Excerpt: The Snow Queen

In all the stories, she is beautiful.

They say that she lives in a castle of ice, the walls glass-like, minarets and turrets dancing in endless spirals. The walls are like the purest glass, a reflection without ripples, the a mirroring of the true self. She is served by silent bears dressed in white fur, their dark eyes the color of stone.

It is endless winter in her domain. Here, the sun refuses to shine, and so it is the moon that casts its white face across an ocean of dead water. The shadows are long in this land, thin and stretched, mere distortions of a changing land. No mountain here is the same, no hill or mound of snow remains constant. No snowflake ever has the same pattern. The snow here burns, the cold creeping inside the skin, between bone and blood, a deadly sleeping stillness.

Here, she sleeps, her pale curls rippling down goosefeather cushions, her slender body frozen out of time and space.

They say she cannot be awakened until he walks the land again.