AN: The descriptions in this chapter are clearly inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale "The Snow Queen". But I would also like to explicitly mention "Märchenmond" by Wolfgang Hohlbein, which I just recently reread and which, with its description of a quest to a castle made of ice at the end of the world through a desert of snow, also inspired this chapter. In any case, again a big reading recommendation on my part to anyone who likes (German) fairy tale fantasy!

Sixth story in which the hero reaches the Ice Queen's castle

The silver glow of a long-forgotten goddess smiled down on the three friends as their raft glided slowly through the cold waves. Harry, however, did not feel like smiling, lost in his dreams, these messengers of the past, which he had preferred to confront with the pen instead of the sword...

Some Slytherins looked at Harry with disdainful expressions as they passed him in their splendid dress robes and gowns. Most, however, ignored him with feigned indifference. After more than three years, his friendship with Daphne had long since ceased to cause an uproar among the Hogwarts houses, however much Draco Malfoy ranted and raved about it.

And when Daphne finally stepped out of the Slytherin common room, the world around him finally faded away. Speechless, he looked at his friend. Her normally wild hair was now combed smooth. Soft as water, it framed her smiling face before falling over her shoulders and back. Dressed, Daphne was in an elegant green gown that perfectly matched her eyes.

"Wow, Daphne," he stammered. "You look incredible!"

Daphne's smile grew even wider. "You look nice, too," she said, "very nice, in fact. Only your collar is a little crooked. Wait, let me help you."

With that, she stepped up to him and her delicate fingers began to fiddle with his robe. She was so close that Harry could smell her perfume. Until now, she had never worn perfume. And now he also saw that Daphne was wearing a gold necklace with the emerald he had given her for her last birthday. The emerald nestled gently against her skin, right between – he averted his eyes, feeling the blood rush to his head.

"There, now you look perfect," Daphne said when she had finished with his collar.

Harry gave her a grateful smile before offering her his arm, just as Hermione had shown him earlier that morning.

Speaking of Hermione.

"Do you know who Hermione is going with?" he asked as they walked behind the other couples to the Great Hall. "She was adamant about not telling us."

"Sure," Daphne replied. "She's going with Viktor Krum. I tried to talk her out of it, but she wouldn't listen. For her, it feels like she's in the middle of a wonderful fairy tale story – and I wish her all the joy and happiness for tonight – but I hope she doesn't expect anything more than that. Krum would break her heart. After all, he has umpteen groupies; to him, she's just another pastime..."

Harry cursed as he tried to lift a particularly large pile of Kelpie dung with his shovel. No magic to hell! After this class, Hagrid could go and jump in the lake, he and his bloody –

"Watch your language," admonished Daphne, who mucked out the Kelpie enclosure with him and the other sixth years. Most of the sixth years, at least.

"Ron's going to get to hear a lot more drastic things from me later," he grumbled, pointing to a nearby oak tree behind which Ron and Lavender had disappeared to do who knows what. "Just leaves us with all this shit. And I always thought Kelpies were oh so sublime creatures..."

"They are," Daphne said. "That's why they don't like it when you mess with their excrement with magic. So put your wand away again real quick."

Damn, she knew him too well.

"And about Ron, yeah, you do that. And I'll take care of Lavender. How can she let Ron take advantage of her like that?" She shook her head. "As if all her wits had flown into her melons!"

Harry had to pull himself together not to snort with laughter. He had actually heard quite a bit about Lavender's melons from Ron.

Daphne gave him a dark look.

Yes, he had been all too familiar with Daphne's opinion on romantic relationships, yet at some point, he had been unable to hold back any longer. It had been two months into their last year at Hogwarts when the question had suddenly popped out of him...

"Daphne, please go out with me!"

A variety of different emotions slid across Daphne's face – surprise, confusion, and an expression he couldn't quite describe. Finally, though, Daphne lowered her gaze, shaking her head.

"No, Harry, I don't want to."

And with that, she turned and walked away with quick steps, leaving him heartbroken.

"Why did you ask me out?" asked Daphne softly as she gazed at the starry sky above them, the evening breeze playing with her blonde strands. The fact that they were talking alone again at all was progress. For several days they had avoided each other, until at some point they both couldn't stand it anymore.

Nervously, Harry played with his fingers. His heart was pounding wildly in his chest. "Because I like you. I like you a lot, actually. I –"

"Please don't say you love me." Daphne had turned to him, giving him a sad smile. "What do you know about love, Harry? What do you and I know about it?" She shook her head. "No, Harry, I like you far too much for there to ever be anything between us. You're my best friend. I want to have you by my side for the rest of my life. But feelings beyond friendship would destroy all that. I don't want to lose you, Harry. I beg you to understand that."

Harry felt like he was falling into a deep hole. What could he possibly say in response? He didn't want to lose her either...

"Yes," he breathed. His voice had stopped working. He coughed before repeating, "Yes, Daph. We are friends. Now and forever."

Daphne stepped up to him, putting her arms around his body, as she had done so many times before. This time, however, her embrace was filled with regret and wistfulness. Instinctively, Harry inhaled her familiar scent, a mixture of vanilla, oranges, and pine needles. She had always smelled like that, but lately, the scent was clouding his senses.

The future would hurt, but if that was what Daphne wanted...

Harry didn't know how much time passed – whether seconds, minutes, or hours – but eventually Daphne broke away from him again, taking her warmth with her. For a brief moment, their eyes met, and Harry could even see his reflection, streaked with golden speckles. Daphne opened her mouth as if to say something more, but then abruptly turned her head away.

"See you tomorrow, Harry," she said softly, and then she was gone.

Left behind, once again, was Harry, gazing lonely at the distant stars. Deeply he breathed in the misty, damp air. It had become cold. His breath stood in little clouds before his mouth.

He hated himself.

Harry awoke when the raft ran aground with a loud crash. He jumped up, reaching around for support, but only got a grip on something cold and hard.

They were surrounded by ice. Ice that piled up into a high, glassy wall across the river, breaking through the surface in sharp reefs and turning the shore into a bizarre landscape.

Harry stood up, and almost fell again as his stiff frozen muscles protested the movement. His limbs were numb with cold and his whole skin tingled and burned. His eyes fell on Ron and Hermione. They seemed to be in an even worse shape than he was. Their arms wrapped around each other, they lay on the floor of the raft, their faces pale and miserable, but awake.

"Pretty cold," Ron muttered. "Can you make out anything?"

Harry glanced around. The river was shallow enough here that he could see the bottom, but the raft was so caught in the ice that they didn't even need to try to free it. Even if they somehow managed with magic without destroying it, the stream would immediately push it back into or even under the ice.

"All I see is ice and snow," he said. "As far as the eye can see. Even the river is almost completely covered with ice. We can't get any further here with the raft."

"We can't get any further at all," Hermione's weak voice rang out.

Startled, Harry looked to his two friends, meeting Ron's eyes full of regret.

"Just look at us, Harry," he said. "We can't even rise, let alone reach the Ice Queen's castle. No, my friend, this is where we part ways. We would have accompanied you to the deepest fires of hell. That's how it's done among friends, in a family. But with what you – and Daphne – now face, we can no longer help you."

"You created the Ice Queen, Harry," Hermione said, visibly at the end of her tether – she had been protecting them with her warming charms the entire time. "And because you created her, you can defeat her. You already have everything you need to do that."

A shudder gripped Ron's body, yet he tried a smile. "Just please talk more about your feelings in the future, you and Daphne. Instead of dragging the whole school into your drama."

Harry was at a loss for words. He didn't know what to say. Only a comforting warmth spread inside him, despite the freezing cold, as if he were drinking hot chocolate in front of a roaring fire.

"We know you can do it," Ron said "Save Daphne and come back to us. My mother would kill you if you missed Christmas."

"We're going to drift back now," Hermione said, performing a quick wave of her wand. "And you have to go! Hurry!"

"I love you guys," Harry shouted, finally letting his emotions get the best of him.

"We're not the one you have to tell..." said Ron, as the raft began to move slowly again, this time in the opposite direction.

Harry nodded at him before turning around. Hermione was right. He had to hurry before a pure, innocent soul was lost forever because of him.

He took a deep breath, before letting himself slide over the edge of the raft. He sank into the icy water up to his thighs. The cold hit him so painfully that he cried out. For a moment his eyes went black. Mustering all his willpower, he staggered on, holding on to the ice barrier with his right hand, each step an agony. After only a few seconds he lost all feeling in his legs, and more than once he was on the verge of simply giving up and letting himself fall forward into the water. But he made it, somehow, and after a while, he reached the shore. Exhausted and half unconscious from the cold, he sank down on the ice.

He wanted to sleep, wanted to surrender to the tantalizing, numb warmth that began to spread through his limbs. Instinctively, however, he knew that if he fell asleep now, he would not awaken again, that the warmth inside him was nothing more than the first harbinger of death. He felt far too weak for magic by now, but he couldn't give up. He had to save Daphne. He had put her in this danger in the first place...

Groaning, Harry rose from the ground. He saw Ron and Hermione on their raft, who at that moment raised their hands to wave at him. He waved back, hoping that his friends had not exhausted themselves too much, that they would return safely.

He himself began to walk away from the river and into the desert of snow and ice. He didn't know if it was the right way, but it would be a truly depressing story if the hero failed simply because he had run in the wrong direction. Especially since there were more than enough other adverse circumstances.

His clothes were heavy with water, and he felt as if the moisture in his clothes was gradually solidifying, encasing his body in a deadly coat of ice. In his chest, his heart was hammering as if it wanted to burst. And before his eyes, veils of mist rose and fell, while the air seemed to turn into liquid ice with every breath, burning his throat and lungs.

But he kept walking, driven by a force that only the desperate understood. And the movement, though slow and in almost unbearable pain, did its work. Gradually, life returned to his body, first as tingling and stinging in the tips of his fingers and toes, then as hot, raging pain. His vision cleared and he could make out more than a blurry outline of his surroundings.

Not that there was much to see. The landscape was a monotonous, contourless white. There was nothing, not a bump, not a tree or shrub, or at least a rock, on which the gaze could have held. The horizon blurred in the mist, and only sometimes Harry thought he could make out the outline of a huge, bizarre building in the drifting swaths of white and gray, but the image disappeared before he could focus on it.

His footsteps carried him relentlessly ever forward, while the moon lingered silently in the firmament, untouched by the burdens of mortals. But for Harry, there was something comforting about not being completely alone in the dark.

And finally, the wall of fog lifted. Where just before there had been only empty, icy wasteland, a magnificent castle now rose before his astonished eyes. The walls of the castle were made of whirling snow and the windows and doors of biting winds. And directly in front of him was a gate, constantly changing its contours depending on how the snow was blowing, but always wide open, as if the castle were welcoming him.

With a pounding heart, Harry passed through the gate and – he had not wanted to believe it possible – the cold became even more horrible. His breath poured out of his mouth like frozen water.

Beyond the gate, over a hundred halls awaited him, formed as the snow drifted; and they were all so large, so empty, so icy cold, and so gleaming. Not the laughter of men or other living creatures, but only gray mist filled the castle.

Harry kept moving forward, through countless corridors and halls, until he finally reached a hall over a mile long. And in the middle of this empty, endless snowy hall was a frozen lake that had cracked into a thousand pieces. Each piece resembled the next one completely, it was a formal feat.

The mist began to move, looking like a roundel of dancing spirits in the moonlight. And then he saw her. Cold taken shape. Not twenty steps away. The Ice Queen!

She was dressed in the finest white gauze that was made up of millions of star-like flakes. She was very fine, but made of ice, of blinding, twinkling ice, and yet she was alive; her eyes stared like two bright stars, although there was no calmness or rest in them. Harry had seen a lot in his years in the magical world, had seen beautiful and terrible things, but what he had not known until this moment was that there were both in one, that beauty could be terrible.

"Daphne!" he called out, but little more than a croak came out of his mouth. Nonetheless, he continued to shout, even louder to drown out the howling wind. "Daphne! Daphne!"

The Ice Queen's mouth opened, and her voice echoed off the walls of snow, more force of nature than human sound. "Who dares cross my realm?"

"Daphne," Harry shouted, continuing to drag himself forward, but his movements grew slower and slower. The cold wind, still carrying the voice of the Ice Queen, brushed over him, gradually banishing all sense of life from his limbs. "Daphne..."

Slowly, the Ice Queen walked toward him, and wherever she set foot, the icy winds died. She was the centre of the storm. "You are chasing after a girl named Daphne? Who are you? Apollo?"

"Please, Daph. It's me, Harry. Please come back to me..."

The Ice Queen was now standing directly in front of him, and he looked into her unnatural blue eyes, very different from the warm eyes of his memory. It was icy cold, symbol of the winter that had settled over the girl's heart. It was like in his fairy tale. They had reached the beginning. And the end.

"I know the girl Daphne," the Ice Queen spoke, stroking his cheek with her white hand. His guts felt as if a carapace of ice was closing around them. He could barely breathe. "And her weakness, for she is my opposite in everything. Your feelings are amusing, but foolish. They cannot thrive in this world of cold. And in a moment, you will know the terrible truth as well. Farewell, my foolish hero."

I love you. That was what Harry wanted to say, but pain erased every thought.

It felt like he was falling. One last wet feeling on his cheek. Then his eyes went black, and all pain left him.