unraveled

what's in a name?

          The tent's structural poles were plucked out of the snow and placed in the nine-foot tall wooden box next to the luggage of other performers. In this box, sat the lives and belongings of all ten performers, the Master, the boy and Nia. That easily, everything they'd ever known, felt, owned was stuffed into a wooden box. The box was pulled by a black mule named Farsha and a bull. The Master sat in it on a wooden chair, with his legs The boy glared at him with an intensity enough to make him fall off the box. The performers trudged along behind it in a bundle, like a swarm of bees following a lump of honey. Ants walking on a white canvas.

          The boy had always lived in places where it snowed, so he knew how to work with the cold but this wasn't just cold, this was glacial. Unforgiving. Ice wrapped around his bones, freezing his blood. Woolen coats and knitted sweaters felt like paper-thin handkerchiefs. He clenched his teeth to keep them from chattering, but that just locked his jaw shut. He wondered if this was where the Ice Queen - from Nia's stories - lived, in such lonely isolation. The titanium-haired Queen was supposedly Queen Carac's older sister and the rightful queen. Hungry for the throne however Queen Carac staged a deplorable scene and claimed that her sister had fallen in love with the Prince of Vera and was spying on her own kingdom for him. Charged with treason, she was sent to the west of the country, jailed to live in her own company. They say she didn't accept her exile and instead fled away and captured a Witch of the West, threatening her to form a spell that would bring out the real truth and her sister, the now Queen Carac would be lawfully punished. It just so happened that the Witch worked in secret alliance with the Queen Carac and instead cursed her with powers of ice and frost. Terrified by herself and her own powers and their extent, the older sister finally accepted her exile and she hasn't been seen ever since. The witch's curse would be broken under impossible circumstances - she'll only ever come out of hiding when she hears her true love call out for her, his voice a key to her locks. The moment she saw his face, her powers would turn from a curse to a blessing - she would become an almost god, unbreakable, mighty. Her powers would not become a thing to fear but to cherish. They would no longer be restricted to frost and ice and become raw power that could be applied to anything that was everything. The boy trudged along deciding that if he were the love of her life, he would convince her to remodel this place - brush away the snow, add some green grass, fluterring butterflies and flowing lakes with the homely warmth of melted butter. He walked past the stories and the Ice Queen with each footprint left in the snow, as his brain refocused on the frost and the cold.

Gods damn it!

He quickly searched for another distraction to think of.

          He clutched his hands around himself, holding on tightly as if keeping himself from falling apart and spilling into frozen pieces on the snow. With each step that he left pressed into the snow, he made a decision to live, to not give up yet. Shades of alabaster and ivory and pearl white swirled around them like butterflies chasing after each other. The sun stood trapped behind a layer of white clouds that spread from end to end of the horizon, an angel trapped. Each breath seared his lungs. Icicles hung on his eyelashes like stalacites. His ears threatened to fall off. The fluttering of tent flaps from the box was the only sound in the arctic hell. Nia walked a few paces ahead of him, he could see her entire figure tremble and shake. Familial love and empathy bit at his heels as he fastened his pace and caught up with her. Without a word, he slipped a hand around her shoulders and pulled her close. She looked up in question. And he hated himself at the sight of her face, for ever letting her look that way when he was alive, when he was standing there right next to her. Masked in periwinkle and sangria purple, her face was a frozen portrait of pain and some other indescribable feeling that punched an icicle into his already numbed heart. He painfully managed to move his jaw and explain in a whisper of a voice that under different circumstances he would have associated with a demon of hell. It sounded as if it were beaten up, the syllables bullied and battered, the vowels torn in places. "Body heat."