Sorry, My Love: The Adventures of Lovers-Chapter 44: Ice Manipulator

Far away from the Creation World...

The wind screamed over the icy wasteland of Antarctic, a bone-cold, bitter dirge of war and devastation singing through the frozen wilderness. Snow struck in the air like crazy phantoms, swirling around the broken spires of the Ice Castle. The Queen of Antarctic, her breath coming shallow and icy, hugged her swollen belly as her world crashed down around her.

Below the ice spires, in an empty cavern that had a chilled beat of a dying realm, the Queen panted old words. Her deathly white face shone with the fading flashes of life, her eyes unfocused with pictures of the child about to blink its eyes in this harsh, cold world. Her breaths were ragged clouds that evaporated in the chill air as cracks formed in the ice walls, and the ground shook from the pressure of advancing forces.

As the final burst of power coursed through her form, she set trembling hands upon the cold floor. Ice sprang from her fingertips, etching a delicate ring of ice-bright symbols and curling frost blooms. She spoke the name that seared her mind since the initial snow fell upon her realm – "Martha."

The earth shook, the cavern creaked, and a fragment of ice as white as moonlight on winter slashed across the frost-bitten ground. Inside, a small form stirred – a new-born child, her hair as white as the drifts of blizzard raging outside. Her small fingers tightened, her lids opened, and the cavern echoed to a low, mournful wail, keen as an icicle-slit.

As the last breath on the lips of the queen slipped away, the ice crystal closed over the child, her eyes still wide and questioning, never to realize the world around her disintegrating. The Queen's head rolled back, the crown falling from her brow to thud against the unyielding ice. The ancient runes etched into the ice under her pulsed for a moment before fading like the dying spasms of a dying star.

His King father came too late. He walked into the cavern, armor shattered, sword red with the blood of murdered knights. His own breath halted in his throat as he looked at his dead wife, face frozen in endless peace, and his daughter, sealed in a crystal of the purest ice.

He fell to his knees, the earth splitting beneath him as he bellowed his sorrow into the frozen emptiness, his cry drowned out by the shattering of the spires and the war drums of the conquerors. He gripped his daughter's frozen prison, his tears freezing on his cheeks as the final remnants of strength abandoned his body. A blade drove into his back, driven by an unknown foe, and he fell, his blood staining the snow a bright, bitter red.

The castle had fallen. Towers were broken, walls collapsed, and the skies were filled with screams of succumbing knights, sword clash and incessant howling of the hurricane. The glacial castle, the nucleus of Antarctic, was now a tomb of destroyed dreams and ice remains.

Among the wreckage, an ancient man staggered in the smoke and ice, his breath convulsing in his chest like brittle bones. His cloak, frosted and torn, streamed out wildly as he stumbled toward the glittering splinter on which the child remained untroubled amidst the ruin. He wrapped his wizened hands around the crystal, muttering words ancient as the ice itself, and the splinter broke, shattered, and fragmented, exposing the child within, trembling but alive.

He swept her up in his arms, his breath sending fleeting, warm mist on her frozen flesh, and ran out into the blizzard, the screams of the dying fading behind him. The castle fell, the ice shattered, and the snow consumed everything else.

The old man bore the child to a remote igloo, a small, glinting star among all the whiteness, and put her on a heap of furs. He spoke in a forgotten language, breathing warmth into the small, thin body.

Martha, child of ice and of death, drew her first real breath among the broken ribs of a dying world, her pale blue eyes shining in the dance of the dancing flames and the pitiless storm raging outside the walls.

Years went by, and Martha matured. She learned how to walk on the ice, how to dance with the snow, how to whisper gently to the cold winds howling through her frosty realm. Her abilities, forged in the agonized death-throes of a kingdom, matured slowly – a flash of frost here, a spin of snow there. She molded the blizzards, named the frost, and whispered gently to the ice that groaned and splintered underfoot.

And then, one day, when the conquerors came back again, looking for the dying breath of Antarctic, she was waiting. She stood on a broken, jutting ice-cliff, hair a mane of white and iced tangles, eyes burning with antique fury. She extended her hand, and the snow swirled around her bidding, curling into ghostly, twisted forms – ice knights, born in the rage and the isolation of the moment.

They charged forward at the invaders, slicing bone and tissue with the cold deadness of winter's sharpest blades. The snow was again stained red with blood, but it was not the blood of her folk. It was the blood of her foes, who had dared to trespass into her frozen kingdom.

And in the midst of this icy tempest, Martha discovered something she had never understood – a flicker of warmth, a pulse of something other than the cold that had fashioned her soul. She gazed into one of her knights' cold eyes, a being of unmarred, killing beauty, and felt the shattering of ice within her heart.

They warred together, hacked a new kingdom out of the flesh of the old one, and when Ella was born to them, they named her that – Ella Snow, child of a throne of ice and blood.

And Martha's reputation grew – an ice queen of death, her heart an icy star, her child the blizzard that one day would occupy the place of the Antarctic.