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The Rise of Winter
When the water turned into glass, he had simply brushed it aside and called it ice. Then when the crystalline powder dusted the weakening blades of green, he thought little of it and simply called it snow. And that\'s when it became apparent to him that it was growing quite cold. However, he considered that to be nothing serious and simply stated that it was just a part of this thing he called winter. Like the animals, the warmth would return as would the flowing water and the knives of green.
The strange part of this all was that no one else felt this winter that he spoke of. How could the water be solid when it made lazy slopes through the fields? Also, what did he mean by innocent white choking out the vibrant green on the ground? No one understood in the Nest. They didn\'t comprehend such nonsense in a world of eternal spring, so they shunned him. They kept their children away from him, crossed the street in order to keep their distance from him, rejected his attempts to blend into their society.
Only one other person in the Nest understood the the strange, frozen paradise he spoke of and because of this, she didn\'t fear him. Rather, she found herself filled with glee. Finally, she was no longer alone in her world of ice; had the snow princess finally found her snow prince in a hallucinated wonderland?
It had seemed likely, but there was a flaw in that logic for he was no prince. While his mind may have wandered in the biting cold, it had done nothing to mold his ideals into noble ones. On the contrary, the strict mistress of the snowy world had perverted him into a monster of sorts. While he appeared human to those of the Nest, his heart had been morphed by frostbite, leaving a demonic soul nesting in his soul.
Unfortunately for the snow princess, she never found out until it was too late. She never understood that the snow prince was a beast masquerading as a human and because of it, she was to suffer a fate worse than death. It had happened one night when the snow prince fell to a fit of possessive madness and found the Nest and it\'s eternal spring to be a corrupt world and felt that he had to protect the snow princess from it. So he trapped her in a red-shingled tomb, leaving her unconscious within the prison, only to awaken to a world of darkness constructed stone by stone.
It is imagined that she had probably gone mad in that world of shadows. After all, humans, even ones of royal blood, aren\'t meant to live in the darkness. Perhaps she died in there or maybe she continues to live as some immortal creature, tormented and blind.
The thought of the snow princess clawing away in agony was a painful and familiar one to the monstrous snow prince. Despite the demon he was, he somehow felt her suffering in that grave and in some sort of attempt to honor her, placed their frozen curse on the Nest. For a quarter of the year, the world would see their wonderland and be forced to live with its icy beauty. And then... as a final remembrance, the snow prince cut down the amount of daylight the world received during winter, just to give the people a sampling of what the snow princess was trapped in.
It is said that the monster has died off, leaving winter as a brutal scar. Others say he guards the tomb that the snow princess is trapped in, tending the roses: red for the tomb\'s shingles and white for the snow.
Perhaps the world will never know. After all, not even the Nest knows after all these years...
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;;;
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