After six years, it begins again. We're going back to Arendelle.

Frozen 2 opened up many themes and questions that may or may not have been satisfactorily resolved. While some may be divided over the quality of the writing, no one can doubt that the sequel explores many mature themes and ventures into darker territory than its predecessor. And there is no question that the fantastic animation and the brilliant voice work all deserve acclaim.

As usual, I am never a fan of the happy ever after.

Here is my attempt at exploring some of the darker themes opened up in the movie, my humble effort to tease the demons out of Pandora's box.

Here is the tale of The White Hun.

Chapter 1: Your sins will find you out

Arendelle's Theme: Vuelie (feat. Cantus) - Frozen OST

The sun ascended from beyond the horizon, and in an instant the coverings of cloud and darkness shed themselves. Fierce yellow light scattered across the open water, as the smooth mirror of the fjord reflected the sun's glory heavenward.

A rider sped across the water. White hair billowing, trailing a dress of alabaster that no tailor could have emulated.

As the sun rose, Elsa's spirit soared with it. She never grew tired of it—that wordless voice of hope that swelled with each sunrise, dispelling the dark thoughts that lurked in the night.

Anna was waiting.

I'm coming.

Beneath her, the Nokk reacted smoothly. Sapient water in the shape of a horse, its hoof-beats left no mark upon the fjord. Speeding across the water, sensing the anticipation of its rider to reach the glittering towers of the palace on the waterfront.

Arendelle.

"Anna, it's good to see you too," Elsa breathed, cradling her sister's head in her embrace.

"Mm," murmured Anna, her face buried in Elsa's snow-white hair.

The sisters shared the moment in the dimness of the corridor. The rays of sunlight had not yet started to creep through the windows, and the air was cool and still heavy with the scent of night. Clutching each other for warmth, Elsa reveling in the faint smell of lavender, Anna wondering how someone able to control ice and snow could still feel so warm.

Neither of them wanted to let go first.

"Elsa?" Anna piped up. "What say we let go—together?"

And so they did.

"So…Anna." Elsa smiled, still holding her sister by both hands. "What did you want to show me?"

The younger sister's smile faded ever so slightly, and her voice dropped. "I was tidying up Father's things yesterday. I was thinking of all those things we didn't know about them all this time. How Father escaped the enchanted forest all those years ago. How Mother was Northuldra. What else didn't we know about them?"

She clasped her hands, and walked to the window. "I wanted to know more about our parents. And besides, now that I'm queen of Arendelle—" Anna giggled nervously—"it wouldn't hurt to find out more about the previous rulers, wouldn't it?"

Elsa walked forward, next to her sister. "So what did you find?"

Anna paused. Then, walked to the door of the study—the old chamber, where their Father once spent his time.

"It's better if I showed you."

The box was made of solid oak, reinforced with cast iron struts and inlaid with gold. Roughly a foot by two feet, it rested upon the old table in the study.

"I found this," Anna panted, still weary from the strain of lifting the box, "behind his desk. It was hidden in a small hole in the floor and covered with a panel."

Elsa's eyes turned to the splintered fragments of wood under the table. "Hidden? Then—how did you find it?"

"I—um—may have dropped a very heavy and totally-not-expensive limited-edition encyclopedia on the floor. By accident."

"By accident."

"Yep." Anna pursed her lips.

Elsa smirked. Typical. "So what's inside it?"

Anna looked at Elsa. "I don't know. But I wanted us to open it together. It—it belongs to our parents, after all."

Elsa stepped towards the box. The crest of Arendelle gleamed bright on its lid. And beneath it, two names were engraved side-by-side.

Agnarr.

Idunna.

Elsa drew breath, sharply. Then took her sister's hand.

Anna's eyes were wide, nervous, but as warm as they ever were. "We'll do this together."

Elsa grasped one handle on the lid. Anna grasped the other.

Then, as one, they lifted it.

For a long time, they stared at the contents of the box.

"Are those—" Anna breathed "—are those letters?"

Plain brown envelopes, stacked neatly side-by-side within the container. Protected from dampness and light, they still looked as crisp as they must have been when they were written.

"I don't get it. Why would our parents write letters, and then never send them? Who were they writing to?"

Elsa had picked up one of the envelopes. Scrawled in a corner was a date—eighteen years ago. His handwriting. Her father's handwriting.

"Unless these aren't letters." Elsa's eyes narrowed.

"Look." Gently, Anna retrieved something else from within the box. Folded and embossed with their father's personal seal. And the words.

To my dear daughters, Elsa and Anna.

"Papa," Elsa's lips parted. She met Anna's wide eyes.

With pale fingers, trembling but not from the cold, Elsa opened the letter.

My daughters,

If you have found this, I hope that it is because you are ready. I hope—and pray—that you are reading this because I have finally gathered the courage to show this to you, and not that you have found it yourselves. Perhaps—by then, I would have found the words I need to explain everything in person.

These are my thoughts, catalogued over the years. My confessions, if you will. I had started writing them in the hope that I could unload the burden on my heart with ink and pen, and yet found that not to be the case. Then with the years, I had continued writing in the hopes that someday—someday the wrongs would be righted. I will be indicted by my own words and my own pen one day, before the judgement of men and of Heaven. It would be the least that I deserve.

My dear ones, whatever you may read, whatever you will come to learn—please remember that your mother and I love you. That will never change. And if there is any resentment, any judgement—your mother is innocent. The blame lies solely upon me, and upon the royal family to which I belong.

Elsa's hands could not stop shaking. Anna reached forward, gently holding her sister's wrist.

"What does he mean?" Anna whispered. "What is he talking about?"

Elsa continued to read, trying to stem the quaver in her voice.

Your mother has secrets too, but those are hers to share, not mine. She will speak about them in time. Her secret is one of wonder, and of love. Mine stinks of shame and condemnation.

Remember the story I used to tell you both, about how my father King Runeard built the dam for the Northuldra?

I never told you the full story.

I never learned about it until I was a young man. And even then, I am ashamed to say that I did not speak out. That shame will haunt me until my dying day. What kind of king am I, a coward at heart? What kind of monarch allows such a wrong to go unchallenged, like a child hiding under the covers, hoping that the monster will leave him alone?

I had wanted to tell you the truth. And yet every time I see your faces—and that of your mother—words fail and my shame overwhelms. Perhaps inside, I had hoped that the great mist of the forest would swallow up everything in time.

"Papa…" Elsa whispered.

Anna said nothing. Only gripped her sister's wrist tighter. Keep reading.

We did not build the dam, not with our own hands. My father, King Runeard, envisioned the construction of that massive structure long before I learned to walk. Arendelle's people are strong and hardworking and full of spirit as they are, but even so, such a task would have been beyond their small numbers.

I do not know how my father found them. Only that they had been brought by great ships to our shores by the thousands, and then put under the heels of our boots. Put to work to build my father's vision.

The Great Dam was built by slaves.

Steppe Theme: "Kha-Khem" by Yat-Kha

Every night, they lit the fire.

Old hatreds burned deep. Some of the oldest ones still had the memories. Of the holds of large treasure-ships of the North Dwellers, of starvation and thirst and biting cold. Of the terrors of the white ice and the rushing water dashing men to pieces as if they were dead wood.

Of the swords and axes of the Northerners, and the blood spilled along the river banks.

The shaman was blind in both eyes. Old as the trees, her wrinkled and liver-spotted face speaking of ancient wisdom and the ways of a land they would never again see. But her back too bore the scars of the oppressor, testifying that she had shared in the hardship of her people.

She stoked the fire with her cane.

A shriveled hand, clawed and arthritic, reached into a leather pouch around her waist. She flung the sand into the fire, feeling it sputter in reply.

"Remember, you children of the Altan Uruk. This is the sand upon which our blood was spilled."

The assembly murmured in response. The older ones closed their eyes. They remembered well, that Day of Falling Stones. The grief of their losses, the fear of impending death and the panicked flight into the mountains, the guilt and shame that they had survived while their kin had perished. Perished in one of the worst of deaths, lost to the deepest depths of the cold salt sea.

All they had, all they could gather of their grief, was the sand by the banks of the great river, stained red with their blood. Blood now dried and rotten into iron, yet heavy still with memory.

The same sand, now flung into the fire. Night after night, alongside the same invocation.

Perhaps the river remembered. But they needed more than just to remember. The burning coal within their hearts would not be sated by memory alone, but by vindication.

The shaman withdrew, now, the curved knife. Her fingers had lost none of their dexterity. Calmly, without flinching, she pulled the razor edge of the blade along her wrist. Droplets of anaemic blood dripped into the fire, staining the embers.

"Gurun, avenge us," she intoned.

"Gurun, avenge us," came the reply.

She continued to bleed, life's blood dripping into the fire. Her face concentrated in tradition, in memory, and in pure distilled hatred. As if she could distill vengeance and enmity into every drop, and fuel the reckoning upon the head of their foe.

Thirty five years had they been here, in this frozen wasteland where even the winds and spirits were against them. Some had been buried already beneath the snow, claimed by starvation or accident. Many had been born, who had known nothing else except this constant struggle against the wind and sky, battered by demons and spirits that set trees ablaze, flooded homes, and thundered through the night. Crops refused to take in the soil, and the treacherous spirits drove away the herds of reindeer.

Every night, she had performed the old rite. Her youth was gone, her back was hunched, her sight had withered. But her hatred had never dissipated.

Snow swallowed all, blanketing the grass and shrouding rocks and deadly pitfalls. High pillars of ice stood from the many rivers, waterfalls petrified by the winter that seemed to stretch for months and months at a time.

But in this land of forest and snow, the collective memory of the steppe peoples never diminished. Nor had they forgotten the ways of the old horse-lords of the east. Before the Sveta Huna followed the teachings of Tengri, they offered their prayers to an even older deity. One who, even now, they turned to in their time of strife.

Gurun, the lord of sand and desert. Gurun, greater than any of these Northern demons. Gurun, who answered the call of vengeance.

Answer us.

The forest kept them trapped. Beyond a wall of evil power and unholy mist, where not even the great Khan of the Old Desert could hear them. Yet every night, she called out. She was the shaman; she spoke for the people. This was the way.

The sudden shock tore through the air, almost toppling her over. Around, she heard cries of alarm. The very temperature of the air changed. She could feel it—in her bones, in her joints.

The fire flared up like a plume.

Murmurs and whispers rippled around the gathered host. She silenced them with a single utterance.

"The veil has fallen. We are trapped no longer."

She raised her unseeing eyes to the sky, to Tengri above. And for the first time in forever, her lips peeled back in a toothless smile.

"Gurun can hear us now."

Slowly, at the fringes of the crowd, came shouts of assent. Then gathering volume and momentum, it spread through the great host. Cries and bellows, giving voice to joy, and vent to sorrow.

They were free.

They were free.

The shaman tilted her head back, and cried to the open sky.

"Then, Gurun, hear our call, our thirst! Hear these thirty five years of suffering and starvation! Remember the hundred years even before, when our blood and sweat were shed, and repay it a hundredfold upon these the North Dwellers! By the sand and the blood, and by our cries for vengeance!"

"Uukhai!" Ten thousand voices answered her.

She raised a crooked finger to the sky, and then pointed unerringly south.

"Send from your desert, Great Khan, that Dagger which will pierce the heart of the North! Send that doom which will at last befall these accursed Northerners in their stone walls and high houses!"

"Uukhai!" Came the reply, thundering across the snow and the mountains. "Uukhai! Uukhai!"

The shaman closed her eyes, a smile across her features. All around her, swords were loosed from their sheaths and shaken at the sky—a herald of the coming storm of iron and blood.

It was only when morning came that they realized she was dead.

Elsa's voice had broken, at that very last word. The sound of that last syllable hung in the air, ugly, ringing. An indictment of Arendelle and everything around them.

Slaves.

"No." Anna's voice was parched. "It can't be. This can't be true."

Elsa's mind swirled.

Father was the kindest man I ever knew.

He stood for strength and peace. He upheld the value of all life in his kingdom and put his people first.

How—

The parchment crinkled at the edges as her grip tightened, little flecks of ice beginning to form over the corrugations—no, no, she stopped herself in time, before she destroyed this letter, this one precious piece of her father.

This was father's legacy. These were his words.

She owed it to him, if not to Anna and herself, to go on. To understand.

Willing strength back into her voice, she continued.

I had always been told, as a young boy on my father's lap, that sacrifices had to be made for the greater good.

The men and women ferried to our shores in chains and rags, emptied from cargo ships, were from some faraway land, or so he told me. Criminals, thieves and murderers, offered up to us by their very own people. They were scarcely human, spoke almost no language we could comprehend, and had no semblance of culture.

We would take this pitiful people and put them to work on something great. It would be a privilege, a favour even, to these people. To offer purpose for their lives.

Today, I would have opposed it immediately. I would have seen it for the barbarism it was, thinly disguised behind this veneer of civilization. But then—then I was but a boy. And so I smiled, and nodded, and swallowed this sickening lie. I don't know how much my father paid the owners of that fleet of cavernous, ugly ships. But it pains my heart that somewhere out there, Arendellian coin hangs in the pouch of a slave trader.

Now, these things are all forgotten. King Runeard is dead, the forest swallows up everything in mist, and I sit upon the throne. The Northuldra held no love for us, least of all for bringing such a large host of foreign and unwanted people to their lands. But these peoples are also gone—many dead, the rest lost. Lost, as certainly as the forest consumes all.

I wonder sometimes. If I dread the day when the mist parts, and my sins are laid bare. I share in this shame. I am a part of it. Idunna would sometimes speak of a distant place of wonder, where all memory is found. I wonder—are my sins etched also in its annals? Preserved there, so that all may know of King Agnarr and his failure?

I can only hope to atone for it before my own life is over.

Elsa, Anna—please, please my daughters. Read, and learn from my mistakes and my failures. If any remain—if there are any left of the poor and downtrodden people who suffered under Arendelle's yoke, seek them out. Show them kindness, show them compassion. Show them we are better. Show them—you are better than I was.

Seek their forgiveness, if they would ever be willing to offer it.

Just as I seek your forgiveness, though I will remain

Your undeserving father

Agnarr.