Winter seals the land. Ice has fallen, beneath black clouds that close over the sky and stars. Rank upon rank of snow falls, as if to unfurl an all-enveloping flag. Like this, the valley is claimed. It lies a world frozen and dominated by the will of the blizzard.
In this regime, the air is not silent, but echoes with the sharp plinks of hail, the harsh whirling of winds, and the creaking, cracking protests of the trees assailed by each. But the snow muffles it all, like a law of quiet enforced.
She watches the snow descend from atop the last upjutting rock as the mountainside leads to the valley. That rising stone could be her throne. The cold certainly doesn’t rebuke her claim, the ice and her flesh are of like kinds.
She lifts a clawed hand. It glows faintly white with gathered power and it commands the the snow around it. The snow that fell and froze around her has affixed her to the rock, but now by her will it releases her.
Snowflakes have gathered around her glowing hand like moths. She closes her hand, and all of it bursts outward. Then momentum slows off the ejected snow, and now they fall alongside the rest.
Bourne by the wind, the snow is almost suspended, the white crystals made to dance in mid-air. She rises from her rock, and her levitation is true. No origin of her flight is visible, except the too-meager winds rippling waves in her white kimono.
In the snowfall, she travels. Ice flows freely off her skin, and behind the protection of her mask, her eyes remain unperturbed. Still, the snow is thick enough, the night dark enough, little is left to see. But the snow speaks to her, and she feels where it falls around her.
She belongs in this blizzard, and it belongs around her. If she could claim a throne over it, there would be no one to challenge her. Indeed, there would be no one.
She could travel with it as the clouds fly, follow it and one day sit atop a mountaintop where the snow remains ever unevicted, and reign for an era. Audience only to a court of frost, listening to the crack of hail and howling of wind, and a whimper of pain —
Wait. No, that’s not a sound fit for her kingdom. And with that, the trance is broken, and the timeless moment that could have stretched unending instead becomes a transient thing. She turns to the source of the sound, and floats forth, red ribbons trailing behind her.
The one who whimpered, they are almost buried by the snow, frozen in place. The first thing she sees is a pile of cloth, and realizes the garments swaddle a pale, shivering thing. A leaf hangs frosty between two orbs that shimmer wetly in faint light.
The thing jumps suddenly, as if it had seen a ghost.
“Do you know,” her voice is a crystalline chiming, impersonal, “what they say my kind does to pokemon who get lost in a storm?”
The response is almost unintelligible, quiet and stuttering. But she can feel the words touch the snow. “You’re — a froslass.”
Nothing at all of her should be visible in the snowy nothing — certainly not enough to identify her — but the grass-type could clearly see her body. It is an illusion.
“And you are delectable,” she says. She is swaying in the air.
“Are you… feral? But then — you’re talking to me.” They shake their head. “Please, help me!”
She giggles, two pure tones as a resonating warble. “Why should I? You’re lost. No-one has come to find you. And now no one ever will. But I can keep you for-ever!”
“You… please? You’re Awake. That means you’re good, friendly. You can… choose to help me. The town, it can’t be too far away from here. Please?”
Her response comes before they’ve even finished talking. It’s not a giggle this time, but something harsher, if associated. “As if the Awake aren’t still capable of the worst.” But her tone is less rebuke than resignation.
“Good pokemon can still make mistakes. It doesn’t mean they aren’t good.”
She stops swaying. “I could kill you. Seize your body to put on display. And laugh about it. And you call that a mistake?”
A nod, though it’s hard to tell between the shivers. “It wouldn’t make you happy.”
“How do you know?”
“You said display. But… there’s no one out here to show except yourself, is there? You’re alone. And if you decided to kill pokemon, you’d always be alone. And you don’t — no pokemon should be alone, not forever.”
“That’s what you think,” she replied, quietly.
“It’s true.”
“I’ve heard it before.” She shakes her head. With a careless wave of her wing, there’s a pale glow, and then ice is rushing in toward the grass-type. Shivers intensify, as snow covers them completely, and they scream. Cold, cold, cold.
Then she tosses back her wing-arm. The new snow has stuck fast to that which had covered them, and now it all comes off with a cacophony of cracking. A freeing chorus.
“I didn’t think I’d hear it again,” she said quietly.
More ice is pulled off, freeing the pokemon. Still swaddled in cloth, the body obscured but with more of the face free, she sees a bayleef smiling at her.
“I knew you wou—”
Not all ice was free of their face. She pinches some that remains, shutting their mouth.
Unable to speak, they lift a leg and point off into the distance. Not feeling like interpreting, she releases them just a moment later.
“Would you — do you think you could escort me to town?”
She stares, frowning at them. “I have one condition.” They tilt their head, so she explains: “I want your leaf.”
“My… leaf?”
She’s looking at it and they cross their eyes trying to look at it too. She says, “I will freeze it and put it on display in my cave.”
“You — do you even know if it will grow back?”
“That doesn’t concern me.”
The bayleef frowns.
“Do not refuse. I think you would owe me, if I freed you from the storm.”
“But you already freed me.”
All of the snow around them, for a moment, stops falling. The bayleef swallows.
“I… guess. It’s better than all of me?”
“I don’t agree.”
“Ha ha. Um.”
“It won’t hurt.”
The froslass floats closer. The bayleef flinches back, then stops themself. “Okay.”
She brings her wing-arms together, focusing. The forehead leaf sits between them. Falling snow gathers there, pulled in like magnetized iron fillings. Snow melts and refreezes under her power.
“I feel… numb.”
Froslass glances at her work, the block of ice forming on the bayleaf, and blinks. Giggling, she says, “You have a horn, now. But I still have two.”
“H-heh.”
She swipes suddenly with one wing, tapping the new block of ice. It cracks, and the crack spreads. Froslass takes the block of ice. Inside, through a gleaming mosaic of snowflake impurities, is bayleaf’s leaf.
Froslass smiles.
“You’ll take me home now?”
She looks up, lowering the frozen leaf. One nod.
“I hope you — I hope you enjoy it.”
Froslass makes a sound.
“Do you, well, do you have a c-collection? Of things like that?”
A moment of quiet. Then, “Did you mean it?”
“What?”
“When you said a pokemon can make mistakes, and still…” she can’t repeat it.
“You’re good, mysterious snowstorm ghost. You, you wouldn’t have helped me if you weren’t.”
She looks down to the frozen leaf she holds. “This will be the first, in my collection of things like this.”
“Can I ask that you don’t, uh, make a habit of exacting bodily tolls for pokemon stranded in blizzards? I don’t think that would be very good.”
“I’d like to grow my collection.”
“Do you think… what if you had a collection of pokemon, but they weren’t all frozen and they weren’t there all the time and they were your friends?”
“That doesn’t sound like much of a collection.”
“But does it sound nice?”
“How will I organize them if they keep moving.”
“We’ll… work on it.” Bayleaf breathed out, breath fogging. “Do you see those lights off in the distance? That’s where we’re going.”
Froslass floats on in silence beside the bayleaf, whose footsteps leave the only trail. They’re still shivering.
“Also, um, if you can control the snow… could you keep it off me? Please?”
In the land surrounding them, the grip of winter was no less absolute, in its frozen dominion, but if froslass were its ruler, perhaps she could spare a subject. With the snow she keeps off the bayleaf, she swirls it around her, virtually extending the length of her kimono. Bayleaf sees it and smiles, and she smiles back.
The last jutting rock, which she might have been throned upon, lies behind her, in the night-darkened, snow-obscured distance. In front, the lights shine like beacons from windows of warm homes, from a town full of pokemon. Froslass looks back, and then at what lies ahead. She keeps looking between the two, a frown of consideration beneath her mask until she makes her decision, and moves forward.
The snow is still falling around both of them.