One Word Prompts

Freeze - Winter's Gate

She stepped into the cavern, her foot sinking into the layer of frost which covered the entire floor. Stalagmites and stalactites of ice built glistening pillars around the room. Crystals frozen deep within the ice walls glowed pale blue and pink, illuminating the cavern of ice.

She walked slowly, torch in one hand, a blade of cold steel in the other. Behind her another young woman, her younger sister, followed close behind, a second torch held in a white knuckled grip.

"Will we really be safe here?" she asked, taking another step toward her older sister.

"The lord's men won't follow us here," she reassured her younger sister. She didn't look back, though. Instead, her eyes scanned the walls for movement or magic.

"Because they are scared of frost elementals?"

"Well... I mean..." What could she say? If the rumors were true, this was the home of frost elementals and lesser spirits of winter. It would be a lie to say the soldiers of the castle didn't give this area wide berth just to avoid this cave of ice and monsters. "No one has seen a frost elemental in nearly ten years."

"Hasn't it been ten years since the last time the lord tried to have this area developed?"

She sighed. "That may be true."

It was, in fact true. Ten years ago, the lord, the man whose men now hunted them, had wanted the region outside this cave cleared and a manor built. Before the first tree had even been felled, frost elementals, primordial spirits of ice, had rolled out from this cave as a freezing mist. The mist had slipped into the lungs of the workers before any realized. Over half the work force suffocated, their lungs frozen solid, before any of the overseers realized what had happened. As panic spread through the remaining workers, the spirits manifested as men, eight feet tall, with clubs of ice for arms. They smashed any too slow to run away into frosty, bloody piles.

But, recounting this story to her already trembling younger sister was hardly good for moral. Besides, if the lord got them, they would hardly fair any better. The possible death and dismemberment of the cave was far better than certain demise they faced if any of their hunters caught them and dragged them back.

"We just need to hide here until nightfall," she added. "His men won't go out in the forest after dark. We can slip away then."

Her sister nodded meekly, but she could tell she wanted to point out why the soldiers wouldn't enter the forest at night. Whether her sister was thinking of the direwolves or the snow drakes, she couldn't say. She supposed it didn't matter. Both could kill them with a single blow, could take them down in a single lunge, could outrun them even on solid stone, to say nothing of the waist high snow bluffs.

They walked deeper into the cave, the temperature dropping with each step, the cold seeping through their winter coats, sinking down to their bones. Their torches flickered, as if the cold were trying to put out the flames itself.

"Do you think it's true?" her sister asked, her breath coming out in a cloud of moisture, freezing to her scarf around her chin almost immediately. "Do you think this is actually the gate to the Winter Court?"

She frowned. "The home of all winter Fae?" She shook her head. "That's just a story to scare small children into behaving during the winter."

"So, you don't think undines will pull us into the ice or redcaps will come and steal our fires?"

She almost laughed. "Have you ever really heard of that kind of thing happening?"

Frost elementals were one thing. Those undoubtedly lurked in the cold places of the world. But true Fae? They had left this world for the wells of magic, if they had ever existed at all.