VELVETEEN vs. Santa Claus #4
She didn’t mean to fall asleep. She didn’t want to fall asleep.
Sleeping felt too much like accepting the idea of her new reality, admitting that this was the way things were now, and that she couldn’t change them.
But she was tired, and her eyelids were heavy, and she found herself closing them for just a moment.
Everything went away. Maybe it was better that way.
* * *
Santa Claus walked through the village, shoulders slumped, eyes trained toward the dancing lights overhead.
Those lights had always seemed endless to him before, an invitation to a thousand nights of wonder, a thousand days of endless, childlike joy.
Now they looked like bleached streaks across a bitter sky, and he wondered if he had done things poorly.
Perhaps sending Jackie to recruit Velveteen had been a poor move, manipulative, unworthy of him—but he had been thinking of Winter.
The Snow Queen and Jack Frost would want to stand aside eventually, and while the Snow Queen had had her heir, Jack had never had his own.
Velveteen had been intended to stand for him. And now…
Now even if they won, the victory would be ashes and coal dust in his mouth.
Nothing ever came without a price. He, who was the generosity of the world, should have known that better than anyone.
But somehow, he had allowed himself to forget, to fall prey to the lie of his own omniscience, and now Winter was going to pay the price.
Velveteen hated him. Whether she could come back from that, could learn to love him again, was anyone’s guess.
As for the rest, well. All choices have consequences.
Even the ones that were forced upon the people who made them.
He just hoped that one day, all of those who followed him could find it in themselves to forgive him.
* * *
Lucy stepped nimbly out of the trees, following the tracks of Velveteen’s snow army—and hadn’t that been clever of the little animus, to turn the flesh of Winter itself to her cause!
Why, Lucy had seen supplicants come and go, each of them bending their powers toward the cold, but she’d never seen anyone try that little trick before.
No matter how short Velveteen’s stay turned out to be, it was certainly going to be interesting.
The Northern Lights were splashed wildly across the sky, blue and green and gold and purple.
Lucy tilted her head to the side, watching them dance for a moment before she said, “All right: everything’s in place.
If there’s any chance she’ll stay, she’ll stay because she’s grown too cold to dream of leaving.
Not sure that’s how I would have chosen to recruit a powerful animus, but it’s not my problem. What do you want me to do next?”
“She feels she has no friends here,” said a voice from the trees behind her. Lucy turned to find Aurora standing there, in her gown of ever-shifting light. “Don’t encourage her to thaw, but encourage her to trust you. Be the friend she needs in Winter.”
“But also the friend that Winter wants me to be,” said Lucy.
She had been with the season longer than almost anyone: longer even than the current incarnation of Santa Claus.
She had seen Snow Queens and spirits of plenty come and go, and while she did her best not to be jaded, she knew what was expected of her.
Lucy had been able to thrive in Winter for as long as she had because she did not fight it.
“Yes,” said Aurora. “Even if she doesn’t choose to stay, we’ll benefit from having her for the time we have. It should be long enough to shore up a few walls, repair a few defenses. But mark me: I want her. I want her strength, and I want her anger. If you love me, do what you can to acquire them.”
Lucy nodded. “Yes, ma’am,” she said, and watched as Aurora dissolved into light. Then, smiling, she turned and started down the hill into Santa’s Village. She had work to do.
* * *
The Snow Queen walked in the House of Mirrors, and she walked there all alone.
Frost followed her footsteps—not her husband, but the cold that shared his name.
It drew delicate designs across the floor, filigree and ferns and beautiful patterns that dissolved unseen.
The Snow Queen never looked back. Her eyes were all for the mirrors around her, filled with pictures of lives she had never lived, choices she had never made.
In some of them, another woman wore the mantle of Snow Queen, a woman who had taken the position when she had melted, or made the choice to thaw.
In others, she walked with her son at her side, a son who had never been born in this reality.
In most, as in the present moment, she walked alone.
She stopped in front of a dead mirror, its surface clouded over so that it cast no reflection.
Placing her fingertips gently against the surface of the glass (which immediately began to freeze, for she was the Snow Queen, after all), she bowed her head, and wept until her tears were done.
Then she straightened, turned, and walked away.
She never looked back. There was nothing there for her to see.