Chapter 6: The Summit
The air in the room didn’t just feel cold; it felt brittle, like a single word could shatter it into a million lethal pieces.
Anna’s question hung between them, naked and terrifying.Elsa opened her mouth.Nothing came out. Her throat was sealed shut by permafrost. She watched as Anna’s gaze, that painfully open and trusting gaze, scanned her face, then dropped to her own hands, twisting together. The silence stretched, a physical weight.“I woke up,” Anna started again, the words tumbling out in a nervous rush. “And my body felt… different. Really good-different, which was weird, and also kinda wrong? And I had this…” Her fingers fluttered to the side of her throat, where a faint, bluish mark, like a smudge of cold, was just visible beneath her freckles. “And I remembered bits.Feelings.You.But not you. A version of you that’s all… sharp edges and whispery.And I felt so happy. And then I felt like I was going to throw up.”
Elsa finally found a sliver of her voice, thin and cracked. “You should leave.”
“No.” Anna took a step forward, then stopped, as if hitting an invisible wall.“Elsa, we have to talk about this. Something’s happening to us.”
“Nothing is happening,” Elsa said, the queenly authority automatic, a suit of armor she clawed into. She stood up, turning her back to Anna, facing the window.“It was a dream.A strange, vivid dream. Shared stress from the coronation, the eternal winter, the thaw… it’s trauma manifesting. It’s not real.” She was convincing no one, least of all herself.
“It felt real.” Anna’s voice was closer now, soft but stubborn.“Was it magic? Is this… another part of your magic?”
A bitter laugh, sharp as an icicle, escaped Elsa. “My magic makes ice and snow. It doesn’t make… that.” She couldn’t even name it. The memory of Frost’s possession, of the crude, visceral pleasure, was a stain on her soul.
“Well, mine doesn’t do anything except maybe overheat a sauna, so it’s gotta be yours,” Anna said, and the clumsy pragmatism of it was so Anna that Elsa almost crumbled.“Look, we can’t just ignore it. I found this.”
Elsa heard the rustle of paper.She forced herself to turn.
Anna was holding a sheet of parchment, covered in a familiar, elegant script—Elsa’s own. But the words… they were not her own. They were a poem, or maybe a diary entry, written with a feverish intensity.
“Her warmth is not like the sun’s, which demands and drains. It is a hearth-fire, banked and deep, and I am the starving woman who crawls from the blizzard, drawn to its ruinous glow. I will drink her heat until my veins burn.I will frost her skin until she sighs my name. She is mine in the silent hours, and this truth is a glacier carving its way through the bedrock of our waking lies.”
It was signed, with a flourish, Frost.Elsa stared at it. The possessiveness in the words, the raw need, made her physically ill. This was inside her.This lived in her hands, her mind, when she slept. “Where did you find that?”
“Tucked under your mattress,” Anna said quietly, not accusing, just stating a fact. “Ember… she must have left it for me to find.Or for you to find. I don’t know.They’re talking to each other. Through us.”
The practicality Elsa was clinging to began to solidify into something else: a dreadful, fascinating logic. “They have awareness.They have memory. They act with intention.”
“And they’re in love,” Anna blurted out, then clapped a hand over her mouth, her eyes wide as if she could snatch the words back.The word love detonated in the space between them. It was too big, too wrong, too perfect. It didn’t sanitize what was happening; it made it infinitely more complex.This wasn’t just some magical prank or perversion. It was a relationship.Elsa sank back into the armchair, the fight draining out of her. “What do we do?” she whispered, not to Anna, but to the universe.
Anna moved then, crossing the room to perch on the edge of the large bed, a respectful distance away. She chewed her lip.“Okay.Practical steps.One: we agree this is actually happening. Two: we figure out what they want.”
“They want each other,” Elsa said, the truth sour on her tongue.“Yeah, but like… to what end?Do they want to take over? Are they going to get stronger? Is this going to, I dunno, bleed into the daytime?” Anna’s pragmatic tone was belied by the slight tremor in her hands.
Elsa focused on that, on the problem.It was safer than the feeling.“I don’t know. Frost… she’s clever.She hid this from me for over a year. But she’s getting reckless.Leaving evidence. She wants to be known.”
“Maybe she’s tired of hiding.” Anna looked down at the poem in her hands. “I mean, if you loved someone, and the only time you could be with them was when your other self was asleep… that’d be pretty frustrating.”
“Don’t,” Elsa warned, a sharp spike of anger piercing her dread. “Don’t empathize with them.This isn’t a romance, Anna. It’s an infestation.A division of our selves. We are not whole.”
“Are we sure?” Anna asked, her green eyes lifting to meet Elsa’s. “What if… what if they’re not separate? What if they’re just the parts of us we don’t let out?”
Elsa thought of Frost’s possessive rage, her coarse language, her unrestrained hunger. “Then I am a monster,” she stated flatly.
“And I’m a slut,” Anna fired back, with a defiant shrug.“Ember is… not shy.At all. And you know what?Waking-me kinda wishes I had some of that confidence. Maybe that’s the point.”
“This isn’t about confidence!” Elsa shot to her feet, her control snapping. A wave of frost flashed out from her, crawling up the window panes in intricate, violent patterns.“This is about violation! I did things to you—to you, Anna—that I would never, ever consciously do. Things a sister should never even think.” Her breath came in ragged clouds.“That is not a ‘hidden part’ of me. That is a sickness.”
Anna didn’t flinch from the cold or the anger. She just looked at her sister, really looked, and Elsa saw not fear, but a profound, weary sadness.“You didn’t do anything, Elsa.Frost did. I didn’t do anything.Ember did. They used our bodies, but they’re not us. Not exactly.”
She stood up and walked to the frost-etched window, placing her warm palm flat against the frozen glass. A melt-pattern spread from her touch, a blooming flower of clarity on the blurred, cold world outside.
“We have two choices,” Anna said, her reflection serious in the clearing patch of glass.“We can fight them. Try to lock them away, shut them down.Maybe find a magic solution.Or…” She turned, leaning back against the sill. “We can try to talk to them.”
Elsa stared at her. “How?”
“We go to sleep.On purpose.And we try… we try to remember. We try to stay aware, just enough to communicate.” Anna’s expression was a mixture of terror and determination. “We ask them what they want.”
The proposal was insane. Deliberately surrendering to the very force that had upended their world.It was also the first proactive idea anyone had voiced.
Elsa felt Frost stir somewhere in the depths of her psyche, a serpentine coil of anticipation. Yes, the feeling seemed to whisper.Come and see.
She hugged herself, suddenly feeling very small, very young.Not a queen, just a girl who was terrified of what she contained. She gave a single, tight nod.“Okay,” Anna said, her voice soft.“But not tonight. We’re both too fried.We need… a plan.And a safe word. For if it goes wrong.”
“A safe word?” Elsa echoed, numb.“Yeah. Something we’d never say normally.” Anna thought for a moment, then a faint, grim smile touched her lips. “How about ‘chocolate’?”
Despite everything, a choked, watery sound that was almost a laugh escaped Elsa.It was so perfectly, ridiculously Anna. It was a tiny flame in the frozen dark.“Okay,” Elsa whispered. “Chocolate.”
Anna pushed off from the window and walked to the door.She paused, her hand on the handle, and looked back. The distance between them felt oceanic.“They’re not us, Elsa. But they came from us.Maybe… maybe we can understand them. Maybe we have to.”
She left, closing the door with a soft, final click.
Elsa was alone again with the frost and the silence and the ghost of her other self. She looked at the rumpled bed, the melted spot on the window, the poem now lying on her chair.A plan.They had a plan. It felt flimsy and terrifying.
She walked to the bed and slowly, deliberately, smoothed the sheets where two shapes had been pressed together.Her fingers traced the cold, damp linen.
Come and see, the silence seemed to breathe back at her.
Tomorrow, she would.