Cold-Blooded: A DC Universe Fanfiction (#Wattys2015)

Chapter 50: Yukie, Rose, Tim: The Breaking Storm

Before her daughter was even born, the first yuki-onna knew her child would also be a yuki-onna when she grew to womanhood, and when the time came, just as she had taught her how to sew hides together into garments, and how to bank a fire so the coals would last until the morning, she taught the girl how to feed, for without feeding she could not use her powers, and then how to race over the earth in the form of wind and call or cease snowstorms.

By that time, though, the yuki-onna had several children, both boys and girls, and all of them were as healthy, tall, and pale as their mother. Only the girls, though, could become yuki-onna. As time went on and she had grandchildren, her daughters' daughters were also yuki-onna, and sometimes the sons' daughters, too. After that it became hard to keep track of them. Also, her children and their children were mortal-they lived much longer than most humans, but eventually they died. Only she went on, although she moved back into the mountains or sought out other human settlements after she had lived in one place too long.

She lived a very long time, but at last there came a time when the world had changed so much it no longer made sense to her. She had loved, lived with and lost many consorts, borne many children, and the years piled up upon her like the snow upon the village roofs, until it seemed she might give way under the weight of all of them. She wanted to stop remembering, to be free of time and her body as she was long, long ago. Yet she could not, did not die.

So she went to the kitsune, and spoke to their kami. Inari told her this: you were the first of your kind, so you are the kami-yuki, the spirit of snow, and spirits do not die. There will always be a spirit of snow in the world, but it need not be you. Choose one of your daughters or granddaughters, take her up into the mountains, and-.

Yukie woke. She had seen all of that in a dream as if she were watching from the sky, and when she woke, she was in the sky. Flying? No. Not flying. She was the wind and the snow it drove before it. Her first reaction was not disbelief but panic. Am I dead? How do I undo this? I never wanted this!

In that initial fright, she roiled around in the storm, tearing over the rocks and whipping through the trees. No! NO! I WILL FIGHT THIS!

Then she saw a vivid patch of red tucked in between the rocks, and she swooped down to discover it was her ski pants and the rest of her clothing. Coalescing back into a human form was instinctive, and she found herself standing on the mountainside entirely naked but otherwise herself-other than that she too now looked as though she had been sculpted out of snow. Yet there was something changed in her, something missing, and she couldn't tell exactly what.

Picking up her ski pants, she shook the snow off them, then froze as she examined the stain, the darker red against the scarlet of the fabric. It was blood. Holding them up against herself, she frowned at where the stain would have been-and there were stains on the camisole, too. Yet her flesh was whole and unbroken, like unglazed porcelain.

Was there really any need to put the clothes back on? Traveling up to the peak as a gust of wind would be much easier than climbing up, inch by grudging, painful inch. There was only one thing she did not want to lose-the engagement ring Slade had given her. Well, if she zipped it into the belt pouch of the pants, and put them somewhere that they would not get lost or buried...

She could not find the ring. It was not in either of the hand wraps, or any of her other clothes, or anywhere around the spot where she had spent the night-nowhere she could find it, at least.

Another sadness, one last thing lost to her.

'We are not like other people. What we are, I do not know, but I was told, years ago, that if I wanted to know what I was and why, I should give up every earthly tie and ascend Mount Hakkoda before the plum trees blossom in the spring.' Those were her grandmother's words.