From EryriWiki

A story told by High-Hawk, one of the characters in a tabletop one-shot RPG called "The Snow Princess." Read by Matt M. because Simon M.'s voice was tired; written by Matt M. A close retelling of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Steadfast Tin Soldier."

[edit] The Tin Soldier

Once upon a time, there was a roomful of small, strange objects. They were toys, when their makers and masters remembered to play with them; in the nighttime hours, in the afternoons when those ineffable giants went away and left them to their own devices, they were just people.

One of them was a lead soldier, a fellow whom age and use had treated rather cruelly. His bright martial paint had all worn off, and he was missing one of his legs. (Although the latter, ingloriously, wasn’t a war-wound—the truth is that he had been the last soldier in his platoon to be made, and there hadn’t been quite enough lead left over.) All he could do was pull himself across the great landscapes of carpet and floor and think of better days. And of her—a ballerina, forever frozen in one pose because she was made of gold leaf graven on paper. He thought she was like him, since her leg was perpetually stretched high above her head and his own perspective was too limited for him to see her all at once. He loved her.

But she, being exceptionally light and thin, beautiful on one side and identically beautiful on the other, gave him no thought at all. He liked to imagine that her mind was set on higher paths. Like the tracery of lines that made up her face and form, they wound through their snow-white expanses without him . . . what glamour must dwell within that head of parchment! He imagined this, and it sometimes made him feel a little low and sad, but it also allowed him to think very highly indeed of the one he loved.

And so, as he did not know how to be miserable, it fell to the soldier to be brave. One day, when he was making his painful circuit of the rug round the playroom table, a terrible icy sensation crept upon him from above. The skylight in that room had never been left open before, so he had no notion of what wind was. But that did not stop him from seeing what it did—he watched as the paper dancer was lifted from her high place and pulled through the air, straight out of the playroom. And, leaping from the table and tumbling across the floor, the soldier followed without hesitation. If his path was not quite straight, it was only because of the limits of his now badly dented body.

Long was his journey. He saw a thousand things he did not understand, in the chambers of the house, but he pressed on. Finally he came to a hot realm with a stone floor. Dim and far ahead of him, lit by red flickering light, he saw the golden face of the paper ballerina. She was fluttering in the breeze, caught against a metal grating, a look of panic on the side of her that was facing him.

He noticed in that moment that she had two legs, not one—but he was open-minded as well as brave, and he plunged on across the cobblestones of the kitchen floor. When he got closer he saw that she was hanging in the air far above him. With effort he climbed up onto a metal platform, trying to get to her; but still she was beyond him, and he found that the metal beneath his feet painfully hot. In fact he was melting—with a last desperate half-leap he reached for the grating she was stuck on—but it was no good. His one leg bent and faltered and he fell headlong into the fire.

The soldier lay among the coals. A tear of lead ran from in his eye as he looked up at the face of the dancer, flickering beyond the flames. She seemed to see him, to be looking at him for the first time. Come to me, he said in metal silence, in the next life if not in this one. And then it seemed that she was drawing closer, that she had come down from her great height or he was rising up—

Fate was kind to him: he melted before he could realize that the wind had at last pulled her from the grating and blown her into the fire beside him. And when the maid came in the morning, she found an odd thing in a corner of the fireplace: a lump of lead, lying on a bed of soft fine ash, that had tiny flecks of gold mixed all through it.