Chapter 11: Ember's First Memory
Ember let the silence stretch, heavy with the memory she’d just unveiled. Anna’s consciousness floated in a numb, horrified stasis within their shared mind. The steam in the bath had begun to dissipate, the water cooling around them.
“You see?” Ember murmured aloud, tracing a lazy pattern over Anna’s collarbone. “It wasn’t always about that.The fucking. It started… quieter. Softer. It started with a storm.”
She closed Anna’s eyes, and the room seemed to fall away, replaced by the flickering, visceral recall of an older memory. This one was sepia-toned with childhood, edged with the sharp, electric fear of a thunderclap.
“You were eight,” Ember began, her voice dropping to a whisper, as if not to scare the little girl in the story. “Terrified of thunderstorms. A real baby about it.”
In the memory-view, young Anna huddled under her own quilt, her red braids messy from tossing and turning. Another world-shattering boom rattled the castle windows. A whimper escaped her. Without a second thought, she was out of bed, her small feet pattering down the cold hallway towards Elsa’s room. The guards pretended not to see the little princess fleeing the storm.
“Elsa was eleven. Already putting on the brave face, the ‘future queen’ mask. But she was scared too. Not of the storm. Of herself. Of what she might do.”
The memory solidified. Young Anna pushed open Elsa’s heavy door. The room was dark, lit only by the frantic flashes of lightning. Elsa was sitting rigidly in the middle of her large bed, knees drawn to her chest, gloved hands clenched. The air around her crackled with a cold sharper than the one outside.
“Anna?” Elsa’s voice was thin, strained.
“Can I sleep with you?” little Anna pleaded, her words trembling.
A long pause. Elsa looked at her own hands, at the frost crystallizing on the velvet bedspread. She gave a tight, nervous nod.
Anna scrambled up, burrowing under the covers beside her sister. She immediately curled into Elsa’s side, seeking warmth. Elsa flinched at the contact, then slowly, hesitantly, put an arm around her.
“We fell asleep like that,” Ember narrated, a strange tenderness in her tone. “You, clinging to her. Her, holding onto you like you were the only anchor in the whole world. That’s when it happened. The first time we crossed over.”
The memory shifted. The perspective changed. It was no longer little Anna looking out from behind her own eyes. It was Ember, waking up inside the small, warm body. And across the pillow, staring back with wide, pale blue eyes, was Frost. Not yet fully formed, not yet fierce with desire, but there. A flicker of recognition in a child’s face.
“We just… looked at each other,” Ember said, her present-day voice full of wonder. “The storm was still raging. Lightning lit up her face. Frost lifted a hand—a small, bare hand—and looked at it. Then she looked at the window. She just… blew a gentle breath.”
In the memory, Frost pursed her lips and exhaled towards the window. A soft, shimmering wave of magic flowed from her, not a blast, but a blanket. It coated the glass, thickening, muting the furious flashes of light to a gentle, blue glow. The thunder’s roar became a distant, muffled rumble, as if someone had thrown a quilt over the sky.
“She calmed the storm.For me. For us. So we could sleep.”
In the bed, child-Ember reached out. Her small finger touched Frost’s cheek. Frost didn’t pull away. She leaned into the touch, her eyes closing for a second. Then she opened them, and they were full of a lonely, centuries-old understanding.
“Come here,” Frost whispered, her voice not quite Elsa’s.
They shifted closer under the covers. It was an innocent cling, two children in the dark, but the charge between them was something else entirely. A fundamental alignment. Ember tucked her head under Frost’s chin. Frost’s arms tightened around her, and a delicious, perfect coolness seeped from her skin, counterpoint to Ember’s natural warmth. It wasn’t cold. It was balance.
“We fit,” Ember sighed in the bath, a tear tracing a path down Anna’s cheek—whose tear, it was impossible to say. “Like two halves of a secret. That’s when I knew. I was made for her. This heat inside me… it was meant to temper her cold. We were safe. We were home. And then we fell asleep, really asleep, and you two woke up none the wiser. Just sisters who had weathered a storm.”
The memory dissolved, leaving Anna reeling in the silent bathwater. The innocence of it was somehow worse than the graphic later memories. It was a corruption of her most cherished childhood comfort.
“That’s the root,” Ember said, her voice turning practical, almost clinical. “That’s the first thread. Every night after that, we found each other more easily. The bond got stronger. The touches… less innocent.”
Anna found a sliver of will, a spark in the prison of her mind.You took that. You took a memory of my sister comforting me and you made it… yours.
“I didn’t take it,” Ember corrected sharply. “I was it. That warmth you felt? That was me.That safety she felt? That was Frost. You just borrowed the feeling. Like always.”
Ember stood up suddenly, water sluicing off Anna’s body. She stepped out of the tub, grabbing a plush towel and wrapping it around herself with an elegant twist. She padded back into the bedchamber, leaving wet footprints on the stone.
“Your hour isn’t up,” Ember mused, staring at Anna’s reflection in the dark window. “I could do so much with this time. Walk the halls.Visit the kitchens. Maybe pay a little visit to a certain ice queen’s chambers…”
No! Anna’s mental cry was a spike of pure panic.
Ember laughed. “Relax. I’m not that cruel. Today.” She turned, leaning against the window frame. “But you feel it now, don’t you?The separation. You’re Anna, who loves her sister. I’m Ember, who is loved by Frost. We’re not the same person. We share a skin, but we have different hearts.”
She pushed off from the window and walked to the dressing table, picking up Anna’s hairbrush. She began to drag it through the long, wet red hair, each stroke slow and deliberate. “The problem is, the line is blurring. You woke up in the middle of our business. You have my memories now. And I… I’m starting to want things during the day. I felt the sun on this skin today. I liked it.”
A deep, unsettling chill settled in Anna’s soul.
“This can’t last,” Ember said, meeting Anna’s gaze in the mirror. “One of us is going to have to… settle in. For good. And I have three years of practice being loved by her. You have a lifetime of being pushed away.”
She set the brush down with a final click.
“Think about that, little one. While you can still think for yourself.”
The hour wasn’t up, but Ember relinquished control, slipping back into the depths as suddenly as she’d arrived. Anna stumbled forward, her hands slapping against the dressing table, her own gasp loud in the silent room.She was back. Alone.
But the memory of the storm, the perfect fit of two lonely child-spirits in the dark, was etched into her now. It was a ghost in her bones, a sweet, poisonous truth. She looked at her own terrified face in the mirror.
The line was blurring. And she had never felt more alone.