Alaia Skyhawk: Hehehe, I see a lot of my readers from the Merlin section, like ROTG as much as I do :)

Disclaimer: I don't own Rise of the Guardians, the Guardians of Childhood, or any related characters etc. This story is written purely for entertainment purposes.

~(-)~

Chapter 3: Winter's Shepherd

Spring thaw was moving in, and Jack didn't need to see the grass peeking through the thinning snow to realise that. He felt it in his very bones, the inexorable wane of winter's hold in the north. The winds told him that too, that the Northern Winter would soon end. But it wasn't an abrupt change, he could feel that the Northern Spring was already starting. It was as if the two or three weeks either side of the seasonal boundaries, were a time when the previous season coexisted with the next.

But even so, the winds told him that spring was coming, or rather, the Spirit of Spring. She was in Europe, they said, but would leave there and come here in a few days, moving east-to-west across the world like the passage of the sun. They told him that she wouldn't mind if he were still here when she arrived, that the Spirits of the Seasons were meant to cooperate at times when one season flowed into the next. Yet Jack didn't want to meet her, not now... He just wasn't ready for it.

Jack sighed, floating down upon the winds to land on the roof of his family's cabin. Emily was sat on the steps of the porch, gazing sadly across the village without actually looking at anything. He knew why... It was March now, specifically the fourteenth. Today would have been his nineteeth birthday.

He floated down now to land beside her, kneeling so that he was at the same eye-level.

"Stay safe, Emily, and don't cry for me too much. When the first snow of next winter comes to our village, I'll be here, and I'll try to help you see me again."

Jack reached out as if to cup the side of her face, but held off from actually touching her. He didn't want the strange way he turned misty-blue and ephemeral, when people who didn't believe in him passed through him, to spoil the illusion that he was able to comfort her right now.

He stood, bowing his head in reluctance, and forced himself to turn away. But not before he touched the tip of his staff to the edge of the porch where the sunlight shone on it. Emily heard the faint crackle of forming frost, and turned her head to look. She saw the frost-patterns, frowning a little in confusion as to how they'd gotten there, before a small smile of wonder lit her face at the way the icy crystals glittered in the sun when she moved her head.

Jack felt a lightening in his heart at that, and soared up into the air over the village. Once he was high enough that the gusting winds wouldn't distrurb or startle anyone, he then called to them to take him south to wait for the start of the Southern Winter.

The winds obliged more than happily with the request, and he glided in their grasp with the grace of three months of daily practice. He still had the occational shaky moment or bad landing, but he was getting used to the idea and task of flying. The winds had also become his only company, and while he was already begining to cherish his burgeoning friendship with them, it wasn't the same as being seen and talked to by people. He craved that contact, more than anything.

Jack remained lost in his thoughts as the winds carried him south, his soft sighs of loneliness lost in that rush of air. It didn't take long for the winds to release him at the top of a mountain, where it seemed snow clung to the peak's tip all year round, but he could see that towards its base autumn was still in full swing.

Jack considered going exploring, having already overflown most of the south of the world but for the South Pole region of ice. Compared to the north, other than that cap there was very little land in the south where his snow was needed and could fall. And the areas where frost could now begin forming did not need his attention. That was something else the winds had told him. Frost being on the ground after nighttime didn't mean it was winter. They'd shown him desserts during the nights, where it became very very cold even though it was summer in those regions. Frost formed on the surface of the dunes during the night in the desserts, which was why creatures living there would hide in the warm sands until the sun rose and everything became unbearably hot again.

He settled down in a snowbank, letting it pillow his head as he mulled over that. He commanded frost and snow, but frost still formed on its own during the early weeks of spring, and the late weeks of autumn. He supposed it was nature's way of showing the transition between seasons. Frost would mingle with the tender shoots of emerging spring flowers at the border between winter and spring, and trees would still be bearing fruit and berries, and some even clinging to their browned leaves, when frost began to trace over everything at the boundary between autumn and winter.

Maybe that was Mother Nature's doing, or maybe it was just the way things were anyway. She hadn't been around forever, the winds had told him that, and they also told him that the seasons used to flow between each other just fine in the uncountable years before the Spirits of the Seasons had begun to be chosen. It was just that the Seasons were a bit more organised these days. Even if, to mortals, things would seem as prone to random change as ever. But Jack now knew that was because he and the other Spirits of the Seasons had to change things a little now and then. Again, it was the winds who had told him that, even if the knowledge hadn't sat well with him.

In the end he sat in his snowbank for close to two months, leaving only when instinct told him it was time for winter to sweep over the south. But not many people lived in the south of the world, not compared to the north, and not compared to the numbers who lived in snowy places there. It meant there were little-to-no places where he needed to trigger avalanches, and very few children he could watch having snowball fights. In the end he decided to go explore the Southern Ice Cap, the South Pole, when the winds tugged at him eager to show him. But what they led him to was by far nothing he had expected.

The winds dropped him, not literally, on a high plateau where he could sense the ice below him was hundreds of feet thick. There, upon the windswept top of the glacier, he began forming fantastical constructions of ice and snow to amuse himself... Until several little somethings came clambering up out of a nearby crevasse in the glacier.

Jack stared at them once he'd noticed their presence, blinking as he tried to grasp what they could possibly be. They were barely a foot tall, had little bare feet and hands like a person, but were rendered almost completely rounded by fluffy white fur which hide completely the true length of arms and legs, and however slender they might actually be under all that fur.

He blinked again, when the winds whispered something in his ears, and realisation dawned. He'd seen Spring Sprites during his travels, although only twice as spring had begun to approach, and the winds had told him they served Ariko, the Spirit of Spring. What the winds told him now was that these were Winter Sprites, his servants, and he started to smile. He might have only seen two Spring Sprites, but that had been enough for him to tell they didn't actually do anything helpful for the season. They just seemed to exist for the express purpose of running around giggling like miniature, pointy-eared children with exceptionally big eyes and tiny noses. They were, to put it simply, cute, funny, and really rather useless at anything else.

Jack smiled at the sprites, crouching down to their level and holding out his hand to them.

"Hey there, I'm Jack Frost. The Spirit of Winter."

The cluster of sprites blinked at him, their black eyes wide and innocent amid their white fur giving them the cuteness of baby seals, and then all of them squealed in excitement and all of them charged at him to bury him under a pile of fur and hugs. He just had to guess that they'd been stuck down here at the South Pole for a long, long time without a Spirit of Winter to look to, and that by now having a master they were very very happy.

Jack eventually shooed them off him so he could get up, to which they then began bouncing up and down in the snow and skittering back and forth between him and the crevasse. They wanted him to follow, so he did, as the winds gently carried him and the sprites down to where a tunnel in the ice came into view.

The sprites landed in it, chattering away excitedly in whatever language it was they used as they led him along the tunnel. He was deep below the surface now, he knew, very deep, and yet a faint glint of daylight still seeped through the ice here. Or was it that the ice glowed?

Jack ran his hand along the rippled walls, still following the sprites, until at last they reached their destination and he stopped and stared in awe.

It was a massive cavern within the glacier, with stalagmites and stalactites of ice reaching between floor and ceiling. As soon as he set foot in it, a shiver of unknown recognition went through him, and from the air a gentle scattering of snowflakes began to fall. Whispering down and settling to carpet the floor of the cavern, and yet he somehow knew the snow would never become more than an inch or two deep.

Jack walked forward, rather than flying, feeling that somehow to rush would be to disrespect this place. He felt... at home here. This place was his, he just knew it, and that was confirmed when he reached a sort of plaza at the far side of the cavern.

It was a simple circular area, where no snow settled and where the ice was perfectly flat and smooth, and it was marked with an elaborate snowflake several feet in diameter. 'The Winter Sanctuary' was what a single tendril of wind whispered in his ears, and Jack smiled. The other Spirits of the Seasons had their special place to go to when they weren't needed, a place to go rest, and this was his.

He looked around, and up at the moonlight which had chosen now to reach through a hole in the ice above him which he hadn't realised was there. A hole through which no snow fell and no wind blew; the weather out on the glacier did not intrude down here. He smiled into that light, at the Man in the Moon, and then he began to laugh. This cavern was pretty, and big, and awe-inspiring, but it was also a bit boring... It was time to make it more fun.

~(-)~

Winter Sprites squealed in excitement, jumping up and down waving their arms in a sort of 'pick me! pick me!' motion. Jack laughed at that, stood atop the rather basic castle of sorts he'd made next to the Sanctuary Plaza. From the top of that structure, several looping slides of ice extended out and wove among the nearby stalagtites and stalagmites, and they were what the sprites wanted to ride.

And the way in which they rode them?

Jack grinned wickedly, flicking his staff over the fur of the next couple of 'lucky' furballs. Both of them were instantly coated in ice, rendered completely immobile, and yet beneath their icy covering they were giggling. Jack pushed them to the brink of one of the slides, and nudged them over the edge so that they whizzed away along the frigid track while the sprites still on the top of the building continued to jump up and down waving their arms. They'd been alone for so long, they adored his company and adored the games he came up with for them. But one thing kept distracting him now, after the months he'd been here waiting for the seasons to turn.

Autumn was half-done in the north, he could sense that. And as amusing as it was to freeze solid his all-too-willing little minions, so he could push them down increasingly elaborate ice-slides, one thought now intruded on his mind and heart.

It wasn't long now until winter could return to the north, not long until the first snow could fall on the village. He wanted to go home, to what he'd begun to think of as his pond... He wanted to see his sister.

~(-)~

Alaia Skyhawk: If you want to know how to picture the Winter Sprites, think of North's elves, with smaller ears, and cover them with white fur so thick they almost look like furry snowballs, before adding baby-seal eyes. Yep, they're cute :)