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Origins
The girl's mother woke her at night's darkest hour. She was an imposing woman, all sinuous muscle on a sturdy frame, and a face of hard edges and lines. High cheekbones. A sharp jaw. Icy blue eyes. She was a woman accustomed to unquestioned authority, and it showed in her poise and posture.
The ever present wind whispering through the narrow canyons of stark, bare stone and snow howled in the distance, a constant accompaniment to life in Andora. The girl brushed sleep out of her eyes and huddled beneath the thick white furs that made her bed as she sat up, blinking into the darkness.
Her mother stood in the door frame of their small home, silhouetted in pale, meager moonlight. She spoke, her voice not remarkable for being pleasant or harsh, but simply for its clarity and steely refusal to brook any disobedience.
"Get up, child. Follow me." The woman turned and strode wordlessly out of the circular hut, leaving the door open in her wake.
The girl rose, shivering in the now frigid air of her home, and rushed to don a thick sealskin coat, woolen gloves, fur lined boots and a heavy cloak with a deep cowl. She shuffled after her mother, awake enough to dimly acknowledge that this was foolhardy. The icy night claimed those that wandered into it unprepared. She took them, and not quickly.
She was greeted by the icy sting of wind, needles pricking against her skin. It seeped through her clothes, wriggling between layers of cloth to bite at her wrists and ankles. It gushed under her cowl, her cheeks, nose and ears rapidly taking on a rosy shade.
Her mother was waiting for her, nonchalantly standing knee deep in a fresh bank of powder. She looked the young girl over and pursed her lips.
"No. No coat. No gloves." She paused for a brief moment, her expression softening in a reluctant concession to motherly instinct. "Keep your boots."
The child made a soft sound of protest but didn't hesitate in shedding her cloak, wriggling out of her coat and setting her mittens aside. She had never challenged her mother, but had never needed to in order to know how very badly it would end for her.
The pair walked in silence interrupted only by the moaning wind and the faint rustle of branches of gnarled trees desperately eking out an existence amidst the snow and ice and jagged rocks. The young girl struggled through snows as high as her thigh, stumbling and falling, picking herself up and hurrying to catch up. Her mother drifted along carelessly, parting the powdery white ground cover with effortless ease.
Though the moon was merely a sliver high in the sky, it was light enough to see by against the white ground. Rugged hills made smooth by the blanket of wintery white atop them stretched out into blackness, dotted here and there by the occasional tree or stone or snow-covered hut.
They walked only a short time, maybe ten minutes, and were already a ways outside the small village. The older woman seemed unaffected by her surroundings despite her minimal attire: a simple white dress with blue trim and a wide silver belt with an ice axe threaded through it. But the short walk was enough to start the girl shivering uncontrollably, and she fell to her knees. Her woolen nightgown may as well have been absent for all the protection it offered from the chilling elements.
The girl let a quiet whimper of protest escape her lips. “I c..can't go on. I can't, I'm s..sorry.”
Her mother offered a soft grunt in return. “Winter will spread across all lands and all seasons. There will be no reprieve.”
The child looked up, wind snagging her dark locks and whipping them wildly about, and stared wide eyed at her mother.
She continued. “To survive, you must accept Her embrace. You must prove yourself worthy.” She crouched, bringing herself to eye-level with her child, and chanted sibilant praises to her goddess into the breeze. She extended a hand and a single snowflake drifted down to rest on her palm. It was followed by another, then another, each new flake adding to those before until they coalesced into a solid sphere of ice the size of her fist. She offered the globe to the girl, who accepted it without question.
“Hold this against your flesh until it has melted to nothingness. Do not come home beforehand.” With that, she departed, her mane of coal hair shimmering in dark blues in the frosty moonlight.
The fist of ice was a heavy weight in the girl's small hands. Her fingers clung and stuck to the ice as she passed it from one hand to the other, balling the other hand into a small fist for warmth. It wasn't going to work, she realized. Her fingers would be black and frozen through before even a fraction of the sphere had melted away.
She pressed the ice to her chest instead, hugging it close. It started as a cold pain on her skin. A slow, throbbing ache that spread with glacial speed, but also glacial inevitability. A narrow stream of melt-water trickled down her chest, seeming almost warm in comparison.
The cold spread, sinking into her flesh and bone, searing. She gasped small puffs of white mist, the moisture in her breath freezing into tiny crystals that bit against her skin like sand in the wind. She sobbed quietly, tears rolling down her cheeks to join the water flowing down her chest. She sobbed the pain, the cold, the dark, the howling wind and freezing night.
The ice melted, slowly, surely. Each moment passed in growing agony. A pain that burned in her bones and made her skin numb. Hours passed, and the girl stopped crying. There seemed no point to it. No one would come to help her. No one would take the pain and wrap her in warm pelts. She was alone.
The realization kept her going, minute after minute, hour after hour. Pain gave way to numbness. The sphere of ice shrank, first to the size of an egg, then to the size of a marble, then it was gone.
In the early hours of dawn, the girl stumbled through the pelts covering the door to her home, her eyes red and watery, her face streaked with tears, her hair with building snow and ice, her nose running. She had survived. Every fiber of her being ached, but she has endured. It was enough.