Johanna
The goblins are gone. I can feel their shapes moving down the mountainside, but I leave them be. The snow around them falls softly, and I have no desire to kill them. In fact, I've decorated the mountain with gentle flurries and beads of ice that cascade softly from trees, bending the branches towards the ground like crystalline weeping willows.
The goblins won't notice, of course. They have no eye for such things. But I will know that my mountain is beautiful. My heart is so light that it hurts and I have to press it down.
I've never liked memories. They are too strongly tied with emotions. Still, the ones that I let myself have are most often of Julian.
Julian's eyes were bright green, the color of the grass on the hillside. He loved summer days and sword fights and ice skating, but he loved me most of all.
Julian was the youngest son of the Palace Cook, two years older than me. We grew up together, running through the palace halls, getting in the way of servants, exploring those secret corridors that only children know. Sometimes my insufferable cousins, Sonja, Ivan, and Ida, would tag along, but mostly we outran or out-hid them. Those were our times, Julian's and mine.
I'm not sure when exactly our feeling for each other grew up. It seemed to happen overnight. The first time Julian kissed me, we were sitting on the branch of a pear tree at the edge of the palace orchard. I was so startled I froze the whole tree. Ice swept over the branches and crept into the leaves, weaving through their veins like a white lace. Julian laughed and plucked a frozen pear blossom from its stem. He tucked it behind my ear.
"It suits you," he said. "You'll be a snow princess."
"I'll be a snow queen," I corrected him.
"My mistake." He laughed and kissed me again. Those were happy times, when I believed in love.
Everyone said Julian would make a fine king consort someday. The fact that he was a cook's son didn't bother them. Arendelle-Ciera was fond of its royalty marrying for love. It was well-known that my Aunt Anna had married an ice salesman from Lapland. Queen Elsa and King Frederick married for political reasons, but Queen Elsa confided in me that she would never have married him if she hadn't known she would come to love him.
"And I do love him," she said. "Very much."
These are the idiotic ideas I grew up with. Love was touted as if it were the be-all end-all of existence. The goblins tell me this is still the case today. My stupid sixteen-year-old cousin, Ida, has just married a blacksmith's son from Ciera because she loved that he was so much cleverer than her. Honestly, it does not take much to be cleverer than Ida.
Julian and I were more practical. We decided to wait until we were eighteen to marry. We wanted to spend some time living our lives before settling down into being happily ever after.
As if living happily ever after had anything to do with real life.
A/N – I kind of have a crush on Julian. Just sayin'. :p Thanks for reading!