The Winter Court

The blizzard was doing little to hinder I-330’s progress across the ice covered wasteland. The wind should have frozen a human to death in minutes, but she didn’t even feel the cold. The snow came down so thick that it looked like a white wall, but I-330 didn’t care about visibility. She knew that if a Fear wanted to find her, it would.

That prediction was fulfilled soon, as the storm died down enough for I-330 to see a castle of ice in front of her. This was not the ornate palace she had seen in the Wooden Girl’s realm: it was fortress, angular and harsh. The white gate slowly opened as I-330 approached, leading into a courtyard filled with statues. Or at least, I-330’s first impression was that they were statues. As she got closer to them, she realized they were people, frozen in place. All the victims had their faces frozen in similar expressions, but it was not in fear, as I-330 had expected. Rather, they all looked terribly sad. As if being frozen alive being frozen alive had only been a continuation of whatever grief they had been experiencing.

Morbid curiosity made her examine the frozen people longer than she should have. The echo of a young boy’s laughter quickly reminded her that she was still in the domain of a Fear, and such distractions could be fatal.

The laughter had come from past the courtyard, further inside the castle. I-330 stepped through another gate, and appeared on top of one of the castle’s towers. She didn’t question the impossible change; by this point, such oddities had ceased to astound her. The laughing continued, coming from all around. I-330 tolerated it only for a few moments before annoyance triggered her into action. With a powerful swing, she brought her fist down on the tower, cracking the ice. Which she quickly realized was a very bad decision, as the floor beneath her crumbled and fell away, leaving her to plummet several stories.

Before she hit the ground, an unseen force stopped her fall. The boy’s laughter was joined by that of a girl’s, and out from the blizzard the Cold Boy and the Wooden Girl appeared.

I-330 felt the strings that had caught her tightening around her limbs, until they started to break the skin. The Wooden Girl laughed at the sight of blood, and gave the Cold Boy a hug. “Good work, Little Blue!” It said. “I was worried someone else might get to my pet before me, but you were kind enough to tell me she’d arrived!” It let go of the Cold Boy, and started to gather strings around its fingers. “Now we can start to play!”

I-330 had not spent her time since being caught idly waiting for the Girl to finish speaking. While the Girl was distracted, her shadow arm had grown into multiple tentacles that wrapped around the strings holding her. As the Girl finished talking, the tentacles simultaneously cut all the strings, dropping I-330 to the ground.

Her first instinct was to run. Run as fast as she could, and not stop until she had gained several universes of distance between her and the Girl.

No. No more running.

The thought hit her with the force of a truck, each syllable screaming for attention.

I can fight them. I can beat them.

She stopped moving, and planted her feet in the snow. Anger that had been building in her for years was boiling to the top, threatening to explode. She’d been running for so long. Sometimes it felt like the only thing she ever did. And what had she gotten for it?

Of course the Wooden Girl wasn’t letting the escape attempt go ignored. More strings came at I-330, aiming for her hands and feet. In a rush of motion, I-330’s shadow hand grabbed the strings, and tore them apart. Then she started running. Not away from the Wooden Girl. Towards it.

The Cold Boy took a step forward, but the Girl placed a hand on its shoulder to stop it. “Nuh-uh, Little Blue.” It said.  “She’s my pet to play with. You can play with her when I’m done.” Strings came from the ground beneath I-330, and wrapped around her feet. She was lifted high into the air, and the strings let her go, dropping her onto the jagged ruins.

I-330 laid still where she had fallen, bleeding heavily onto the ground for some time. “Come on and get up!” The Wooden Girl said. “I know you’re still alive!”

“Yeah, yeah….” I-330 muttered as she stood up. “These sharp pieces of ice broke my fall.” She knew she should have been in pain, but such sensations seemed far away. Even as she pulled out a shard that had gone straight through her gut, the worst she felt was a mild discomfort. She felt focused, more than ever before. The enemy was in front of her. The only thing that mattered was destroying it.

One of her tentacles wrapped around a piece of frozen debris larger than she was, and lifted it up. She started spinning it around her head, gaining momentum, until she let go. The debris struck the Girl at blinding speed, crushing its body instantly. I-330 tensed in anticipation of a counterattack, but none came. The splintered remains of the Girl didn’t move at all. With growing confidence, I-330 walked toward the body. When it continued to make no motion, she picked up the debris and threw it aside. There was a moment of elation at the victory, but it soon shifted to confusion when she looked at the remains of the Girl’s head. Where there should have been a face painted on was only blank wood.

“Bad pet. Very bad.” The Wooden Girl’s voice giggled through I-330’s head. “Now I have to punish you.”

Strings appeared around I-330s right forearm, and twisted it until the bone cracked. More strings wrapped around I-330’s chest, cutting her flesh and grinding across bone. The Wooden Girl skipped out from behind I-330, completely unharmed, without even a wrinkle on its red dress.

“Making a new body is so inconvenient. I need to teach you never to do that again.”

The pain should have been unbearable. But even with part of her bone sticking out of her arm, I-330 felt numbed. She had to destroy the Fear. Killing them was all that mattered. The sensory messages of a few nerves were irrelevant. With a roar of anger, she punched through the Girl’s chest with a tentacle. The Girl initially appeared unfazed by the attack. “I thought you would have learned how pointless that is by now. I can repair any damage you do.”

“Really?” I-330 snarled. “Cause I don’t think you’ll be repairing this.”

The Girl looked down at its chest. Where I-330 had punched through was a hole of absolute nothingness, with small cracks spreading from it across the Girl’s body. “How did you-” Before the Girl could finish, I-330 punched it in the head. The left half of its face and much of the air around it shattered away into oblivion. What was left of the Wooden Girl’s face painted itself into fear as the strings holding I-330 vanished. The moment she was free she rushed the Girl and grabbed one of its arms. The Girl tried pulling away, and I-330 ripped the arm off, tearing more nothingness onto its body.

Strings lashed across I-330’s body, but she ignored the gashes. She leaned closer to the Girl and whispered, “Scream for me, little god.”

The Wooden Girl turned and fled. It didn’t make it very far before one of I-330’s tentacles struck the ground in front of it, breaking apart that stretch of reality. The Girl tried running in a different direction, but I-330 smashed that path as well, leaving another chasm of emptiness across the ground. Another tentacle hit the Girl’s legs, breaking them off. The Girl started crawling across the snow with its remaining arm, until it reached the Cold Boy.

“Little Blue! Help me!”

The Cold Boy took the Girl’s hand. The Girl smiled, but a second later fear was painted over the smile. Ice had started to spread from the Boy’s hand, growing down the Girl’s arm.

“No! Little Blue, what are you doing?” The ice completely covered the Girl’s arm, and started spreading across its body. “Stop it! Stop it, Cold Boy! I order you to stop!”

The Girl’s voice grew soft as the ice spread, until it was silenced completely. The Cold Boy poked the frozen Girl  few times to see if it would move. When it didn’t, the Boy picked up the girl and walked to one of the gashes of nothing in the ground.

“Ashes, ashes….” The Boy said in a singsong voice. “We all… fall… down!” On the last word, it threw the Girl into the Quiet.

I-330 had been watching the events passively to the side. She felt some disappointment at the fall of the Girl. She’d been hoping for the chance to kill it herself. But the disappointment wasn’t strong enough to motivate her to intervene. And there was still another Fear to be dealt with. Her arm shifted into a blade, and she charged. The Cold Boy called down the full force of the blizzard, and the winds howled with a force that could have leveled mountains. It didn’t impede I-330 in the slighted. The Boy tried creating a wall of ice around him, but she cut through it.

I-330 swung the blade, cleaving a line of emptiness behind it as it cut through the air. Just before it hit, the Cold Boy exhaled. When its breath touched I-330, her vision went black, and she felt herself falling backwards into her memories.



The halls of the high school were filled with students, but Lisa did everything she could to avoid any eye contact. She held her head down, hair framing either side, with her books kept to her chest like a shield.

A group of students had stopped to talk in the middle of the hall, preventing Lisa from going forward. She looked for a way through them, but the only paths she could see involved pushing through, which she couldn’t bring herself to do. “Um….” She said, too quiet to be heard by anyone. “E-excuse me….” Her words remained unheard. Then the bell rang, and the group quickly broke apart as they rushed to their classes.

When Lisa opened the door to her class, she said, “Sorry I’m late, Mr. Robinson.” The teacher at the front of the room looked surprised by her appearance.

“Oh, Lisa!” He said. “I didn’t realize you weren’t here. Well, go ahead and take your seat.”

The class passed without Lisa saying another word. When lunch came, Lisa sat alone at a table, reading a book with one hand while mechanically eating a sandwich in the other. She was so engrossed in her book, that she was unaware someone had walked up to her table until he said, “Excuse me?”

Lisa almost jumped at the sudden voice. A boy was standing by standing by one of the table’s empty chairs, a slight smile on his face over her obvious surprise. Lisa stared at him for several seconds before remembering that she should say something. Her words rushed out in what might have been a “Hello” or maybe a “Yes?”

“Is anyone using this chair?”

What felt like a million different thoughts rushed into her head. Was he asking if he could sit with her? How does my hair look? Isn’t he in my math class? What am I supposed to say?

In the end, she managed to get out a, “No.”

“Oh, good. Thanks!” He picked up the chair, and took it with him as he walked away to another table.



The memories pulled away, and I-330 was alone again in darkness. A child’s voice began speaking, almost singing, to her from the blackness.

“So many days alone. Always so alone. There has never been anyone who you could open up to. No one who understood you.”

For some reason, I-330 suddenly felt extremely cold. Her voice shook as she tried to speak. “Th-there was Lisa….”

The voice giggled. “The only person in all time and space capable of loving you was yourself. And you lost even her. You’ll never see her again. You’ll never see anyone again. You killed them all.”

I-330 had never felt so cold before. It was like her entire body had been frozen. The voice continued to taunt her, but she didn’t have the strength to respond. Layers of emotional walls came down, tearing down the mask of the energetic, confident adventurer, leaving behind a hurt, lonely child. The memories resumed, drowning her senses in years of pain.

The Cold Boy walked around I-330’s frozen body, making sure the ice completely covered her. Her mental barriers were coming down rapidly now, letting out all the emotions she’d been suppressing through her life. Still the memories rushed past I-330. She could barely process the rush of emotions coming at her. But there was one feeling rising above the others. It had been faint at first, but it was growing brighter.

Another memory came to I-330. Lisa was holding a knife in her hand, and stabbing it down into her father. Strike back against those that hurt you. Destroy your oppressors.

Beneath the pain, past the loneliness, was only one feeling: Rage. The anger of a neglected child, combined with the fury of a vengeful god, drowning out all the loneliness.

The ice on I-330 flew off as she tore herself out of the frozen cage. The Cold Boy just managed to jump away before it was smashed by I-330’s tentacles. It started to run, barely keeping ahead of the tentacles smashing apart the ground. Then, something grabbed its leg. A string had come out of one of the empty gashes on the ground, and wrapped around the Cold Boy. It tried to pull away, but more strings came out of the Quiet, wrapping around its limbs. It kept struggling as I-330 got closer, but was held fast.

I-330 stopped less than a foot away from the Boy. It looked up at her, face covered in terror. She pulled back her left arm, and then swung down, smashing through the Cold Boy, breaking it apart until her fist hit the ground. The Boy, the strings holding it, and even the ground I-330 hit all shattered apart into nothing.

The blizzard stopped, leaving only silence. I-330 took a brief moment to look over the remains of this pocket universes. The cracks from her battle were already spreading across the snowy land. Soon everything in it would disappear. I-330 took a deep breath to collect herself, and then moved to the next universe.