Warmth, Wound, and Want

Warmth, Wound and Want

I can feel my heart beating like a drum, as the beat of feet into the auditorium jostles the stage.

How the hell did we ever get drawn into this?

Wait, scratch that, I know how I got drawn into this (Community service is a bitch). No, the real question is how did they manage to get drawn into this. A mantis, alright weird but everybody needs a hobby. The Jiangshi, fuck it she's a zombie they always obey anyway. The Glacies is where the questions still really coming out.

But they all pale in comparison to the Ice Queen, and I mean that quiet literally. Rozaliya, as strong as they come, and twice as beautiful as any other such beast I've made the acquaintance of. Once upon a time a bully to me and mine, always walking about in her plain, ice-blue dress with that Beta-Beta-Beta triple triangle sewn on the right breast. The odder part is that before such things she had been a friend, but then in high school she just went... mad. She pushed me away and aside and I thought never to see her again; but now, here she is.

Now at least we both get to suffer together. Her parents and mine are both out in the audience, watching this farce of a thing.

An undesired shiver shakes me as I look towards the crowd. It was not this cold when I got here, I swear.

How the hell can they all enjoy this? Maria Meyer, the Phantom of the Black Box, needed actors with vive, energy, passion, life; what she's getting, meanwhile, is monotone, sterile, frosty and lifeless. Or at least, the other three have that going down.

Another shiver. Goddamn we need some more insulation in here.

Rozaliya has a soliloquy now, though in honesty I've tried to avoid being here when she rehearses. Better not to be around when she is, and avoid some real honest hurt.

To be honest, the set, at least, is impressive. She's perched on a throne of ice, that softly steams in the slight warm air of the auditorium. It shines slightly under the stage light-- and the gaze of our director. In scene, of course, she's supposed to be in some kind of frozen castle atop the very highest mountain of the world these monsters came from.

"Foes, tribesmen, fellows,
I come here not to bring the everwinter
but for sake of claiming what nature has taken."

She looks straight at me, her face unreadable under the mask of passivity she bears.

"And now, look there:
Him, the prize,
anonymously visaged awaits!"

I know it can't be true, but it feels like the theater's gotten at least ten degrees colder.

"The cold's the thing to draw him out."

That's...not in the script-

An oni's arm thrusts me out, though fortunately I manage to land on my feet.

Fine, fuck it, time to wing it.

"Well and so, good woman!
Why bring you me here,
To this a place of such ignoble hurt,
which hath left my good heart sore wounded?"

She shoots a look at my mother, recently monsterized into a hellhound; she is unreadable, as well.

"It were not I who brought that cold down,
dearest and departed from my hands like water;
but as't that I must have,
you will not leave!"

As rehearsed, great bars of ice shoot up to contain me. Unlike rehearsed, the ice is about, oh, maybe wide enough that I can spread my arms, instead of the at least ten feet from center to wall that I was promised.

The effect is quite immediate. What was chilly as designed become strength-sappingly cold, immediately cutting to my heart. I won't die, but it's yet another cruel jest on her part.

And I have to spend the next act, trapped in here.

Fuck.

I try to listen at first, but ten minutes of listening to their lifeless delivery of what should be strong lines, under a good director, bores me to tears. In fact, the only one who seems to be offering anything is Rozaliya, whose melancholy voice is the only thing that manages to get my attention in this...predicament.

The only thing that distract me from the freezing cold.

By twenty minutes I have stopped hearing their murmurs but for her faint voice. It has a keen, hard edged, quality to it, but for some reason I can't stop listening. It's like a fire, the one thing keeping me sane, in the freezing cold.

By thirty, I am numb, shivering, whispering to her to keep talking to break the frost and monotony.

And then the spikes break, letting me go. She is sitting there, radiant, and resplendent, and for some reason there's a Priestess but I don't care.

"I can end the cold." Her blue eyes give me a fierce gaze. "But give to me what is mine and more."

"A-A-A-A-ANYTHING, JUST END THE COLD!"

She takes a ring, slides it around my finger. A bed appeared at some point too, with thick, inviting blankets, plush pillows, all manner of things good for such.

She strips and then rips off my clothes before, with a shove, she tosses me onto it.

All things go white and warm--

When I wake up, I'm at her house, there's a collar on my neck, and a leash keeping me lashed to the bed.

As soon as I move, the door opens, and she is there.

"Seven years away from you, seven days for each one!"

...Next time the damn wurm asks me out, I'm going to say yes.