This Icy Force Both Foul and Fair Has a Frozen Heart Worth Mining

Close Encounters of the Snowy Kind

We moved on and soon came across a mountain clearing. However, this mountain clearing was very different from any other I had ever been in before now. 

The fresh powdery snow blanketed every bit of the clearing like a frosted cake. The trees were all willows, and the branches had been turned to strings of icicles like you would see on a giant glass chandelier. The rising sun shone through the ice like stained glass windows and sparkled all around us. It was a stunning sight. Have I mentioned that I really love ice? 

I reached out to touch some of the hanging branches of the willow trees as we passed them and they all jingled together like wind chimes as I did so. Sven got a kick out of this and immediately began knocking them about with his antlers and skipping about in pure joy. Anna looked around the clearing in awe. "I never knew winter could be so beautiful," she remarked softly. 

I was just about ready to agree with her when I suddenly became aware of someone or something else doing it for me. It was a bit distant, but it was definitely a voice of some kind. "Yeah, it really is beautiful," the voice said. 

I looked at Anna, and I saw clearly that she could hear it, too. I was somewhat relieved to know that I was not crazy. "But, it's so white," the voice continued to say. Where in the world was that voice even coming from, at all? Anna and I both looked around for the owner of the voice, but as far as I could see there was no one in the clearing besides Anna, Sven, and myself. Neither Anna nor I were talking, so that left... only Sven. But, he could not possibly have been the owner of that voice. I looked in his direction, anyway. 

"You know, how about a little color. I'm thinking like maybe some crimson, chartreuse." Sven stood right behind us with his antlers completely tangled up in the icicled willow tree branches. He looked content with the branches on his antlers, but his lips were not moving to express his content so he could not have been the source of the voice. 

"... How about yellow?" the voice continued on. Only it suddenly seemed closer than before to us, which could have only meant that whoever or whatever it belonged to was not very far from where we were at the moment. "No, not yellow. Yellow and snow?" Then, the voice let out a 'brrr' like it was disgusted with the very idea of yellow snow. "No go!" 

Anna and I simultaneously looked at a snowman that was standing right behind us. What the hey? Had that snowman always been there? We both stared at the sight of it. As if a snowman appearing at random was not weird enough, it suddenly turned its head toward Anna and started to speak. "Am I right?" it asked. It spoke with none other than the very same voice we had been hearing that whole time. 

Anna screamed and kicked its head. The head flew right off of its body and landed in my arms. It smiled up at me. It was easily the weirdest thing I had ever seen in my life. "Hi!" it said cheerfully. 

A disembodied head of a snowman talking to me. Yep, definitely high on the freaky scale. "You're creepy," I told it. Then, I tossed it back to Anna. 

"I don't want it," she said, tossing it right back to me. What? And I do? 

I threw it back to her. "Backatchya," I said. 

"Please don't drop me," the head pleaded. 

"No," Anna cried, throwing it back to me. 

"Come on, it's just a head," I told her, tossing it right back to her. Granted that was the very same reason as to why I was equally as freaked out even by the very idea of it, too, but better her than me. 

That was when the snowman's body suddenly began walking towards Anna, flailing its arms around like a blind man. "Alright, we got off to a bad start," the snowman's head said from within Anna's arms.