Second Best

Chapter Six

Elsa woke the next morning feeling refreshed, though that could be more to do with the ice crystals crusted on the walls and ceiling than how she slept, which wasn't very well. It was completely normal for her, so she was used to waking up with a headache and groggy eyes after her nightly nightmare. It always tended to involve the same things, her hurting the people she loved, returning to her ice castle and becoming the monster her people had feared she would become. She liked to think that she'd proven her worth to them by now.

Strangely, this morning she'd woken feeling refreshed because she hadn't had the nightmare at all! She'd had nights where she could go half the night without the nightmare, but that was as long as she'd ever been able to go without it. She'd never had a night where she didn't have the nightmare at all, and now she was sitting on the edge of her narrow bed wondering why.

Why hadn't she had it, could it have something to do with the events of yesterday? She'd assumed that after the stressful events that had transpired the nightmares would be even worse than usual. She frowned as she thought over it some more, desperately trying to avoid the complaining of her stomach. Mentally she told it to shush so she could think.

Just at that moment, there was a knock on the door, but before she could fix her wayward hair, get to her feet and open the door, Olaf came bounding in in all his usual enthusiastic energy.

"Sorry to wake you, well actually I'm not because you need to see this!" he waddled his way over to her, jumping up onto the bed beside her to give her a brief hug before continuing to tell her something supposedly important that she was no longer listening to.

"Snow statues everywhere!" she tuned in just long enough to hear Olaf exclaim.

"What!" she screeched, hurting her own ears in the process, and probably Olaf's as well judging by the way he cringed in reaction to it.

"Yeah, there are snow statues everywhere, I thought maybe you might have done it?" Olaf asked, his face turned up toward hers, his carrot-nose askew like it pretty much always was.

She reached out to straighten his carrot, her mind elsewhere as she wondered what to say, what to do. Should she panic, or stay calm? She frowned as she thought of the last time she'd heard news like this, and what she'd done to Anna. She shook her head to clear it of the image, not even realising that Olaf was still talking in her distracted mental state.

Maybe that was why she hadn't had the nightmare? Because all her mental energy had been absorbed by constructing all those snow statues. She had to admit that she was curious though. She'd never inadvertently made something with her powers that she couldn't see or wasn't aware of on some level before and she wondered if they were as skillfully constructed as some of her other creations, such as her ice palace. She donated a little of her time and energy each day to maintaining it, just in case she may need it someday in the future as a hide out from the world and its often cruel inhabitants.

She got to her feet and walked over to the window, gently opening the dust covered curtains that ordinarily made her sneeze, but today she was far too distracted for that. And excited. Definitely excited about the prospect of something new she didn't know about her powers. She'd assmumed that there was a lot to learn about them now that she was willing to accept them and so was everyone else (mostly) but she had no idea of their extent!

Absent-mindedly she fixed her braid in the murky reflection provided by the window. When she finished she flicked it back over her shoulder and shifted her focus through the window, slightly shocked to see whole legions of snow soldiers lined up in rows in front of the palace gates. They were dressed in clothes like those of Roman centurions and somehow the snow was coloured! They bore an eerie resemblance to actual people, actual Romans that she and Anna had studied, separately of course, in their lessons all those years ago by their private tutor.