Frozen Hearts

They never tell you that it starts with a sliver. Just a tiny little shard and it’s in. Insidious. Quiet. Creeping through your veins. You grow up hearing the stories, meant to scare children into behaving, the proverbial boogeyman given one specific shape. A tale of a curse told so long ago that it became legend. A whisper. A fairy tale. But the truth’s been warped with the years of the telling. It doesn’t happen how they say - one casting and your fate is sealed. No. It starts with just a little sliver, a thought, a fear, a failure. A changing. And then it grows.

It’s called the Curse of the Frozen Heart, thought to be cast upon a deserving soul by a shaman or sorcerer. A Frozen Heart casts fear in all those they meet. Pale skin, white hair, whiter eyes. It's the eyes that are said to turn a Heart's victim to stone, irises so clear they recall a frozen tundra. Other tales say their skin is so cold, one touch gives their victims frost burn. But a Frozen Heart hasn’t been seen in centuries, the fear they strike dulling into the bland terror of a ghost story, a tale parents tell their children to keep them in line. Until now. When I lost you and my soul ripped in two. When my heart broke open and silence descended. When the pain of seeing you broken upon the floor threatened to tear me asunder. When I let the shard of ice in and understood.

The fairy tales were wrong. Frozen Hearts aren’t cursed. They’re created. Made. One growing plane of ice at a time.

You see, the fear surrounding the Frozen Hearts is in what the curse causes them to become. Uncaring, unfeeling monsters that wield their new magic with unflinching precision. We survived the Ice Age of their rule, but barely. A fully Frozen Heart is beautiful and deadly. After five hundred years without them, the legend of their memory describes the curse casting their heart into ice like stone, immediately and irrevocably. And in revenge for their cruel twist of fate, the Hearts make everyone else suffer for it. It’s a fanciful tale we all grew up hearing, whispering, and disbelieving.

But ever since he died, I’ve felt it growing. A part of me went cold, more than just numb, but unfeeling at the sight of his body, lying there so very, very still. As if part of that unnatural stillness has creeped into me, too. I can’t warm in the sun and my body doesn’t feel cold the same way. I feel like a bubble slowly freezing over, the ice crawling through my veins, leaving crystalline structures in its wake. I thought it would scare me, seeing the nightmare of my childhood come alive in the looking glass, my skin seeming to be leeched of its blood, my blue eyes paling with each passing day. But this isn't fear. If ice is the last thing I will ever have of you, I'm not scared for it to make me into something new. I'd cling to it anyway. No, instead I wonder if I’ll wake one morning to find myself transformed, glorious to behold, but shatterable with a single touch. Frozen in time, a memory of who I once was. Or perhaps I’ll awaken as a sculpture given new life. Perhaps the ice will leave magic in its wake, like in the tales of old, a small consolation for the monster I've become, and I could choose to let others feel the cold they let into my life. Perhaps I’ll reawaken the Frozen Heart legend with an icy rule of my own.

Or perhaps I’ll light a forest on fire, just to thaw, to melt. And feel again.