chapter 15 : once upon a time

The music… it does not stop.

At first it clicks like a music box, bright yet broken—
but as it repeats, it spreads.
It no longer comes from the box.
It comes from the walls. The floor. The air.
From the space behind things.

Unseen speakers.
The notes change.
A real piano begins to pluck the melody, each key landing like a drop of cold water on bare skin.

And then…
her voice.

She sings the words.

Soft. Grief-wet. Almost whispering.
Like how you’d sing to a baby too tired to cry.

This was her song.

The one she ran to.
The one she hid behind.
The one that got her through the nights with her mother.

Now it was being sung again…
for him.

He rises.

His knees creak against the frost-laced floorboards.
His breath fogs, thick and heavy—but it is not breath.
It is fog, pouring out of his mouth, his ribs, his nose.

He looks down.

His hands…
His arms…
His entire form…

Made of ice.

Crystalline, brittle, beautiful.
He touches his chest and feels nothing but cold.

He opens his mouth to cry—
but frost forms over his lips.

And finally—
finally—
it hits him.

The saddest part of the story.

He is dead.

Not just a little dead.
Not dream-dead, not symbolically, not in a poetic or quiet way.

Gone.

Gone for so long, the room has forgotten him.
Gone for so long, even the flower withered.
Gone long enough that the world kept moving—
and yet, the music stayed.

He is not the hero.

He was someone’s hero.
But he is not the hero.

He blinks.

But the ice over his eyes does not move.
The fog from his chest thickens—
a smoky, slow plume of white frost—
coating the tips of his fingers, hardening the joints.

His hands tremble.
He sinks back to his knees.

And the song keeps playing.

Her voice.
That voice.

Calling through time.
Calling to him even here.

A lullaby for the ones who didn’t get to say goodbye..
-----------------

The cold has swallowed everything.

The walls, once wooden and splintered, are now laden with layered ice and quiet snowdrifts.
It doesn’t feel like the cabin anymore.

It feels like a preserved memory.
Or worse… like the moment right before waking up, when the dream begins to melt.

There is no bathroom now.
That part of the world simply… doesn’t exist anymore.

In its place, the cabin has expanded—its front reaching outward, like a house that wanted to grow, wanted to become something more.
The bed remains, untouched.
The music box still sits, trapped in its ice pedestal.

The mirrors…
Oh, the mirrors.

Rehung. Reframed. Repaired.
But so frost-covered that no reflection remains.

Not even a shimmer.
As if the cabin itself is asking:
“Who are you again?”

And then he sees them.

The statues.

Small. Fragile.
Blue crystal girls, scattered across the room like forgotten dreams trying to be remembered.

One stands before the frostbitten mirror, brushing her hair—green locks frozen mid-motion.

One is by the wall, holding up two small dresses, unsure which to wear. Her face forever tilted in question.

Another stands with her hands pressed to the fogged-up window—but not looking out.
No, she’s turned away from it.
Eyes cast inward.

As if she was speaking to someone beside her.
Someone now gone.

But the last statue—
She sits.
Right by the music box.

Her head is down. Her knees drawn up. Her tiny arms wrapped around her shins in a perfect little ball of sorrow.

The melody dances softly around her frozen form, distorting through the room like a prayer trying not to be forgotten.

He doesn’t need to ask.

He knows exactly who she is.

His daughter.

The one he left behind.

The one whose name he cannot remember, but whose spirit still glows like a sunrise pressed between the pages of every dark chapter he ever wrote.

Long green hair trailing down like vines—like a living curtain to hide her face from the cold.

Shoeless. Thin. So small.

But her heart?
It was too big for her little body.
A heart that made space for every broken man.
A child of the forest.
Of light.
Of hope.

Of him.

And she is everywhere now.
Frozen… but never silent.

He falls to his knees again—the grief now eats him.
For the love he once had.
For the warmth he once held.

And all the frozen statues watch him.

Not with blame.

But with the kind of stillness that says:

“We’ve been waiting for you.”

----

He drags himself forward on his knees, ice cracking at every movement, joints grinding like old hinges refusing to open.
The first statue waits for him—the tiny frozen girl holding two dresses, forever caught in a moment of pure, innocent choice.

He reaches toward her.
He doesn’t touch.
He doesn’t dare.

And then—
like a voice whispered into the ear of time itself—
a little girl’s laughter fills the air.

Light.
Weightless.
Alive.

“Oh daddy! What should I wear!”
Her tone is so excited it shakes the frost on the windows.
“Oh! Oh! Can I be the Raven Princess?!”

He freezes.

His heart stops.

Because he knows this moment.
He lived it.
Held it.
Treasure turned memory turned wound.

Behind the little voice, another rises—
his own voice
stronger, warmer, younger.
A man who had no idea how short the story would be.

“Hah—you? My green tumbleweed?”
His echo laughs.
Easy.
Alive.

The statue does not move.
But the voice plays on, a perfect recording of a life stolen too soon.

She puffs in mock indignation.
“But daddy, what’s the party about again?”

His voice answers without hesitation, full of the gentle ceremony only a father can offer his child:

“It’s the Festival of the Stars. To give thanks to the Spirits of the Forest… and to connect with our past.”

She beams—he can hear the smile more than see it.

“Then I want to dress up like you!
Pink Rose Hero!!”

Something in him cracks.

Not in the ice.

In the soul.

The memory wavers—warbling, dissolving—like a tape dragged through water.

He hears himself reply, soft and excited, the smile in his voice audible even through decades of forgetting:

“Well if that’s the case…
then should I dress like you?”

Her laughter bursts through the cabin like the sun through storm clouds.
Wild.
Perfect.
Unforgivably pure.

“You’d look silly, daddy! With long hair!”

And then—

Silence.

The echo falls apart, unraveling into static.

He presses a frozen hand to his mouth but cannot stop it—
the sob that tears loose.
Ugly.
Raw.
The kind that shakes the ribs and leaves you clutching at the floor for something to hold onto, something to anchor you to the world.

He chokes out her name—
or tries to—
but all that escapes is a strangled rasp swallowed by the snow.

The statue in front of him—
the small girl with dresses lifted—
begins to crack.

Hairline fractures race across her crystalline skin.
Her face splits.
Her hands crumble.
And in one silent collapse—
she falls into powder, a heap of shimmering blue dust.

When the air clears, all that remains is a single shard of reflective glass.
Barely the size of his thumbnail.
Sharp.
Cold.

It catches the faintest light.

And shows him nothing.

Not even his reflection.

Only emptiness.