In the Land of Fae ♔ (gxg)

3. ice

Blood dripped more furiously down the side of her forehead.

Her vision blurred, she blinked hard and reopened her eyes with hopes that what she thought she saw had only been a hallucination, but she was imbued with disappointment and pure, hot fear when she saw the creature that stood before her.

It was a woman—or so she assumed—but one not so human. Her eyes were crystals of light blue with cracks of white iciness running through them, like two spherical icebergs in her eye sockets. They seemed to glow, to encompass Nyx in their stare. The woman's hair, pulled up in an elegant style, was nearly white but not in the way an old lady's was. It looked as if it was meant to be blonde but had missed out on the golden pigment of Nyx's own hair and now nearly matched the snowy ground beneath her.

Her face looked as if it was supposed to be kind, but two pink lips above a svelte chin spread into some sort of sneer, one that threatened all kinds of deaths in its glare.

Even if her face had been kind, nothing could stop Nyx's rampant fear when her eyes locked onto the one thing that confidently assured her that the woman standing before her was not human—two large eagle-like wings, white as ice, originating from behind the woman's tall body at her back and spreading out behind her gloriously. At the very ends of the pure white wings, right at the tips of the feathers, were colors of icy blue that matched her eyes. The wings oozed power and strength, even if the woman's skin was immortally pale which, in a human sense, would mean she was frail and ill.

But this woman was nothing of the such. Silver rings, some with sapphires or light blue diamonds, sat on the fingers of her hands that were clasped at the front of her slender waist. She wore a light blue dress, silky and loose on her form, and the ends of it which faded into white fluttered around her bare feet as she stepped forward in the cold snow that, if she were human, would have given her bare toes the worst kind of frostbite.

Nyx's adrenaline pounded throughout her shuddering body at the sight of the creature walking forward, and she quickly tried to raise herself up off the ground, stumbling through the thick and endless snow as her head spun dizzily. She managed to find friction at her feet, and she used that friction to push herself up off the ground, stumbling around until she took ahold of the tree which, ironically, was the thing that caused her throbbing concussion.

The girl turned around to face the creature again, fresh blood trickling down her face and into the snow below her. She could feel it trailing down her cheek and dripping off the edge of her jaw, but she dared not make any sudden movements to wipe it off. She locked eyes with the creature who stood still and erect, her back perfectly straight and her shoulders wide with confidence and poise.

Nyx nearly jumped when she saw the woman-creature's lips break into a wide smile of pearly white teeth slightly sharpened at the ends, and the triangular geometry of her teeth made her only then realize that the woman's ears were also pointed at the ends. It was then that she noticed a sparkling crown sitting atop the woman-creature's head, one studded with diamonds and sapphires that matched her rings. The crown was delicate and beautiful, but it only confused Nyx more about the being standing in front of her.

The creature's laughter rung throughout the snowy forest, bouncing off the icy bark of the trees and right into Nyx's eardrums. It was despotic, so evil it made the girl's stomach drop all the way down to her numbed toes.

The creature finally stopped laughing, and Nyx noticed that her sparkling eyes were fixated on the bloody corner of her forehead. "And they think you aren't human," the creature finally spoke, her voice perfectly smooth and proper, as if she were royalty. "I mean, look at you. You're already bleeding out, and I haven't even laid a hand on you yet."