice shields. It was hard, managing three foes and still striking fear into children's' hearts, but she had trained for this. Those countless hours fighting nightmares after nightmares made this look easy.
Eventually, she found the rendezvous with Pitch, noting the darkened sky and the blackness that surrounded the world. The Guardians were becoming weaker and weaker, and Elsa's job was merely becoming easier and easier.
