We do not own 'Frozen' or any of its characters.
"Frozen Again: 'Faith, Hope, and Love"
Act III
Chapter 52
"Beware the Frozen Heart"
Dread. Complete and utter dread.
Elsa clutches her mother's thin palm in her own ice cold trembling ones. As they both gaze through the coach window to the archipelago below, both women can't help but be gripped by some foreboding unseen force named Fear.
As Eugene directs the Snow Queen's flying carriage towards the Lofoten peninsula to land on the shore, the two Queens of Arendelle warily exchange a look of uncertainty and trepidation.
The trail of haunting devastation, death and destruction at their first glimpse of the fishing village of Å surveyed told of the fierce struggle that had taken place here. Lining the coastline were numerous broken bodies amidst the structural debris of smashed red cabins that were splattered with innocent blood.
And the melting frozen ice intermingled with the crimson stains strikes fear in the aghast eyes of those who arrive on the terrorized scene.
"Papa?!" Impulsive Anna was, as usual, the first to verbally react. With worry for her missing Papa obvious on her anxious features, the young girl dashes out from the carriage just as it touches ground.
Tripping over first Rapunzel's, then her own feet as she rushes out recklessly, Anna nearly falls flat on her face had Kristoff's strong arm not caught hold of the back bustle of her skirt from where he was behind her in the coach.
The reinvigorated mountain man, thanks to Queen Idun's healing skills, now silently uses his massive arm muscles to easily straighten his clumsy wife up. He then, like her faithful dog, follows Anna's mad dash towards the crushed and bloodied melee where she prayed her beloved father was not lying as victim among.
"Rapunzel! Don't look." A serious stare overtakes his normally jovial features as Flynn leaps from his front driver's seat post to shield the view of the devastating scene from his queasy wife, whom the smallest amount of blood nowadays caused her to compulsively heave.
And this was no small amount of blood.
But it was too late. Rapunzel's big wide eyed stare had already taken in the unsightly gore. Although the Princess of Corona considered herself a pretty tough cookie, she still was compassionate enough to have tears immediately fill her eyes as she clutches her upset stomach.
"Oh, Eugene, these poor people. This is terrible." The cropped short brown haired girl whispers and weeps into his stubbly neck as her husband holds his tender flower with the tightly closed eyes close.
Fortunately, Kristoff's long strides beat Anna there by few steps, and he covers her eyes with one large hand. He himself was so disgusted by the disembodiment of several bodies strewn on the beachfront path that big man Kristoff had a hard time looking.
However, Princess Anna was a ginger, and a tomboyish one at that. Yanking herself away from his guarded palm, Anna runs right into the gory bloodsoaked scene and rifles through the wreckage in search of survivors like a crazed wild child.
For the sight of innocent people's blood and guts and gore after they had been slaughtered didn't make this young girl want to shy away or weep.
No, it made her want to scream out a war cry.
Although, it appeared that her demure, ladylike, reserved elder sister was about to outdo her one in this department, if the scary look on Elsa of Arendelle's face peering through the carriage window was of any indication.
"Aww. This poor guy was trying to save his little birdy." Olaf had stumbled out to where that elderly fisherman in the first demolished rorbu cabin near the shore had stubbornly held his position.
And paid the ultimate price.
The snowman, who often viewed the world's most simple unnoticed things with childlike innocence, saw how the wrinkled old man had sentimentally sacrificed his own aged form to free his only companion in the world, his pet puffin. Its birdcage had obviously been knocked down in the small cabin behind the bed when the Draugen's weighty form reverberated and shook the once peaceful shores.
The bird's mangled cage door was still clutched in the brave old man's deceased hand that was yet reaching out to get the trapped puffin to safety through the cracked open window. Even as the old mariner was smashed dead himself beneath the roof, he proved his love for his pet friend was greater than self.
"Keep it together, Elsa. You have to keep it together…" Leaving her exhausted mother with Rapunzel in the carriage, Elsa mumbles under her increasingly growing uncontrolled frosty breath upon witnessing this traumatic havoc close up.
Elsa begins to shiver violently as she forces her wild eyes to silently follow the traces of her Papa's cryokinetic pathway course that had frosted the summer weather's ground with the unseasonal ice crystals she recognized all too well.
Tracking the ice path to Olaf's waving call, Queen Elsa looks up from her purposely focused pursuit of melted ice shards and frozen chunks strewn over the beach. She, all at once, is forced to examine Lofoten's devastated fishing village valley, and fear grips her chilled heart.
Elsa's guarded eyes begin to quiver with extreme alarm at the grotesquely disfigured bodies of men, especially when she realizes that the trail of ice her Papa obviously emitted earlier, perhaps in some struggle, came to a disturbing full halt here, though there was no living being in sight now.
Papa? Elsa's shivering gaze alights upon the pair of dismembered and impaled middle-aged men who had been crushed in the road. There was a certain pale blue handkerchief covered humanely over one of the eviscerated men's eyes, as if mercifully placed there over the one eye that had been cruelly gashed out by the vindictive monster's pointed sharp seaweed vines.
It was the same pale blue handkerchief she herself had obtained as part of Kommander Westergaard's naval uniform ensemble just days ago.
Papa… Prince Hans… Where are you?! Have you been killed by this monster, too? Not when we just got you back! …Not when we've only just begun…
Her mind races with ungovernable passions as Elsa watches with horrified eyes her little sister's knelt down fervent hunt through the dirty and bloodied rubble. Anna had, just then, turned over a cracked beam of wood where a familiar white naval issue glove that only would belong to a high-ranking Norwegian officer such as her Papa lay, wet and cold and ripped and snagged on a splintered crossbeam with blood all over it.
Shaking back tears as she meets Elsa's eyes wildly and clutches the glove tight, Anna then fiercely continues to dig with her hands through the demolished debris.
Dread. Uncertainty. Fear.
And just like before, these unkempt refractory emotions begin to pervade the Ice Queen's senses as Elsa starts to lose her battle with the subzero cold emanating from inside her emotionally drained body.
At the massive pile of rubble where Papa's ice trail ended by the string of red cabins lying in ruins along the coast, Kristoff arrives to help Anna lift the bigger beams. Together the newlyweds sift through the chaos for hope of finding survivors.
But they were going too slowly for the impatient Ice Queen.
Overwhelmed, Elsa raises her hands, her ice frosting over the landscape with an eerie bluish light.
Piece by shattered piece, stick by cracked and broken stick, the decimated buildings begin to be lifted by Elsa's cryokinetic powers. She hurls the debris into the sea with such venom and verve that a watchful Kristoff has to physically pluck Anna away from the spectacle lest she be caught up in her sister's unintended frenzied ice turbulence.
"Elsa! Stop! Don't lose it now!" Pressed to the warmth of Kristoff's protective bare chest, Anna cries out to her best friend. Although, through the furiously flurried ice storm that was overriding all sounds of the beachfront, it was hard to hear her little sister's high musical strains.
"Please listen, my little princess!" Against the sudden ice storm, Queen Idun too calls out to her elder daughter to heed their calming. The small framed little woman tries to leave the carriage with Eugene's quick aid when Elsa doesn't seem to hear them.
For Idun, more than anyone, was very much aware of how Elsa's hard fought for control was dwindling in the chaos of the dread and anxiety her mother too shared for her Papa and fellow countrymen.
"But Papa! Hans! Where are they?!" The unstable, fearful young woman, physically trembling, gazes around the scene of utter devastation in search of some stability. And she secures some in Anna's suddenly big bright toothy smile.
"Elsa! Look up there!" Jubilantly reassuring her beloved sister, as Scuttle salutes while he zooms past her head to reaffirm, Anna sings out loudly above the din of the blizzard, after Kristoff had passed onto her whispered ear what the poor old fisherman's indeed rescued puffin birdy friend mentally told him of. The adorably plump black and white, orange beaked seabird now hovering near the blond Ice Harvester had managed to fly into the bitter cold whipping winds to inform the Wind Whisperer of the Ice King's epic battle with that awful Bielgomai just over the summit of the 3000 foot high peaked mountainside.
High upon Mt. Reinebringen's high-altitude mists, Elsa squints her shielded eyes in the dusky midnight sun's departing rays to glimpse the silhouettes of two tall slender men, who wore the Norwegian naval uniform well. They appeared to be standing with triumphant looks on their faces as they reviewed their defeated enemy trapped in the ice of the mountain lake below.
And all at once, her icy fury swirling around the uncertain fear that was gripping Elsa's heart is contained and her panic driven ice verglas coating the entire beachfront suddenly ceases.
"Agdar." Idun lets out a relieved pent-up sigh as her acting bodyguard/human crutch Flynn Rider lets out a victorious whoop.
"Whoo-wee! Look at them boys showing off up there! Let's get this show on the road before those two well coiffed gents get all the glory, eh, Muscles?" The blustery thief scoops up Queen Idun's petite frame and winks over her dark brown head to the other young would-be hero of this adventurous tale they've all been unwittingly thrust into.
And whose fault was that, exactly? Eugene's mind was even talkative to himself as he carries the Queen's frail form back to the carriage for him to play conductor of again.
Guilty as charged. Meeting his wife's ever forgiving eyes, Eugene lets that minute amount of self culpability creep in.
But we wouldn't have been graced with this lovely Lady's presence had I not momentarily delved back to my thieving ways – albeit for the best reasons – in a roundabout way, would we?
As the older woman gives a tender appreciative smile up at her very self-satisfied, with an exaggerated sense of self-worth, nephew, who was in actuality just a few years her junior, Eugene smoothly places Queen Idun back into the coach with Job's gentle aid.
Although woozy Rapunzel, being fanned by Pascal with a rolled up map had become rather ill at the sight of all the mayhem of blood outside her carriage door, indeed, she and her aunt share a hopeful relieved hug at spotting her uncle and new brother still in one piece after their struggle with that hundred foot plus tall monster.
As Kristoff ushers Anna onto Svala's eager back alongside Sven beside the Snow Queen's vehicle to join her victorious father atop the mountain, Elsa doesn't need to wait for a ride.
The young ruler was elated to see that her dear Papa, whom she feared lost, was again standing tall and strong. On her own ice projected slick, the nearly frozen over Ice Queen glides upward at incredible speed to meet up with her brave and beloved father.
Not to mention that significant other who was dutifully serving as the King's supportive right hand man as Hans Westergaard pledged to her he would.
Behind Elsa's throbbing eyes pounded the nagging thought that he too could have been killed. The idea of never seeing Prince Hans of the Southern Isles again, never hearing his velvety voice lilt her name or smile those absinthe eyes on his unbelievably beautiful face was too hard to bear in ways Elsa never thought herself capable of before…
Elsa swiftly gains altitude on her ice powered slide towards where Papa and Hans were waiting for her. As they start to make their way on their own flying white horses over the frozen lake to meet the impatient young woman welcoming them halfway, King Agdar eyes his little princess' bold new icy attire guardedly, almost wishing to cover young Westergaard's eyes again at now this daughter's low-cut, showing-too-much-skin display.
"Papa! I've brought something you'll need!" Unaware of her proper father's stuffy discomfort as he sees her Ice Queen vixen dress for the first time, Elsa sings out, glad that her parent and her…Vise Admiral…had vanquished the terrifying beast whose evil black eyes still haunted her psyche…
And as the unawares trio soars through the dusky August sky nearer to one another above the frozen mountain lake, something beneath the waters begins to stir…
CCR-RAAC-CCKK!
Through the eighteen inch thick hoarfrost coat that Ice King Agdar had entombed the Draugen within, the monstrosity's jutting out frozen clawed hand audibly cracks and breaks a hole through to reach its depravity into the high-altitude stillness.
The intense fear and doubt and uncertainty of dread poor Elsa had felt before when she believed her father and lover lost, had already revitalized the symbiotic creature enough for it to be fueled by her fear still linked to its hungry greed, and awaken to life.
Her petrified terror maximizing before Elsa had the chance to register what was about to happen all about her, a pair of the Draugen's long dark green wicked haptera tentacle vines, unexpectedly and rapidly splurt out of the frozen mountain lake.
They zero in on the platinum blonde who is frozen in place like a deer in the headlights as the beast starts to feast on her fear again…
GRR-RROOWWLL! The deafening scream of the old sea ghost monster paralyzes Elsa in place as it moves in to capture her again.
"Elsa! Get back!" King Agdar orders his grown-up little girl as he sends a sub-zero direct blast at the creature's head. Although mighty, the King's attack falls uselessly upon the dark ilky green mass that seems to just draw on his cryokinetic powers.
The massive monster's other ilky tentacle continues to reach straight up for a screaming in panic Elsa. One evil vine shatters through her ice formed ramp slide, sending the Ice Queen plummeting down in chaotic spirals through the thin mountain air.
Tasting its conquest, the rest of the humongous creature starts to emerge from its frozen entrapment below, hungry to feed on the current young Queen's ready fears that were linked to her vast energies again.
The yet half frozen and immobilized Draugen anxiously awaits gravity below to catch Elsa in its regrown appendage and never let go again until she was drunk dry…
"My Snow Angel!" Protective father Agdar's incessant fierce attacking ice shots only seem to dissipate into the absorbing Draugen's scaly skin, just as young Prince Hans had warned him before, as the shrewd older Naval man moves in, undaunted.
"Stay away from my daughter, Jol!" So, heroic, self-sacrificing Agdar boldly rushes towards the Draugen in the only way he could. After building a precipitous snow cloud pillow beneath Elsa to ensure a soft landing that drifts her away, Agdar takes his daughter's place midair just moments before she was to be seized in the wicked creature's grasping hand.
The algal seaweed, instead of being rewarded by Elsa's weak fears in its clutching energy-draining claws, it is repelled by Agdar's confident strength. The dissatisfied sea monster angrily grabs and thrashes the King as it smacks him right off his whinnying horse at such bone-crunching velocity that a traumatized Agdar bangs his head hard against the rocky mountain crags and sinks down its rocky slope lifelessly.
The Ice King's knocked-out-cold, gnashed, and thrown aside senseless body rolls over the Mt. Reinebringen lake ledge and down the hillside back towards the village of Å below.
Fortunately for the distressed, downed King, his capable new Vise Admiral did still have his back, battered though it may be, as Hans Westergaard, upon his own flying steed, makes a daring selfless serpentine dive. He deftly directs his mare to avoid the killer vines mere feet in between the gigantic Draugen's numerous googling out eyes and thick haptera algal weeds to deftly catch a floating-like-an-angel-on-her-soft-snowcloud Elsa in his wiry arms.
As golden enchanted arrows run interference, being lobbed from a certain reliable mountain man somewhere beneath, Hans makes an intrepid getaway with the dizzied blonde on his lap until his galloping mind could fashion a more advantageous plan of action against the awakened beast.
All he understood for certain was that he must somehow keep this pure angel of beauty in his arms safe, as well as protect her father and country that he now proudly swore to protect.
"Hans? But where is Papa?" Glancing around for her missing patriarch across the mountain bend's deep abyss they were flying over as she groggily comes to, Elsa's body suddenly grows stiff and rigid when she spots Agdar's crumpled form over the edge at the precarious base of the mountain ledge. There Anna and Kristoff were trying their best to lift the bloodied and bruised and broken boned King onto Sven's back without harming his pitiable beat-up form further.
"Oh no! Papa!" Elsa cries out in agony, prompting Hans, who was already on his way, to bring her to her father's woefully injured side, to the place where the poor King was tossed aside like a limp ragdoll.
As Hans gentlemanly helps her from the flying horse, Elsa kneels at her father's terribly wounded body, breathing hard and heavy.
When she sees how badly hurt and unresponsive her Papa was, Elsa starts to shake and totally freeze up, her livid anger overruling her fear.
With a few words between men, Hans and Kristoff together decide to lift the Arendelle King onto Sven's back rather than have him exposed out here, should the rapacious sea monster emerge from the remainder of its captivity under the cracking glacial lake before healing help arrived.
Which is exactly what happens.
Somehow the huge creature born of pure darkness and hatred had slunk through the growing Midnight Sun nighttime shadows to not only surface from the cracking up frozen lake, but emerge from the gloom directly above them.
Like a vindictive inky storm cloud, the Draugen's growling shadow looms overhead just a second before either of the two couples below on the rock ledge busy with attending to the injured King, see it.
So when the Draugen's sharp spiky vine stealthily moves in towards Elsa's vulnerable back to either attack or kidnap her away with it again, at least one person does perceive.
"Snow Angel!" When the Draugen's greedy energy sucking sleep-rendering tentacles were mere inches away from claiming defenseless Elsa again, injured King Agdar somehow manages to lift himself up from where Hans, Kristoff, and Anna had been placing the King carefully on Sven's back.
And with a last spout of pure adrenaline energy, Agdar throws his battered body in front of a startled Elsa. In one fluid movement, the courageous King yanks his child roughly behind his defensive back, passing his shocked and flustered little girl to Hans before she is violently grabbed by the seaweed tentacle.
The lionhearted King of Arendelle, the Supreme Admiral of the Sjoforsvaret, the loving devoted Father of Elsa and Anna, stands valiantly tall in in his child's place.
"Jol! Stop this! I swear to give myself up to you if you vow to cease this avarice rapacity for my innocent baby girl's pure vitality! Feed off my more mature energy, not hers, Jol! Let her go and leave my nation in peace!" Ignoring any physical pain and future torment for the sake of the ones he loves, Agdar selflessly takes several steps towards the Draugen's extended poisonous seaweed and opens his arms wide. With his blue grey tunic billowing upon the frosting winds, he freely offers his extensive controlled ice powers for the energy feeding creature to feast upon in his Elsa's place.
"Elsa, I always believed you would be strong like this someday. Your Papa is so proud of you, my Snow Angel. Keep being strong for our country. Keep being strong in your heart." The King pets the crown of his pale blonde daughter's hair lovingly.
"Give your Mama all my love. And know I am so proud of you and Anna both. Please, don't waste a worry on me, my darlings. God will assuredly help me defeat this beast for my country and the people I love, if it be His will." His final conscious whispered words were for his family and his great faith as, seeing no other way, Agdar lets his guard down and opens up his stored energy reserves to allow the quietly growling in consent Draugen to gorge upon the Norwegian Ice King's vast untapped powers clutched in its hand.
The sea monster starts to grow with Agdar's rarely exploited ice energies as its offered new feeding source. The foul green-black slimy sea creature continues to develop until the nefarious ghost monster was towering upon Mt. Reinebringen.
But the soulless pirate had no intention of honoring his end of the deal and cease its gluttonous symbiotic relationship with Elsa either, in its lust for ultimate power.
"PAPA!" Elsa was crying fierce tears of love and pride for her courageous father's self-sacrifice, just for her. So much so that she finally is able to break the Draugen's hold over her fears herself in her raw anger, now that her Papa was keeping it busy.
Little Princess Elsa never realized before how much her strict parent loved her. Papa so loved her that he would readily give up his own life and freedom in exchange for his little girl who had been so problematic growing up that she always believed herself a shameful burden to him.
But no, Papa was proud of her.
And that knowledge, coupled with Prince Hans Westergaard's sure arms around her, not to mention her own angry sense of justice where this vile criminal degenerate was concerned, gave Queen Elsa of Arendelle all the encouragement she needed to be the Ice Queen she was intended to be.
"No! Papa! Don't!" Elsa argues the point as her heroic, in-charge, self-sacrificing father presses his surprised and flustered little girl behind his back with the unspoken command in his stoic eyes to his second in charge to keep his child subdued and safe.
Hans takes a deep breath and nods, placing both hands on Elsa's violently trembling shoulders to both steady and restrain her.
Perplexed to know how to respond to this terrible situation, Anna looks over to Elsa who was too upset herself to afford her scared little sibling a glance. Anna then turns to beseech her Kristoff, biting her lip until it bled in worry for her selfless, altruistic, chivalrous Papa. He, too at a loss, the Ice Harvester shakes his head. Being a protective father was a new and novel thing for the orphan boy he'd have to configure for himself someday.
"YOU MONSTER!"As her father's body, already injured and continuously being drained, falls to his knees limply right in front of the helpless girl, Elsa's blue eyes widen as her pupils start to dilate to an icier shade of white.
Exploding with infuriated anger that exceeds her great fear, Elsa's already daring Ice Queen dress undergoes another transformation. The cerulean and icy blue slinky gown expands into a rather imposing, yet still skintight formfitting design. Wide ice layered spiked shouldered armor is mentally formed on some artistic level along with a feathered and bejeweled ice diamond headdress that mirrored the warrior Vikings who ruled her country nearly 1000 years long ago to crown her head.
Elegant, yet striking, Warrior Ice Queen Elsa's maddened enraged eyes glow with icy hoarfrost as her unleashed powers explode and viciously send ice shards like sharp switchblades flying through the air in every direction.
With fearful, panicked eyes transmuted into irate, angry ones, the unstoppable frozen force that was once calm, decorous Queen Elsa, becomes possessed by her terrified frozen heart. Arrogantly assured, she stomps her even higher heeled, quite fetching thigh-high tight iridescent icy white boots across the mountain lake surface of the water straight towards the Draugen until the massive sea creature was cornered again on the mountain shelf ledge by her pure ice fury.
Elsa's frosted over ears could no longer even hear anything but the pounding of her own frozen heart's echo chamber for the long dangling tinkling bell-like earring cuffs that had delicately shaped around her ears.
"You want a piece of me, you vile contemptible degenerate?! Here! TAKE IT!" Elsa believed her beloved father just granted back to her was being enslaved and painfully exploited until the weakened King on his knees would be killed by this depraved merciless monster.
So, from being frightened to becoming frightening, Elsa's cold dispassionate rage takes shape all around her piqued wrath physically.
Frigid spiked adornments of long crystalline ice gems hang from her chaotic blonde hair spreading out in every direction of her messy, loosed braid. Her many layered draping palest blue armored skirt and matching headdress were brilliant with clear diamond and sapphire obelisk jewels that shone like the aurora borealis itself.
Everything about this new Warrior Ice Queen made her almost too blinding to behold. From her five inch high glassy heels to the tip of her extremely large and faceted pointed high marquis stone crystal adorning the center of her headdress crown.
Terrifying in her cold ice rage as the high heeled woman drives the vicious beast away, the unleashed Ice Queen shoots ice blast after unforgiving ice blast at the creature back towards the mountain lake, until its seaweed-y physical hold over her Papa is overwhelmed and King Agdar is freed.
And without her fear to help refuel it, the Draugen begins to shrink back to its original size, no longer able to sustain itself in this freshwater lake environment for much longer.
The Draugen seemed to need the salt of the sea to survive, especially after being persecuted by such unremitting opposition such as this vicious Ice Queen on the warpath.
So the fearsome Draugen hightails it like a yellow bellied chicken back down the mountain it climbed to dive with a splash into the sea, rather than face she who wouldn't be challenged at the crest of the peak.
The entire lake mountain shelf was instantly covered in thick snows as ice exuded from her every pore—and that included Elsa's frost coated heart that was normally moderated, but now was growing chaotic and unregulated. It was turning more glacially cold until the subzero temperature had nearly eaten away any vestige of warmth left within, leaving only the smallest speck of the human heart remaining…
Anna gasps as her orangey head peeks over the mountain ledge to see what was going on up there with Elsa after they had seen the Draugen her sister was attacking take flight to the sea. The temperature all around had dropped like a rock everywhere as sleet and ice poured over the mountain edge, alerting the younger princess that something was amiss.
"Whoa! The weather is getting a little too turbulent up here, Princess! Better take cover!" Scuttle the seagull had made it up the mountain to join Anna, just to be blown back down with his new puffin friend. The birds spin their flapping wings in a flurry of frozen currents like a pair of out of control salt and pepper shakers in a whirlwind of frost.
"Elsa! Don't let the cold snuff out love's sunshine we've found together! Don't let the ice take over the warm person you are! You're stronger than that!" Shaking her determined head, Anna climbs up as she cries out. But she was not too sure if her sister's all-but-vanished pupils of her iced over blue-white eyes even heard her words that were lost on the howling winds Anna doggedly continued to fight against just to gain footing.
Seeing the dire situation above with his quick decision-making precise eyes, Prince Hans leaves the wounded, comatose Agdar to Kristoff and climbs up to rush in front of a storm tossed, yet unrelenting Anna. He selflessly stretches the arms of his Arendelle grey cloak out to shield the feisty spirited loving little sister as brave Anna scrambles up over the mountain ledge to help her adored sibling calm down.
Making a sourpuss face at Hans that plainly screamed:'I can do this by myself!' Anna runs straight towards the ice storm blizzard trying to make her way to Elsa, without his rejected shielded aid. But finally the stubborn girl who weighed no more than 43 kilograms, is caught by the gale force wind and pushed by the hailing flurry over the edge, despite Hans' best efforts in trying to catch her from falling.
Those torrential winds blow Anna right off the mountainside until Kristoff's strong arms snag her flailing form from going over the edge entirely, and a grasping out Hans sighs in relief.
He then turns back to face a self-destructive Elsa alone with a new determination.
"Elsa! You have to listen to your sister! Please! That monster will never own you if you don't allow the fear to consume you! Remember:'There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love." (1 John 4:18 ) Using all his strength to focus volume to his cracking, strained voice, Hans quotes the New Testament, with all the elocution his projected tenor could carry.
Hans stands up against the roaring whipping wind blizzard conditions that had already covered the mountaintop with over five inches deep of fresh snow powder that emanated from the Ice Queen's incensed, out of control body in sparse minutes of time.
"Leave me alone!" Elsa rebelliously cries out as she tosses her long icy mantle cape over her shoulder at him, dismissive, cold and unfeeling.
"No, I will not." Hans stoically defies the armored up Ice Queen's frozen fury flash freeze as Elsa's cryokinetic bursts randomly are expelled from her untamed emotional body. Hans continues forward nonetheless, ducking and dodging around the sharp spikes of the oncoming ice blast as he keeps his head down. With his arms to his face, he shields his squinted eyes against the raging uncontrolled fear that gripped the young woman's delicate heart in pelting waves of her relentless ice barrage. Hans recognizes her anger, her fear. He himself, as a confused child who felt so alone in the world and abandoned growing up unwanted, once mirrored those sentiments.
SZZT! CHKKK!
Drawing his shuttered breath intake in rough gasps as her expelling ice felt like it struck right through his gut, Hans, undaunted, keeps on his stalwart trek towards the self exploding Ice Queen nonetheless. Even as the shards exude from every pore Elsa's impressive body, cold smoky puffs breathing from her mouth, he would not give up on her this time. He would never betray her trust again.
"Elsa! Stop! Please don't allow this evil monster to change the woman I know you to be! This isn't you!" Hans raises the level of his voice again to call out against the howling winds coiled in fuming ice. But the subzero armor built around her winged helmet was growing thicker with each passing second. And the ice armor around her shoulders was widening as the thorny-tipped frozen breastplate now formed over her heaving frontal cleavage added to her vehement angry battle-ready mode.
So his pleading words go unheard through that thick helmet of ice around her ears that were so ringing with rage, panic and dismay that it was beyond painful. And Hans, despite his own gnawing discomfort and empty cold twinge that was starting to build from somewhere deep inside, he could plainly read the terrified agony on Elsa's troubled face.
"I fell in love with the tender, compassionate woman you truly are! Don't let this fear consume your true self!" His wide viridescent eyes sparkling at her, Hans startles even himself with this genuine heartfelt confession that his strong tenor cried out in truthful, unashamed admission amidst the Ice Queen's cruel, blowing harsh hailstorms of sleet that her broken heart had been lashing out against him with.
Love?
{Huff huff}
You love me?
A still eerie silence abruptly falls over the raging tempest of snow and ice and sleet on the mountaintop as the just now able to breathe Ice Queen somehow, through her unbelievably cold crazed confusion, is beckoned back by the warm honesty of his human heart opening up to her.
A human heart that, for this one shining moment, dares to dream an impossible dream. One that urges her almost lost heart to dissuade the frozen ice threatening, and smolder back to life. The breastplate armor covering Ice Queen Elsa's heart starts to completely melt away.
Hearing his words yet again amidst the chaos, Elsa feels that tiny spark inside her heart that had been diminished by the Arctic temperatures catch the fire of the sun in the Danish Prince's unyielding caring eyes full of inexplicable warmth for her.
Around the platinum blonde, all those prickly, uninviting ice spikes drop off her mantle, melting away one by one with each passing second until her cape returns to its magically pure sparkling shimmering translucence. As does the ice helmet shielding her mind to him as it falls away, leaving only the demure delicate silver crown that signified her as a true Queen.
After only a few seconds of the pair staring at one another in an eternal glance, Elsa suddenly feels Anna's fervid arms and sunlit smile embrace her no longer stone cold body.
'There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear.' Elsa hears the poignant Bible verse replay in her head as she hugs Anna all the more tightly to her no longer frozen chest.
Allowing emotion to return her to normal warmth, Elsa quietly starts crying on her little sister's shoulder. Anna hugs her big sister's trembling body just as tight, even going as far as to bestow Hans a warm smile over Elsa's weeping head.
"Oh, Anna! Papa! It was my entire fault! That monster hurt Papa, because I was so afraid." Elsa sobs and opens up her deepest secret inner shame to Anna, that being half the battle with her fear won already. With Kristoff's lifting assistance, Anna leads Elsa down over to where King Agdar had fallen.
"No, Elsa. Papa would never blame you. He loves you too much. We all do! Everyone's afraid some time or another; we just can't keep it bottled up inside. And we can't let it take away our joy. God didn't create us to be scared to love." Somehow in her simple way of embracing life Princess Anna had learned the truest lesson of it and now wanted to share that knowledge with her sister in her greatest hour of need.
Elsa's true blue eyes gleam with tears of love for her sister, her eternal best friend.
Just then, the Snow Queen's ice carriage arrives with Eugene who throws open the door for Queen Idun.
Elsa and Anna's mother gives her girls a grateful glance as she rushes to her downed husband. They all had witnessed the violent engagement on the Reinebringen mountaintop side and how the sisters, with Hans' help, had sorted Elsa's fractious cryokinetic control issues. The worried mother garners strength from watching her two little angels embrace one another warmly.
"'Angels, from the realms of glory,
Wing your flight o'er all the earth;
Ye who sang creation's story,
Now proclaim Messiah's birth:
Come and worship, come and worship
Worship Christ, the newborn King.
Shepherds, in the fields abiding,
Watching o'er your flocks by night,
God with man is now residing,
Yonder shines the infant light:
Come and worship, come and worship
Worship Christ, the newborn King.
Sages, leave your contemplations,
Brighter visions beam afar;
Seek the great Desire of nations,
Ye have seen his natal star:
Come and worship, come and worship
Worship Christ, the newborn King.
Sinners, wrung with true repentance,
Doomed for guilt to endless pains,
Justice now revokes the sentence,
Mercy calls you—break your chains:
Come and worship, come and worship
Worship Christ, the newborn King.
Though an infant now we view him,
He shall fill his Father's throne,
Gather all the nations to him;
Every knee shall then bow down:
Come and worship, come and worship
Worship Christ, the newborn King.
All creation, join in praising
God the Father, Spirit, Son,
Evermore your voices raising,
To th'eternal Three in One:
Come and worship, come and worship
Worship Christ, the newborn King!'"
After lifting her sweet soprano up to God in supplication as the holy song answered played in her warm memory, Idun vocalizes the first special Christmas carol of her first Christmas spent with her first love and the first newborn little girl her Agdar gave her. For baby Elsa was their precious first Christmas present to one another, born on the first day of winter solstice just a few days before the holy day.
From start to close, Idun glows with golden streaks alight in her hair and rosy cheeks from the cold atmospheric surroundings until she finally breaks into a smile. As does Rapunzel, who was harmonizing with the glorious timeless carol as she helped the older woman prop her bruised and bloodied husband up to his wife's healing song.
"Girls! He's breathing! Papa will be fine!" After a few minutes back from her own brokenhearted anxiety when the strains of her song seemed to at first fail, Idun's beautiful laughter rings across the cliff in her warm soprano tones that were filled with tears of joy that all four females share, embracing one another in turns.
"I am relieved for you all." Hans breathes out over the ledge he was leaning over to see, as his entire body trembles for another reason that no one else knew of as he meets Elsa's normalized eyes and nods.
After giving Hans an incandescent glowing smile of gratitude where no words further needed to be expressed, Elsa's true blue eyes fill with joyful tears as she races, arm in arm with Anna to her Mama's gesturing with happiness side. Once there, Rapunzel takes turns squeezing each elated girl tight in relief for her healing up uncle.
Elsa, back to the usual fetching feminine non-warrior Ice Queen garb, hugs her smiling mother as she kneels down to embrace her wonderful brave father who was both proud of her and loved her so much that he would've sacrificed everything for her.
And with that glad knowledge her youthful insecurity and pensive heart had always longed to hear, Elsa Bernadotte was learning to be fearless of God's simple gift of the sense of touch that He gave humanity, as she had not been since the early days of her childhood. Perhaps due to a brazen red-headed Prince who taught her she could dare, Elsa gingerly brings herself to kiss her beloved Papa's cool cheek once again, just as she remembers she could when she was so tiny a little girl who so adored her first sweetheart and protector.
"Thank you, Papa." Free of the Draugen's evil symbiotic curse from overcoming her fears, through past realized love for her parents, the constant sweet love of her best friend of a sister, and maybe even the newly discovered love of a handsome Prince who melted the ice that threatened to coat her heart until it was frozen solid.
"I am so proud to have you for a daughter, my Snow Angel." King Agdar intermittently awakens to breathe out the raspy words. And though his voice was choking and strained, Papa's smile was tender and sincere, with hard fought for warmth for his beloved family.
"Beware, that cold ice could have frozen your heart until it was irretrievable, my little girl." The King pauses to touch his child's cheek, his own fingers a brush too cold but his exhausted injured state left him with little control.
"Believe me when I say that I have felt that same urge…huff…from time to time…cough…to just let myself go like that. But your good Mama always stopped me in time, before I destroyed myself…That's why I foolishly wanted you to deny your ice altogether…cough…for my fear of the fear. Forgive your silly Papa, little Snow Angel…"
And after sharing a squeezed hand and loving smile with his adoring wife, still seeing Elsa as his little girl, though she was now before him in quite a risque womanly form, Agdar drifts off to pass out as his freshly healed wounded body and exhausted icy powers shut down his outward mental consciousness so they could fully knit the injured King's gashed and banged up skull back together in conjunction with his adored family gathering around him.
Eugene, Anna and Rapunzel all help in getting the Norwegian King into the carriage as Elsa and her mother walk behind together, mother's arm around dear baby girl's strong shoulder.
"Good thing this Royal monarch prefers the svelte look rather than the more filled out, typical kingly father type." Flynn Rider comments in his teasing way as he easily hefts King Agdar's far more slender frame compared to good 'ole Fritz's back home, into the waiting carriage.
"Eugene!" Rapunzel reprimands her naughty guy with a hand about to slap her husband's busted arm but remembers to refrain just in the nick of time, although Anna was not as charitable, as she 'accidentally' kicks her cousin's husband, who started this all, squarely in the shins.
"Oops. Sorry." Her apology was none too believable as Anna friction rubs Elsa's cold hands warm, as the sisters watch their exhausted Mama lean her head to Papa's softly resting shoulder in the coach.
Meanwhile, as this was going on, with all the voices in his head screaming, Kristoff had climbed up and traversed to the far end of the mountain ledge where he could get a better view of the path back to the ocean that the fierce Draugen had taken.
"What do you hear?" Prince Hans, keeping his own calculations as to the evolving battle plan with militarily trained accuracy, was a good enough strategist to recognize where his best resources lie.
"It's heading southeast, down towards the North Sea." The Wind Whisperer taps into his psychic link with many of the underwater mammals and fishes he had already made alliance thereof. Kristoff squints his eyes as he was obviously currently in contact with some of the many creatures beneath the disrupted waves as he offers Hans this curt succinct answer.
"He's heading home to the continent…" Quietly talking under his breath of the Dutch pirate Captain he knew all too well, Hans murmurs. "We cannot allow that vengeful monster to roam the seas freely or make landfall on the innocent people of Scandinavia."
Quietly extrapolating his evaluation of where every creature, human or otherwise, longed to run to in the end, Hans responds in even tones as not to be heard by any of the others.
"Agreed." Kristoff was more a man of action than words as his eyes are still trained on the unkempt tossing sea waves below. Kristoff answers his former rival, who had now become a relied upon ally, with an asserting nod.
Even though his own Anna cast dispersions on Mr. Hans Westergaard at every turn of this journey, the honest mountain man in Kristoff judged the person more for his actions and the warm sentiment the Wind Whisperer sensed the Danish Prince held for Anna's sister.
The two responsible young men stand at the edge of the precipice overlooking the Lofoten beachfront over the seashore for a few moments of heavy deliberation. After a deep breath as if to steady himself to the task, Hans turns to call across the iceberg floating lake to the parties on the other side.
"Storbror!" Hans sweet tenor voice goes into his imperious commanding mode as he takes up the mantle of Admiral in his absent indisposed leader's place.
"Mr. Bjorgman and I are going ahead. Please take the Royal family back to the safety of the mainland. Fly swift and sure in return to Arendelle, due direct east and south from here via the inland fjords. Stay away from the sea at all costs." The peremptory absolute authority in Hans' lowered, yet subdued with cold, tone causes the addressed Eugene to raise his eyebrows over to his wife, who bites her lip. Pascal on Rapunzel's shoulder twists his in an uncertain shade of orange.
"Okay… Sounds like a good plan to me… After you, ladies." Eugene murmurs, feeling less assured than he sounded as he was returning to his driver post after loading the insensate King Agdar into the coach. Eugene whistles low as he watches Anna's vibrant braids and Elsa's blonde mane snap up in Hans' direction.
"…Or not." Boy, are you asking for it now. Feeling his little brother's unqualified stepped-in-it pain, Eugene squeaks in a hard swallowed comment after glimpsing the bone chilling look that springs to the young female monarch's eyes. To double the fun, the Ice Queen's cool stare was accompanied by her little sister's irritated peeved one at their contentious domineering counterparts who were just being so pigheadedly male.
A trait to which I so rarely share claim. I find it's best to be more gender neutral and give the lovelier sex a bit of wiggle room. It saves a lot of woe in the end.
Upon her ice slide that Anna second-naturedly hops on board, Elsa easily glides across the frozen lake to where the pair of young men were standing with Sven near the ledge facing the sea.
"May I remind you, Vise Admiral Westergaard, that I am still the Queen of this land?" Feeling mostly recovered from her ice berserk episode, Elsa pulls rank as she nears her handsome provocateur here on her quickly formed ice slide.
"Yeah! Note the prefix 'Vise', pretty boy. Elsa is still in charge. You don't tell the Queen what to do." With a poking finger to Hans' pointy sharp nose, Anna taunts her sworn enemy as she skittishly hops down from her sister's slippery ice ramp just to rap her own guy on the chest for conspiring with this Red miscreant.
"Oof. It was his idea." Going all cute rather than high-handed alpha male, Kristoff smirks his defense as he rubs his whacked bared abdomen while trying to pull on the dark cape Sven proffered. Kristoff couldn't quite explain why, but as he was standing here with Hans, he suddenly felt the temperature drop. But he simply attested it to Elsa's frosted indignation.
The mountain man, for one, never imagined that he could leave his little feisty Princess out of any adventure, even if his royal partner Dane in crime supposed it so.
"I am not questioning that fact, my Queen, and did not intend to cause you umbrage. However, I simply am concerned for you – and your family's welfare, and did not wish to engage any of you in the skirmish—" Prince Hans stands his chivalrous ground as he unconsciously reaches in over to straighten that still pesky curl that fell over Elsa's vexed eyes at him. But cutting him off, she interrupts his speaking and pulls her miffed head away.
"You're sounding like my father, Prince Hans." With a reprimanding raised brow, Elsa places a supercooled halting finger on Hans' bluish lips, which brings a certain pinkish heat back to them.
"I assure you, I – I only meant—" Resisting the urge to shiver in her presence, Hans uncharacteristically stammers under her icy eyed punishing gaze up at him.
"I like it." Feeling liberated fully for the first time in her adult life, Elsa flirtatiously brushes Hans sideburns with her fingertips.
Right in front of her slack-jawed sister too, whom intuitive Kristoff promptly loads onto Svala's back when the reindeer doe joined his resigned silent beckon, as to avoid a new scene.
"Olaf!" Standing regally tall on her own two graceful feet, Elsa abruptly calls out to the snowman as she picks up his waffling form with invisible frozen wind currents in his comical attempts to cross the iceberg chunked lake towards the sparring quartet.
As the chill of the Ice Queen's verglas coated long nailed fingers leaves Hans' frosted stylish titian facial hair, Elsa cryokinetically draws her bouncing snow creation near until Olaf was standing at her feet.
To Anna, Kristoff, and Sven's gasps and Hans' shuttering surprise, Elsa unconcernedly plunges her prim clawlike fingers into the back of Olaf's nonexistent skull as if it were a perfectly natural occurrence.
She pulls out a thirty inch long golden holy scepter that was half the pair of St. Olaf's royal regalia that had been secreted away there since the inception of this incredible voyage.
"What a crick in the neck that was! Ooh! How do you guys stand having spinal columns?" Patting the back of his snow head mound into place like nothing happened, Olaf blinks up at them. He joyously extols his absence of a cervical spine and its resulting stiff pain, glad to be his pliable flexible snowman self again.
"Listen." Elsa waves the long holy relic golden scepter in Hans' face pointedly. "This is my country. These are my people. I must be the one to face the monster and defeat it in my Father's place, as God is my witness. I am not hiding anymore. Never again. You may tag along if you wish." Elsa haughtily holds her head up high and declares this with pride as she extends the glimmering golden Royal scepter of St. Olaf she had stowed away inside her snowman she had named Olaf when this questionable mission began.
This was the ancient relic that belonged to her country's ancestor—Rex Perpetuus Norvegiae—Norway's eternal King whom her Papa would always read the skaldic poetry saga of to her when she was a young Princess. Elsa holds it up to the shining Midnight Sun that refused to sink beneath the horizon.
For even in this darkest hour, there were still those streaks of uncanny light that would find their way to race across and illuminate the magical Norwegian night sky like a shining beacon.
"Now, you know your mission, Olaf. Here is the Queen's seal. Go and warn Minister Kai of the sea monster's threat so that he could ready the citizens of Arendelle for evacuation to the continent, if needs must." Impressing Hans with her organizational leadership wherewithal, she gathers her icy powers in order to blow her friendly saluting dutiful snowman upon the Arctic currents.
Above the atmospheric pressure of the clouds the Ice Queen and her little snow creation had practiced in training for just such a desperate hour when she would be required to send a message to someone far away.
Elsa glances over to where she kept one eye on Eugene, who, on Vise Admiral Westergaard's instruction that she refrained from countermanding, conducts the ice carriage to leave with her parents for the safety of home.
And so, on her self created polar vortex's dense air that produced sudden plummeting temperatures with its circulatory pattern strong winds, Olaf takes off with a waved pair of twig hands. The excited snowfriend swirls around the Ice Queen's low pressure system as she sends the willing snowman on swift moving currents and air streams on a direct path southeast home to Arendelle.
Home. Where, after all, the heart never strays far from.
After sharing a nod with Kristoff, who had Anna securely loaded on Svala beside his Sven, Elsa's eyes meet Hans', who dramatically falls to his knees in a reverent flourishing bow to her greater authority.
"I am but a foot soldier at your command, Queen Elsa, and will give my utmost to vanquish this villain for your nation." Hand over heart, Hans dramatically pledges again his loyalty before he smiles at her apologetically before he must crudely raise his thin fingers to his pale lips to give a high pitched melodic whistle. And the pair of flying white mares from across the still lake responds willingly.
As does Elsa, as she allows the Danish Prince to easily lift the lissome royal beauty, back in her shimmering Ice Queen dress, onto the golden saddle of one of the horses. The handsome Prince squeezes both her hands around the reins.
"You have my complete trust to lead us into battle, Vice Admiral, as well as my gratitude for what you have already done for my father." Elsa answers, wanting to say more, but Hans seemed preoccupied with strategy as he then gallantly slings a long agile leg around to alight upon the other white steed beside hers himself.
"Then, my Queen, let the Wind Whisperer be our guide. I will take the rearguard flank."
Kristoff glances from Sven back to Hans and seriously nods at the plan before taking off on his soaring reindeer over the sea in hot pursuit of the foul creature that has so disrupted nature itself. Anna, on Svala, hovers over to Elsa with a positive arm squeeze and thumbs-up before the two Arendelle sisters soon take off in unison after Kristoff's intuitive heels. Hans takes position with his flying horse in the rear.
And the cold chill that gripped Hans Westergaard's secret heart would hide the bitter truth for as long as he could spare her from it.
I only can pray there will be time enough to make my amends…
And the four beasts in flight quickly carry each of their anxious young passengers with the same valiant goal in mind through the dusky skies over the wave crashing Norwegian Sea towards the final battle…
First off, Merry Christmas!, everyone! We hope you had a special time to share with the ones you love in celebration of baby Jesus' birthday! The treasures of Family and Faith are so important this time of the year, aren't they?
Sorry for the super extended wait, but you all know this wondrous blessed time of the year is sure a busy one for us all, getting presents ready, spending time with friends and family as we celebrate the birth of our Lord!
Hope this fairly long almost 10,000 word, thoroughly juicy, turning point chapter was worth our month long writing hiatus! (Boy, I've missed the joys of writing ^_^! I do hope to get to another chapter by the end of the year in the works very soon!)
As for this edition, I do believe that Queen Idun's healing song: 'Angels, from the Realms of Glory' once again fit in with the season of her first child's birth perfectly. And the entire beautiful Christmas theme of a glorious Savior who was born to sacrifice everything selflessly for another was reflected all through this pivotal chapter as well in small yet significant ways by our humble cast of characters. Don't you agree?
Please review all the nooks and crannies of this ever twisting tale! Tell me your favorite parts! I've missed you all, and am dying for some fantastic fanfiction friend fellowship! ^_^ How's that for alliteration?
So, for my sister (who has been busy illustrating several more romantic chapter scenes; check out SetsunaKou on Deviant Art or TsukimoriKahoko on Tumblr) and I:
"We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!"
God bless you, Frozen Friends!
HarukaKou
