This is a regular column featuring original fiction by and for high school students, provided by Figment.com, an online community writing site for young people.
You met her at a ball, the ball your older sister, the Queen, threw to celebrate her inauguration into the highest position in the country. At first, all you could do was throw her glances across the floor teeming with dancers, the ladies’ ball gowns swirling and briefly obscuring this thing of beauty. She wasn’t dancing. She rejected any man asking for a dance. And there were many men asking for a dance.
So you crossed the floor, knowing that she couldn’t deny you; you were the prince.
The curve of her ruby lips as she smiled at your question made you stutter, and your stomach plummet. But she nodded and allowed you to lead her onto the dance floor.
She danced like an angel; and she was twice as beautiful. She laughed easily, she let you lead her, and you found that, inexplicably, unquestionably, you had fallen in love with this woman in white.
Her black, curly hair smelled so wonderful as you kissed her. Her lips were cold. She let you for a moment, then stepped back, teasing.
She asked to see you again. Of course, her heart-shaped face stunned you into nodding, but you would have nodded anyway. You loved her.
In a twirl of sparkling white silk, the mysterious, beautiful woman was gone as the dancers swarmed over you.
For a while, you met her out in the snow-covered gardens; she never seemed bothered by the cold. Her skin was always chilly, but she basked in the icy breezes that left you breathless.
You didn’t care. She captivated you.
After nearly a fortnight, she invited you to come to where she lived. You agreed, you had been wanting to see her every day since the night you met her.
You didn’t even know her name.
But love is blind that way, isn’t it?
So at midnight on December sixth, you met her in the gardens that were being freshly coated in falling snow. Her arms and shoulders were bare, as she was wearing the ballgown you had first seen her in. Her curly black hair was loose around her shoulders, falling to the small of her back. You thought that she had never looked more beautiful.
She took your hand, her palm icy in yours. Her skin was always cold, even when she didn’t seem to be. She always seemed in the perfect climate. Winter was her season. Ice was her element. It just made her that much more appealing to you.
The door was grey wood, as if it had petrified hundreds of years ago, but you didn’t care. Nor did you care that the door seemed to be jutting out of the side of a cliff. She kissed you, and all you really cared about, all you really saw, was her perfection, her alluring smile, her sparkling turquoise eyes.
You shivered suddenly, and she smiled in pity. She explained that once you witnessed the warmth inside her dwelling, you would never be cold again.
It sounded appealing to you. You nodded eagerly, and she stepped ahead, pushing open the door in the cliff. You followed her inside, preparing to be washed over with warmth.
But it was not so.
Icy wind and cold snow fell upon you, and you tried to back up, back outside, you realized the door was gone.
Your beloved stood before you, a smile on her beautiful face. It was not the smile you loved, but the opposite. It was demonic, evil, and you suddenly realized that she had tricked you.
She beckoned you with a finger, and you felt your feet shuffle towards her on their own account, following her through silver-blue rooms with white couches, chairs, fireplaces blazing with blue fire. You followed her through a bedroom with a queen-size pale blue bed, a carpet made of snow on the floor and a desk with several quills and papers stained with blue ink. You followed her into a cavernous room filled with ice statues of men.
Her freezing hands were gentle and delicate on your shoulders as she kissed you again, even as you tried to pull away.
From her fingertips, ice spread over your body, slowly, painfully, like a thousand knives piercing your flesh.
But you couldn’t scream. You felt her ice creep up your throat like vines, over your nose, over your eyes.
It was so cold.
Too cold for you to breathe.
But you were unable to shiver.
She had you gripped fast, and firm.
It was then that she pulled back from the kiss, smiling wickedly at what she had done to you.
The last thing you saw then, as your eyes iced over for eternity, was her turn her back to you, still smiling before her eyes left yours, and walk out of the cavern where her victims, now including you, would remain frozen.
She doesn’t have a heart. She has, deep within her freezing body, a carved rose made of the purest ice.
It was the rose that fooled you, and so many others.
It was the Snow Witch that will keep you with her.
Always.