The Cold Empress

Chapter 1: Underground

The Calm Before the Storm; A Hundred Years Later

The human population of Arendelle was on the verge of extinction; the people's lives filled with hypocrisy and their hearts tainted black with malice and covetousness.

Arendelle had been pronounced isolated for the past hundred years; and it was erased from the map on its twenty-fifth year of the curse. Trading was instantly cut off, livestock was out of the question, and the last tree in the kingdom had withered days after the befalling of the curse.

Weeks passed and the kingdom was in grave danger; there began with a strange sighting of a huge, monstrous, ice-powered beast.

It made its way into the domain; the people taken in shock and still ignorant of what exactly was happening. Lives were taken, houses and living quarters were either frozen solid, or crushed under the beast's gigantic feet. Hope seemed frail and null back then; until the most likely savior from a foreign land came.

The sweeping, majestic and kind Hans of the Southern Isles saved the kingdom with the only option left available; magic. He was crowned king after that; but sadly, the genuine truth on how the king slew the monster and started the construction of the great magical wall barrier was lost throughout the years; some say he was a powerful mage himself and brought the barriers up overnight while others say that the barriers were brought up by sheer human labor, which they later cast a spell on it.

And that was the very beginning of the reign of king Hans' bloodline.

The surrounding perimeter of Arendelle was then, therefore filled with various creatures of the cold and ice out for blood; their numbers growing largely within the passing years, and the only thing that kept the creatures out of the vicinity was the great mighty wall barriers.

Magic was slowly accepted in the society, but despite facing the predicament of the eternal winter curse, the townspeople still continued their hunt for mages within the walls of Arendelle under the order of the royal lineage. The ascertained mages were captured and taken into the royal castle; kept in the cold, dark dungeons as slaves who produced crops with their magic while others were sent out the barriers of the kingdom for a kill-or-be-killed way of exile.

Majority of humanity's intelligence and scope of reality was, indeed, very low. The governing royal family's system was rotten; with power, money, luxuries and influence the main basis of people's life as a villager. The poor and poverty-stricken were found near the walls, where sounds and terror of the barrier breaking any second filled literally every waking second of their lives, while the rich and greedy were in the center, away from disaster and drunk with sloth and grandeur.

In the careless wake of the royal lineage then formed a place within the kingdom of Arendelle full of crime, shadowy business, and sometimes, magic-related occurrences. This was where most of the mages in hiding were being captured, where most of the kingdom's most dangerous assailants were found and still being hunted. The underground society of Ravenloss.

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"Blondie," his cold, monotonous voice filled the atmosphere whilst his startlingly blue eyes focused and burned through the alarmed golden-haired girl's eyes and soul.

There he was; Jack Frost, in his usual all-black attire, standing before her very eyes while his unusual, stringently clean and refreshing scent assaulted her senses.

"Yes?" She breathlessly replied, already feeling the oncoming weakness in her knees and her grip on the black cloak slightly loosening. She stared at his frost-like white hair, wanting nothing but to ran her fingers through them and feel if it was, indeed, as unusually soft as it looked.