The storm is over.
But the silence it leaves in its wake is heavier than snowfall, thicker than the mist that once guarded the forest.
The trees stand frozen, their branches laced with frost so heavy they sag under the weight. The ground is buried in ice, smooth and glass-like, a reflection of a world shattered. No wind stirs, no birds sing. Even the spirits have gone quiet, retreating into the unseen folds of the land.
Elsa stands at the heart of it all, her breath curling like ghostly tendrils in the bitter air. Her hands are numb, but not from the cold. She cannot remember the last time she felt warmth. Not in her body. Not in her heart.
Her mother's voice no longer hums lullabies. Her father's sturdy presence is gone, no longer a shield against the weight of the world. Anna's laughter—sharp, clear, endlessly bright—has been stolen from her, leaving behind an echoing void.
The warlords are statues now, their bodies encased in a prison of ice, their weapons frozen mid-swing. The prince who led them, with his gleaming armor and hunger for conquest, lies beneath the thickest sheet of frost, his features locked in an expression of rage and disbelief. He will never move again.
And Jack—
Elsa's breath catches. She stares at the frozen lake, its surface dark and unyielding. He had gone after Anna. Had tried to reach her. And then—
She knew the ice took him.
The moment replays in her mind, burned into her soul—Jack's outstretched hand, his eyes widening as the ice beneath him shattered, swallowing him whole. His voice, calling their sister's name, swallowed by the storm. The world, blurring in her grief, until there was nothing left but the cold.
She screamed.
And the storm had answered.
Now, she stands in the stillness, staring at the lake, her fingers trembling. Jack is gone. Anna is gone. The world is frozen in her sorrow.
But then, she remembers hearing a crack—soft, almost imperceptible.
Elsa's gaze snaps to the ice.
The shadow that shifted and stirred beneath the frozen lake.
And then, impossibly, the frost fractures. A hand—pale, long-fingered, eerily untouched by death—breaks the silence frozen atmosphere, reaches out to her, grasping for any surface he could find.
Elsa stumbles backward, her heart hammering.
The figure that pulled itself from the lake is not the same boy who fell in. Jack's skin is paler than before, nearly translucent, his veins laced with frost. His lips are the color of a winter sky, his silver-white hair slicked back with melting ice. But his eyes—his eyes, somehow, are the same, the only part of him that remains untouched by death.
His gaze finds Elsa's, searching. His mouth parts, as if to speak, but no breath comes.
And then—
The frost at his fingertips flares to life, and the wind shifts. Snow curls around him, bending to his presence.
Elsa, at that moment, had no idea what had happened.
Jack is no longer just her brother. No longer just a boy with a mischievous grin and a heart too big for his own good.
He is something else now. Something like her.
The spirits, once silent, whisper again.
Elsa tightens her grip on her own arms. The weight of the moment presses down on her like the coldest winter. She has lost everything. And in her grief, she has created something new, something unnatural.
Jack steps onto the ice, testing the weight of himself, his new existence. He turns to her, snow dusting his lashes. His voice, when it finally comes, is hoarse, distant, edged with something ancient.
"…Elsa?"
She lets out a shaky breath.
He is here. But at what cost?
The spirits murmur their warnings once more. The world feels out of balance.
And deep within the frozen silence, something is waiting to break.
The mist rises like a living thing.
It does not come in waves or in a slow crawl—it falls, sudden and absolute, like a great lung exhaling, like the sky itself has lowered onto the land. It seeps into the trees, curls around the frozen ruins of the village, drowns the river in silver. It is thick, impenetrable, and endless.
And it does not let them go.
Elsa stands at the edge, where the world used to be.
She reaches out, fingers trembling. The mist recoils. It does not touch her, but it does not part either.
A barrier.
A prison.
A judgment.
Behind her, the forest is silent.
Not the silence of peace, but the silence of grief, of absence.
Her father is gone.
Her mother is gone.
Anna is gone.
The village, once filled with voices and laughter, with the warmth of firelight and the hum of spirits, is hollow. Frozen bodies remain where they fell and where they stood, scattered among shards of ice and abandoned weapons, forever locked in the moment of their last breath.
Elsa does not weep.
She has nothing left to break.
The spirits have turned their backs on her.
She feels them in the air, watching, whispering, waiting. Their presence is not warmth, nor comfort, but something distant, something cold.
They have sealed her away.
And perhaps they are right to do so.
Her hands are unsteady as she clenches them into fists, as if that alone will keep the storm at bay. But the frost still lingers beneath her skin, restless, hungry, aching to be released.
She has become something else.
Something the spirits fear.
Something she cannot undo.
And she is not alone.
Jack stands behind her, watching her with unreadable eyes. His usual smirk is gone, his playful ease replaced with something sharper, something colder. He moves differently now, like a shadow given form, like a breath of winter carried by the wind.
He is not the same boy who once laughed under the northern lights, who once teased her out of her worries when Hiccup had been away.
He is something else too.
Something she has made.
He does not ask why she does not cry.
He only tilts his head toward the mist, arms crossed. "So… what now?"
Elsa exhales, the cold curling from her lips like a ghost.
The answer is simple.
She survives. As the forest does not welcome them. As the spirits do not speak.
The other villages that came into view remains frozen, untouched, its people preserved in ice, as if the frost is unwilling to let them go.
Elsa and Jack move through the silence like echoes of something that once was, their footprints the only fresh marks upon the frostbitten ground.
It should be unbearable.
But Elsa feels nothing.
Or perhaps, she feels too much.
The cold inside her no longer burns. It does not sting, does not bite. It has settled into her bones, into the marrow of her being. It does not leave. It does not falter.
She no longer needs warmth.
Neither does Jack.
At first, he plays at being the same. He jokes, he hums, he tosses snowflakes into the air. But his voice does not reach where it once did. His laughter does not fill the spaces between them.
His eyes are too sharp, too distant.
Jack still feels her presence, the way the ice stirs when she moves, the way the frost curls toward her like a tide drawn to the moon. When he focuses, he swears he can hear something—her breath, her heartbeat, the pulse of her magic as if it were his own.
The bond is unspoken.
It is unbreakable.
It does not let him go.
And neither does she.
Perhaps, she never will.
The seasons turn, but the forest does not change.
The mist does not thin.
The bodies do not thaw.
The world outside moves on without them.
And the forest has forgotten what time is.
No sun breaks through the mist, no clear sky marks the passing of days. The trees stand in perpetual twilight, their branches heavy with frost, their roots drinking from frozen streams. Seasons turn elsewhere, but here, they are trapped in an eternal hush.
Elsa walks through it like a ghost.
She does not count the days anymore.
Perhaps weeks have passed. Perhaps months. Or years. The stillness makes it impossible to know.
She wakes. She breathes. She walks.
The village remains untouched. Ice coats every wooden beam, every fallen shield, every frozen face locked in their final expressions. Sometimes, she stops and stares at them, trying to remember what their voices sounded like, what warmth felt like.
But memory is a fickle thing.
It fades at the edges.
So, she keeps moving around, visiting the same places
Jack is always near, lingering like a shadow, like a second frost that refuses to melt. He does not speak of the past, does not say her name the way he used to. He watches her, waiting.
For what, neither of them knows.
The spirits do not show themselves.
Not the fire spirit, not the wind, not the earth giants that once shook the ground beneath their feet.
Even the river runs quiet, its surface locked in a thick sheet of ice, as if it, too, has been silenced.
The silence unsettles Elsa in ways she cannot name.
It was never meant to be like this.
The forest once breathed with life. The spirits once danced at her fingertips, whispered their secrets to her, warmed her when she was cold.
Now, they are silent.
And silence is its own kind of punishment.
It presses down on her shoulders, heavier than any crown she has ever worn.
This is what she has become.
A Queen of ice and quiet.
A girl who lost everything.
A girl the spirits no longer trust.
Jack finds her at the edge of the river one evening, standing so still she might have been carved from frost.
"You're brooding again," he says. His voice is lighter than the air, but there's something else beneath it—something that wasn't there before.
She does not answer.
Jack sighs, rubbing his arms though the cold does not bite him anymore. "You know, I used to love winter."
Elsa lifts her head slightly, her gaze still locked on the ice. "Used to?"
He chuckles, but it's humorless. "Well. It's different now, isn't it?"
She doesn't ask what he means.
Because she knows.
Winter used to be fleeting. A season, a breath, a whisper. It used to come and go, used to soften in the presence of spring, used to melt when the world asked it to.
Now, it lingers.
Now, it does not leave.
Jack sits beside her, drawing lazy patterns in the ice with his fingertip. "Do you think the world still remembers us? Or anyone else out there?"
Elsa exhales slowly, watching the frost curl from her lips.
She does not know how to answer that.
But she thinks of her mother and father, trapped in ice. She thinks of Anna slipping away from them. She thinks of Hiccup, of Valka, of the way their dragon sailed and disappeared beyond the mist.
She thinks of the warlords, frozen beneath her grief, their bodies preserved in a way they did not deserve.
She thinks of the spirits.
Their punishment.
Their silence.
"I don't know," she whispers.
Jack hums, resting his chin on his knees. "I don't think I'd want to know."
They sit there for a long time, two forgotten souls in an endless winter.
And the mist does not move.