"No titel."

Cold. So cold. His eyes flicker, but the rest of his body is motionless. He tries to lift his head to see where he is, but he can’t. It is not like it matters anyway. He already knows that he will die. Nobody human can survive that much cold, he doesn’t even know why he is awake. He should be unconscious. His heart should have stopped beating. That would have been humane at least. Bearable. But he is awake indeed, and he is cold. It is humane in some way. He can’t feel his body. He can’t feel the pain, he can’t feel his heart fighting to keep him alive, and he can’t feel how his life is slowly leaving him. He doesn’t even want to fight. He just wants to die already. The ice surrounding him has already tapped his will to live – why is it keeping him alive?

Ice castle.

Thorns. Suddenly it feels like thousands of ice thorns are being forced into his skin. He can’t do anything. He is still unable to move, no matter how much it hurts. Why ice? He thinks. His whole life he has hated ice. He grew up in Texas for Gods sake. It was warm there. And here he is, caught in the cold of an ice hell. That’s irony. Bittersweet irony.

Why won’t he die? Why is he still alive? The cold burns. It burns, it sticks and it kills him. He knows he is dying, so why is dead so hesitant? He is surrounded by ice, has been lying in ice for hours. He has never been a brainiac, but even he knows he should be dead by now. His body must be around 50 F or something.

“How is our little prince?” a girls voice. A girl on the wage of growing into a woman. He wishes that he could just turn his head, but he can’t do anything but blink. Even that hurts.

“You are in pain?” Is that pity in her voice? She sounds like she want’s to do something to make the pain go away. He wishes she would. She could kill him, for instance.

“I’m sorry, it has to perish your heart, if you are going to be anything. It will be any minute now, prince. And then you will be Cold,” she says. What is she talking about? She doesn’t make any sense to him. He will be cold? He is already cold. Already so cold that he wishes he could just die. And it already hurts way too much. Minutes with this pain? There’s no way he can survive that, wants to survive that. Why doesn’t she help him instead? He tries to form a plea for help in his mouth, but the words never move past his lips. He can’t move his mouth. He feels pathetic. How come he is there, anyway? How come he is in this cold place? He want’s to go back to Texas. To the warm weather, the sunny sky. How did he end up there in the first place? He doesn’t remember going to any cold state. Or country. For all he knows he can be on Greenland. And then a hope lights his cold eyes up. It can all be a dream. Wasn’t that what they said in that movie – Inception? That when you were dreaming you wouldn’t have any idea of how you got where you were. And that you can feel pain inside of a dream, even if it’s not real.

“It’s not a dream, prince. This is the reality. And it can be any minute now, and then you will be Cold.” Why does it sound like she means cold with capital C? He is already way too cold. He is quite sure he can’t get any colder.

Suddenly he can see her. She is standing over him, looking down on him. She has long smooth jet-black hair, almost translucent pale skin, an oval face and the most startling blue eyes he has ever seen. They remind him of the ocean in Caribbean. She is wearing a long white dress, and no matter how hard he tries to concentrate, he can’t quite make out the delicate details of it. She is beautiful. He is quite sure that she must be the angel who will take him to heaven. If this is not a dream.

And then, his heart stops. He can literally feel it stopping, even though he couldn’t even feel it beating seconds ago. It feels like the needles have finally found his heart, and even though it hurts more than anything else, he is relieved. He can finally die. He closes his eyes, ready for this beautiful angel to take him away, only a bit sad knowing that he will never be able to say goodbye to his family, tell his mom that he loved her and his dad that he was proud of being his son. But it is okay. He just wants to die. They will survive the loss of him, they are strong.

Open your eyes.

He waits for something. Anything. A white light at the end of a tunnel, the angel to appear again and lift him up to heaven or that he floats out of his own body. But nothing but blackness happens. And then, the pain stops, and he feel the bliss of nothing. ‘It’s over’, he thinks, but when he opens his eyes, he is still in the exact same spot he was before, and nothing has changed.

“You can move,” says the girl. She is still there, looking down on him, her eyes twinkling beautifully from all the ice surrounding them. He wonders what she is doing here. Wait – did she say that he could move? He doesn’t believe her, but when he tries to move his arm, it does at he wants to. He sits straight up, and dark spots instantly blocks his vision.

“Whoa, slow down, prince,” the girl says. She is standing on whatever he is laying on, still looking down. She looks concerned, but her eyes hide a relieved smile.

As soon as his eyesight is fully returned he looks around. He is in what looks like a room, but everything is either carved from ice or made out of snow. The walls themselves are clearly made out of ice, and he is lying on some kind of supposed madras, but the comfortable effect has been ruined by the fact that it is made out of pure snow. There is also a couch and a table, made out of ice with small snow pillows, decorated with ice details. And there is a bookshelf with what looks like real books.

“Where am I?” He asks. He should probably also ask why he is there, and how he even ended up there, but his brain seems to be working slow – he is not sure he can actually understand more than one answer at a time.

“You are in the ice castle. As for your exact location, I can unfortunately tell you nothing, as I don’t even know myself. The ice castle exists here and there – it moves from time to time, and it can be quite confusing at times. Sometimes it doesn’t even exist in the real world, and sometimes it floats over the earth. Right now I think we exist somewhere, but as to the location, I do not know,” she says. She sounds like she is regretting not knowing, like she really wants to tell him. Who is she? He wonders. And why does looks so sad?

“Why am I here?” He asks. He needs to get the facts straight. He is quite sure he hasn’t signed up for… dying, if that is what happened, on a floating castle. Dead. Another question he will have to ask. Is he dead? He looks at his hands. They are pale, but he seems very much alive. Which of course is impossible. He must be dead. Or this must be a dream. She was talking about floating castles, right? Definitely a dream, no matter what she says.

“Because you are the prince,” she says matter-of-factly. She steps down from the madras and walks over to the couch. Her hand lightly touches the pillow. She looks like it saddens her even more.

“I am no prince,” he says, but as he says it, he knows it is not true. Even though he has never been a prince before, he knows that in this very instant, he is truly a prince. Which is weird.

“Why do you look so sad?” He asks her. Her head snaps back up, and she studies him intently. He gets up to his feet and walks over to her.

“Because of what I do know,” she says cryptically, “but you must finish your transformation, Cold one. There are others in the other rooms, you may see them if they are awake. You are the prince, what you say is law for them, but you cannot leave. I am very sorry for your fate and your loss, if it makes any difference, it was not my decision.” And with that weird message she disappears in a puff of snow. He sits down on the couch. This is going to be one long dream.

Chapter one.

The weather has taken a drastic turn as Amanda got nearer to her new school. From sunny smiling clouds, to thunder and lightning, to simply a snowstorm. She knows it is probably to warn her that this has been the wrong choice, but there is no going back now. She has made up her mind, and she is way too stubborn to just walk back and admit that she was wrong. She tries to pull her jacket closer against her body in order to get her blood start running. Even though she is sitting inside of a carriage it feels like she could have been outside. It would probably have been the same. The poor horse carrying the carriage is probably freezing even more, she thinks.

She looks outside. The snowflakes are falling hard and it’s hard to see anything at all. She would have liked to have a clear view to see her new school – from what she have heard it should have been a marvelous view, something totally out-of-this-world, but she can’t even see the gravel road.  Feeling slightly disappointed, Amanda turns her attention to her own thoughts. So much have happened it has become quite hard for her to keep the real memories and apart from her dreams.

‘Magic is real’, she thinks. It is still a weird thought, but she is trying to get used to it. Even though it came as a choc at first, she knows she must keep her head cool. It is a new fact, a statement to the others she has sought for her whole life. It also explaines quite a lot about her life.