The door to the castle's grand ballroom had been closed for so long that its hinges creaked with rust when Elsa pushed it. She shot a wary glance down the shadowy corridors to her left and right, but as expected, there was nobody in sight – everybody else was asleep. She might have been tempted by the idea of sleep herself, if she wasn't so excited about the night to come.
She poked her head tentatively through the small gap she had opened, before pushing the door a little further and allowing Dalli to follow her in. He too surveyed his surroundings before entering, and she heard him groan quietly as she walked further into the ballroom she once knew so well.
"It's too dark to see anything in here!" he whispered in disappointment. "Maybe this wasn't such a good idea – we won't be able to practise in the dark."
Elsa couldn't help but laugh gently at his puzzled expression, before walking calmly towards the light switch on the wall. She pushed the door shut, was still for a moment to check for any noise in the corridor, before flicking the stiff toggle.
For a few seconds, it felt as if her breath had been stolen from her body by the sight of the lit-up ballroom. She could feel her throat swelling with the threat of tears as the memories of this room flooded back into her mind, and she tried to disguise this emotion with coughing. Dalli noticed her reaction, but knew when to withhold his teasing, and so stayed silent a few paces away.
The ballroom was a vision of blue and gold, with a huge ceiling painted to represent the marriage of air and water that resulted in the famous North Mountains ice. Tiny pearls outlined the crest of each oily wave, and each gold column that lined the ballroom walls was engraved with little depictions of fjord waves. The floor, designed to support the feet of a thousand dancing lovers, was an amber patchwork of wood from all different areas of Arendelle. If Elsa looked closely at a particular part of the floor, she could have sworn that she saw a little scorch mark from Anna's accident all those years ago, but she told herself that she was just imagining it and looked up to Dalli.
They gazed at each other in silence, as if they were both waiting for the other to suggest an idea. "We've got this far," Elsa muttered eventually, holding her hands together anxiously – this was now much more than just a midnight meeting in her room. "Now what should we do?"
"We have to practise," Dalli resolved slowly. "That's what we came here to do, isn't it? We came here to practise controlling your powers on a large scale. And, well . . . this is about as large a scale as Arendelle could offer you."
"And what happens after tonight?" she snapped in response. She didn't mean to be harsh, but the memories from the ballroom and the sheer illegality of their presence there were making her nervous. "Do we just wait for fate to step in again?"
He frowned at her sudden change in mood, and walked a few paces closer to her. Neither of them had dared to venture into the centre of the ballroom yet – it felt too much like a stage, and the last event involving Elsa's powers that had taken place here was an unforgettable tragedy. "Visions will not always be around to guide us, Elsa, but I know that this is right. I know that fate brought us together to do this."
"You always say that!" she exclaimed in a voice louder than she had intended.
Dalli gestured with a hand that she should keep her voice down, as he was still an intruder in this part of the castle and she was still at risk of being caught by her parents. "I trusted the vision that told me to go to you, and you got out of your room for the first time in ten years. I trusted my instincts and asked to help you control your powers, and you said yourself last night that you've never had so much control over them before. Now, I'm asking you to trust me, and practise for a little longer. Good things will come – I can feel it."
She frowned doubtfully. "We sneak out at night and we have fun, Dalli, but now that we're in here . . . it feels too real. It feels like this isn't just a game anymore."
"It was never a game to me, Elsa." He took a deep breath, and moved backwards slowly, until he was stood in the middle of the room. The memories of Anna, flying from snow pile to snow pile in the dead of night, rushed back to her head and made her feel dizzy. "I came here to help you, and that's what I intend to do. Let's practise."
"You're sure that practising here will help me?" she asked in a trembling voice, hands lingering over her stomach as she gently flexed her fingers in preparation.
He smiled. "I'm sure. If you can control them here, you can control them in front of the kingdom."
After a further moment of hesitation she nodded, and began to spin her arms round in a clockwise motion, just as they had rehearsed in the nights before. This, she realised, was their eighth night of secret meetings – the strange mix of emotion that poured through her at that thought seemed to spread into her fingertips, as the storm she was building doubled in size. She was tempted to draw it in now, when it was still spinning between her palms and manageable in size, but a glance from Dalli told her to keep building it up.
As the ice ball grew beyond her hands, a light sprinkle of snow began to fall over them. "Focus on what you want your powers to do," he added in a quiet voice. She bit her lip as she concentrated on making the storm swell. The snowfall worsened, and the flakes became visible as they twirled around her hands, a layer beginning to build up on the ballroom floor.
This was as large as Elsa had ever willed a storm to grow, but she continued to whirl the tundra around in the air until it had almost filled the whole room. The snowfall was so heavy that it had buried their feet and though she saw Dalli shiver in the corner of her eye, she was so concentrated on maintaining the development of the storm that she didn't give it a second thought.
At last, it reached the size she had intended; the wind howled softly as the layer of snow around their feet built. The snowflakes were now so large that she could barely see Dalli through the whiteout, and she had to shout to be heard by him. "What next?" she asked, continuing to move her hands in parallel to maintain the tundra.
"Wind it back in!" he commanded through chattering teeth.
Elsa began tentatively to move her hands in the other direction. She had practised this difficult motion before and had earned her success after many attempts, but this storm was worryingly larger than any she had ever created, and her fingers were trembling with anxiety. The movement of her hands was not working.
"It's not working!" she yelled out to Dalli over the howling of the storm. She cast a frantic glance towards the shut doors behind her, fearful that the sound of the raging tempest might awaken others. "Dalli, what should I do?"
He saw her panic and waved his hands in circular motions, as if he might suddenly inherit her powers and be able to save the situation for her. They had never seen a storm spin out of control on this scale – before, the relatively small balls of ice she had made simply burst into a flurry of snow. This was no longer just a small ball of ice.
She imitated his actions, but still, the storm raged on. If anything, the snowfall was heavier with the swirling of her hands, and the layer of snow on the floor was now approaching her knees. She could see Dalli shaking with the cold as he desperately tried to shout suggestions at her.
It's going to happen again. The terrifying thought struck her suddenly as she caught Dalli's eyes, and saw the fear rising behind his brave persona. My powers are going to hurt someone again. It was enough to draw an alarmed cry from her lips as she watched the huge tundra fill the room. The situation was out of her hands now – there was nothing she could do but watch as her powers brought the world around her to splinters and ashes.
"No!" she exclaimed as the words filled her head. The shout was too weak to be heard over the howling of the storm, and so she repeated it a little louder. "No! It's not out of my hands! It's not!" Once again, her words were lost to the storm. She repeated them in a long howl of her own, raising her hands above her head in wild desperation. "It's not!"
For a second, the room was absolutely silent.
The wind died down around her. The snow began to thin, each flake melting in the air as it floated on the remainder of the breeze towards the ballroom floor. The ball of ice, with a little encouragement from the waving of her fingertips, shrunk back into itself until it was a silent bubble pathetically bobbing on the wind in front of her. Almost as suddenly as it had spun out of control, the tempest had died, and they were left in shock under the quiet snowfall.
Elsa took a moment to inspect the ballroom, which seemed to have evaded damage. Her eyes marvelled at the sight of every pristine column and the flawless painted ceiling – was it possible that there would be no consequences from the near-catastrophe that had just played out before them?
The thoughts were snatched from her mind as she glanced over to Dalli, expecting him to share in her incredulous joy. At first glance, he seemed to be standing still, just looking at her in silence; when she took a few paces towards him, she realised that he was trembling quite violently.
"Dalli!" she cried as she rushed through the blanket of snow to him. He was wearing winter clothes in preparation for the storm, but they were little use against a blizzard of that size, and he was unresponsive when she wrapped her arms around him. She rubbed her palms swiftly against the flat of his back in the hope of spreading some warmth into his bones. "Dalli, I'm so sorry."
With a few minutes of this, the trembling began to ease. His arms began to stretch again as his body recovered from the extreme cold – for a moment, Elsa feared that she might have to find the family doctor at this hour of the night to treat him, but he seemed to be only shaken by the ordeal. "Elsa," he whispered in a hoarse voice, still too weak to speak properly.
"I should have been more careful," she muttered as she clung to him, still rubbing his back. "I should never have let the storm get to that size."
Slowly, she felt Dalli's arms wrap themselves around her back. He leaned his head back from the embrace to look at her worried gaze. "The cold never bothered me," he managed to utter. She couldn't contain the relieved giggles that came from her mouth as she watched his face stretch into a faint smile.
She opened her mouth to respond, but Dalli had already leaned his head forwards abruptly so that his lips met hers. They stood there for a few moments, surrounded by the falling snow, locked in what felt like a timeless embrace.
From the doors of the ballroom, Anna held a hand over her mouth to hold in a gasp. She had risen from her bed at the sound of a rushing storm, which awoke a distant memory within her that she felt compelled to investigate. When she reached the ballroom, the storm had just ended, but she had peered in just in time to catch the servant whose frozen body was wrapped up in the arms of the sister she barely knew.
It was not this that brought the gasp to her lips though. No, the thing that had captured Anna's attention was the storm that Elsa had somehow tamed and brought to an end, right in the middle of the castle ballroom. How could that be possible – and why did it feel so familiar?