Prologue

Under snow laden bows and twilight skies, winter’s grasp embraced the land and the Snow Queen reigned supreme. Crowned in icicles and clothed in a gown of frozen tears, she roamed the valley and the highest peaks, wandering like a lost spirit, forsaken and forlorn. Each sigh breathed from her turquoise lips blew bitter breezes that consumed warmth and comfort like a silent thief. She was the elixir of slumber, the bringer of hibernation, and the harbinger of death.

Across her vast landscape of crusted snow and empty limbs, there was an overpass of ice. Travelers from far-flung lands would come to cross this frozen bridge, for the land in which it led was a jeweled paradise, with fabled waterfalls of liquid gold and gates of shining crystal. The stories told of roads studded in glittering diamonds and rubies sprouting on thorny vines. There were pearls that formed like dew drops every morning and emerald stalks of grass that chimed in the sultry breeze. 

It was only in the height of winter, when the torrential rains froze in solid layers that the brittle overpass formed, crafted by the cruel whim of the Queen. She guarded the bridge mercilessly, like a dragon hoards its gold, luring travelers but allowing none to pass. Each season she collected a cache of shivery bodies, one by one, stacked underneath the ice. Keeping their souls in suspension, the Queen froze their beating hearts until the first thaw of spring, when the muscle beat one last time before it withered in the season of blossoming life.

Some people whispered that the Queen had been a woman once, forsaken and betrayed in love. They say the day her heart was broken, she flung herself into a snow storm and it froze into pieces, eternally sundered. Now she is forced to walk the earth in everlasting pain, arising each winter to spread her cold passions in the form of frosted death.