Mother Frost, Sister Blue

Lena and Kälte fought over the same blanket since they shared a cradle. There was nothing significant about this blanket - nearly the opposite. It was the color of dusty stone, torn, with gaping holes between carefully woven squares. Yarn sagged and frayed. The more they tugged, the more the fabric disintegrated—pieces of the torn yarn covered parts of their features. Lena’s pieces blanketed over her eyes; Kälte’s settled on her small throat and even smaller heart.

Yet, even given two separate blankets, the twins, in a mighty small grasp between fingers, tore at the ugly thing. What was already ruined, they continued to destroy.

“Gods-be-burned,” their baba would mutter above their cradle, attempting to carefully unfurl the newborn's fingers from the same torn hole, each hand grasping at opposite sides. “A pair of animals, you two.”

Lena and Kälte were more like imps, gremlins, or trolls - creature-like in the coloring of their features and in the way they both expressed their humanity. That is, until they got older - and creatures became particularly monstrous.

They grew up in stark contrast to each other--though that wasn’t uncommon in their small village at the edge of the woods. They got along, for the most part. Kälte had the features of a particularly frigid winter night, Lena of a winter’s dawn.

Playing between sisters turned vicious. Lena popped her doll’s head off, and Kälte kicked a hole through Lena’s door when she kept the doll’s remains inside her locked room. It wasn’t even Lena’s to begin with; Kälte would do anything to ruin the thing between Lena and what once belonged to her.

Lena screamed for their stepmother, “She’s scaring me! See what she did? She smashed a hole in my door!” She did this as she gripped the decapitated doll's head, with pieces of yarn meant to look like golden hair sprouting between her fingers.

“She broke my doll and won’t give it back!” Kälte screamed back. None of it mattered. Lena had pretty tears, and Kälte’s face was blazing red, her piercing eyes and even darker, wild tousles of hair poignant and unnerving for her stepmother.

Lena was quieter, but crueler.

Kälte was louder, but sensitive.

Which side would the stepmother endure?

Quiet and pretty are the two things their stepmother adored the most in a daughter. Easier, some might say, for a mother. Loud and sensitive are bombs.

Kälte could never change their mother’s desire.

So came the conclusion: Kälte’s doll was materialistic, unimportant, and smaller. Lena’s door was more expensive, and the violence behind the door’s destruction had greater consequences for everybody, not just Kälte and the doll that was just as important, but only to her.

Kälte’s actions harmed everybody; Lena’s actions harmed only Kälte.

Never mind Lena stole it, locked it away, and taunted Kälte. Kälte’s voice faded behind Lena’s laughter; the only thing Kälte had left was violence.

Listen. Listen. Listen. Her foot would shout as she hammered it against the door, splitting her toenails.

—

As the sisters grew older into their teenage years, the night became ominous, and the dawn became garish. Snowfall wept into the forest. Trees bent into melancholic frowns from the weight of the snow that threatened to break their limbs.

After living at the edge of the frost-bitten woods, it was well-known that there was a choice involved with the cold: become it or die in it. In the snow was bitterness, a severity of fragility and frigidity that sank into your bones.

They had to work. The house needed tending. The bones of the walls needed to warm the creaks out of it. The soul of the kitchen, the heart of the rooms, needed to polish the splinters.

“Mama,” Lena whimpered, “my hands are dirty, I cannot do this.”

The stepmother rushed into the kitchen and saw Lena’s hands blackened with ash from the fireplace, a single strand of hair falling loose from her intricate braided crown.

“Oh my dear girl, I do not want you dirtied, and look! Your locks are loose!” She waved at Kälte, wild, sprouting waves covering her face, sprouting from each hair follicle as if the harder she cleaned, the bigger her hair became. Stepmother waved at Kälte, “Get your sister a bucket of water from the well, we must tame her hair! Then,” she turned back toward Lena, “you shall rest.”

Kälte’s face was flushed red, dirt beneath her fingernails, knees bruised, cheeks smeared. An ember popped in the hearth. “Why must I get a bucket for her hair? She’s done nothing!”

“Of course she has, look at the state of her hands!”

“She put logs in the hearth!” Her pale-glacial eyes churned. Emotion stirred in their flare like a blizzard.

“Kälte,” Stepmother’s voice became frigid. It was a reminder, a cruel one, that there would always be a distance Kälte could not cross. A chill swept through the room. Kälte’s eyes clouded. “Do you not care for your sister? “ She continued, “She is harmed and whimpering and you sit there, questioning me? Questioning her?” Kälte watched her mother coo at Lena, brush her hair, wipe her tears.

Kälte said nothing and did what she was told.

The walk to the well was excruciating. She muttered an old story of an ancient deity of winter, Old Mother Frost, they called her. It was a bedtime story about the goddess of the domestic, winter, and labor. Kälte prayed to Mother Frost, appealed to her femininity, her strength, her wisdom, even as her teeth chattered and her fingertips shifted from blue to a deepening lavender.

Pain, pain, and more pain as she carried the empty bucket to the well meant for her sister. She could not even fathom the return again, with the bucket full.

Survive, survive, survive, Mother Frost, reward me with your gold so I may leave or so I may please them both. Let me survive, and I will labor as you please.

The wind howled in response, ripping the hood off her head, exposing wild tendrils of hair. The cold gnawed at her skin, the ice warped its talons around her throat. As she walked and walked and walked, snow seeping through her worn bundschuh’s, something heinous, terrible, and monstrous blossomed inside her. When Kälte returned, arms sore from carrying the bucket of ice, she hung it above the hearth until it boiled. The blaze lit up the ice in her irises.

Kälte gave the scathing water to her mother. Lena dove for it with a cloth, shoving the fabric and her hand deep into the water. Lena’s screams resonated across the woods, cracking the ice off leaves.

Stepmother slapped Kälte.

“You miserable animal!” She screamed, “You commit violence against your own family. You will grab more water from the well ten times over to give your sister a warm bath, to wash her fine clothes, to wash every grime of dirt beneath her fingernails.”

She turned Kälte away and off she went into the growing darkness, grabbing bucket after bucket, placing them beside the cabin door for her mother to attend to. Each time Kälte left, winter called. The gnawing wrath accompanied by a stinging melancholy and determination.

The gold, the gold will set me free. Bear the blue for the yellow.

Neither Lena nor Stepmother noticed the changes that crept on Kälte like weeds. Her skin became a bitter blue, lips a quivering lilac, tears frozen on her cheeks, dark hair shifting into strips of white. Her nails became scaly talons, sharp horns began to grow from the top of her head, and twined in her newfound pale-white frayed locks.

Until, on one of her many well visits, she turned to find Lena also changed, chest heaving.

“You may not know what it means to burn,” she declared. “But you will know how it feels to freeze.” Lena grabbed the bucket and tossed it into the well. “Better grab it before mother notices,” she glanced up at the blackened sky, “or the darkness kills you.”

For a moment, Kälte fell into the snow on her knees and cried into the dark. After more tears froze along her jaw, she opened the small wooden box beside the well, anchored the rope that lay within it, and made her way down. Halfway down, her frozen fingers numb, she fell with a deafening thump. Kälte cried some more as she reached for the bucket, but her blue fingers could not reach further enough to grasp its handle.

Her breath clouded in front of her quivering lips in pale smoke. That is, until a beautiful woman appeared through the stone cylinder of the well. Eyes an ice-blue, braids a striking shade of platinum, wearing a cloak of white, a dress made of frost and bare twine.

“M-m-mother Frost,”

“My dear girl,” Mother Frost said, a glow emanating from her form as she spoke softly into the air. “I have watched you from the sky, and your heart is torn. You have labored, fought, and continue to survive at your will. With this in mind, I offer you respite. I will carry you up with your bucket full, kept warm if you should please me. Show warmth in this cold, and the gold is yours.”

Kälte’s fingertips began to warm, her heat quickening in possibility, in the thought of liberation as the shadow to Lena’s glow. Her lips were frozen, so all she offered was a quick nod.

As quick as she nodded, Kälte floated up, bucket placed in her palm. Kälte walked back in the dark without complaint. As she trudged, she thought. It was no use to make the cold colder. She thought some more. The winter wind pushed at her back, making her trudge more like a float to home.

Upon return, along with the last bucket, Kälte dropped to her knees in front of Lena and her mother at the doorway, caught between the warmth of the home and the sting of the wind.

“Be warm, sister. I hope your burn cools.” As she said this, golden coins appeared in her palm. Lena and Stepmother gasped and reached for her hand.

“No,” Kälte muttered. This time, she was not loud. She pleaded. Something she had never done. “Please, that is mine.”

Lena scoffed. “You don’t deserve that gold, you’ve done nothing worth your while.” She grasped at her hand, and Kälte resisted.

“Stop,” the word, just one, pathetic and limp in the air.

They struggled. Again, one sister pulling against the other, Lena’s grasp burning her hands. Opposite ends yet again, even when the cold daughter warmed. Survive. Survive. Survive.

They dug their nails into each other’s cuffs, ripping at their sleeves, quick crackles unfurling the fibers of their dresses. Midnight struck the grandfather clock once, twice, three times. A deafening silence stilled all that moved within the house before a loud, singular knock at the door. The sound did not knock for permission; it rang in deadly warning.

“Stop!” Came a voice, bellowing between gusts of winter wind. The only voice louder than Kälte’s. The door blew open, and in came Mother Frost, eyes glacial as she surveyed Lena.

“You desire a reward?” There was a creaking, a groan above Kälte’s head.

“I deserve a reward for what my sister has done to me!” Lena squealed. With a tug, Kälte grasped the gold from Lena’s hand. Lena followed further out the doorway in a fit of rage.

“Here is your reward,” Mother Frost bellowed, voice icy and above Lena’s head, a great kettle of pitch drenched Lena in a sizzling, boiling shower. Lena screamed, itching at the liquid, but as it cooled, it stained. It sank into her skin, her hair, her eyes until she was nothing but a form of darkness blending into the night.

Mother Frost frowned and howled into the house, “Mother - your dirty girl has come home.”

Mother Frost’s laughter dissipated into the winter sky, and the darkness clung.

Lena watched Kälte’s silhouette beyond the doorframe, eyes bright and wide like the moon, blanketed in snowfall.

Never, as Lena lived, did she glow again.