The Snow Princess (story)
From EryriWiki
A story told by Piridextay, one of the characters in a tabletop one-shot RPG called "The Snow Princess." Read by Katie G.; written by Matt M. The melty-compassion bit is loosely derived from the Russian story of Snegurochka.
The Snow Princess
Once upon a time, in the Kingdom of Winter, there was a princess who died in the fullness of her beauty. This broke the heart of a fellow who’d been about her court for many years, the master architect’s apprentice: he had loved her from the moment he’d laid eyes on her, and the thought of her cold form collapsing, falling dead into itself, succumbing to corruption, was a great and binding sorrow to him.
So he set himself the task of building her memorial. Being only an apprentice, he was not permitted to work in marble or silver, but he made do: for three years, he gathered new snow every time it had fallen. Three years he labored, smoothing snow into a shape like the vision in his mind, letting his imagination run where his memory could not follow. The snow hardened and became ice, growing strong and solid. One day the Kingdom of Winter would have to change its name, but until then this monument he was making would be as sturdy as bedrock.
It’s likely that he went a little mad, in the time he spent working on the statue. But that didn’t matter to him, and as he was living very cheaply and consuming only the most endless of resources, it didn’t disturb the people of the Kingdom either. Three years. After a year, he wondered if he was getting the details right. After two, he knew there were terrible, terrible flaws in his memory and his technique, and he worked that whole last year in a mad rush of anxiety and shame. But then it was all finished—
Two hundred feet tall it was; it loomed in the shadow of the mountains. (A shame it couldn’t have been built where the sunlight would fall on it!) When the crowds pressed in to see it, they marveled, for it was utterly perfect in their eyes. Every detail they recalled of their beloved princess was there, every curving line of her face. For clothing the apprentice had fashioned a gown she’d worn only a week before she died, which had set the worthies of Winter running to their tailors. In her right hand was a book; in her left a rose whose every petal was the clearest ice. Dead, impassive, the monument watched the people as they sighed. Her reflection danced in a thousand eyes.
The apprentice stepped back and looked on his creation for the first time. And he knew he was the worst of failures, for it was perfect. He had made absolutely no mistakes—but it was, after all, only a pale colorless image, and for the first time in three years he remembered seeing her laughing and running in the garden, alive. He turned away.
And the monument, seeing that one final instant of his living devotion, felt a stirring deep within itself. He was saying something to himself, quietly, some long list of secret names and passions: the entire contents of his heart, which he had poured out to the statue over the years without recompense. The monument strained to hear, to finally hear them. He was crying a little, and it wished it could give him back the long hours he’d spent shaping it—wished it could give him anything, so much in that moment did it love him—and all at once its heart melted.
When the rest of it was gone as well, the sages decreed this as a sign that Winter was ending. The Dominion of Spring was declared, with much mournful festivity; the apprentice sculptor faded away into warm obscurity. And, one afternoon when he was walking by a stream near the mountains and heard something that sounded very much like a rather embarrassing story from his own youth, told by a warm laughing adoring voice, he shrugged it off as a trick of the wind and didn’t know why it pleased him so much.