When Ada woke, she felt like she was underwater. She felt the pressure of the water pressing in on her, and immediately panicked. Eyes slammed open and she scrambled in what she hoped was upwards for the surface. Hands flew to her mouth as she gasped and sucked into water into her lungs.

Only to find she could breathe perfectly fine.

Ada's hands dropped tentatively from the clamp around her mouth, heart still ramming against her ribcage.

"Ada?" She heard the familiar voice as though through a great distance. "Ada, can you hear me?"

Eyes focused though the distortion. Queen Matilda stood before her, only a metre away but oddly separate. Ada squeezed her eyelids closed to clear her vision, but the film-like haze didn't vanish.

"I can hear you." Her own voice sounded strange to her. Deeper somehow, crackling with the potent tang of power.

Matilda squinted at her as though she was peering into the depths of a scrying window. "How do you feel?" she asked carefully.

"I feel…" Ada flexed her fingers. Something sparked between them, the power of her birthright crackling through her body. Leaping through neurons and firing through synapses like supernovas. "…Like I could do anything," she said breathlessly. Magic created at the dawn of time and trapped in the silvered surface of a single mirror and it ran through her veins, power like liquid electricity burning through her arteries.

She could do anything. Reorganise the universe. Change time, force it to march to the beat of her command, her desire. Except…

"I'm not complete," she said. More. She needed more. She could feel the slivers of glass that contained the missing portions of her power, trapped within flesh and bone. It would be easy, effortlessly easy to rip them from their feeble prisons of flesh to take them inside herself and absorb their power.

No… murmured the part of her that was still Ada. I won't hurt my friends. I won't hurt Elsa.

"How?" she demanded of the Queen, the question the electric crack of a whip. "The missing pieces. How do I retrieve them?"

"There is a spell," said Matilda, still watching her quite closely and carefully. "Of ancient binding and power."

Some of Ada's own tenor crept into the crackling voice of the Mirror: "I can remove the pieces without hurting them?"

Matilda's wrinkles deepened as her mouth cracked open into a smile. "It's as you said: you can do anything."

Ada felt the pieces shift fractionally in their hosts, tugged towards her like the tides to the moon, responding to her desire. Now that she'd sensed them, it was agony to feel them so close to her but apart. She would become complete. She must become complete. Her voice hitched as she rasped: "This spell. Do it."

Matilda opened the book in her hands. And began to read.

Ask veit ek standa,

heitir Yggdrasill,

hár baðmr, ausinn

hvíta auri;

þaðan koma döggvar,

þærs í dala falla,

stendr æ yfir grænn

Urðarbrunni.

The words left the Queen's lips with the metallic hiss of power. Ada looked to Elsa, to see the strange glow at her chest where the shard of Mirror was lodged. Just a tiny sliver of silver that had so amplified Elsa's abilities that she'd once froze an entire kingdom. The glow at her chest radiated outwards, and she was lifted up from the slab by invisible hands, limp head lolling backwards and hair tumbling.

Those same hands lifted Ilia, Angus and Khublan, glowing blue-white where the shards lodged in their flesh. Those shards that manifested the different aspects of the Mirror.

In Ilia, the Mirror's illusion.

In Khublan, its deception.

In Angus, its trickery.

And in Elsa, rested the Mirror's own cold, icy heart.

Ada's breath was dragged from her chest as the shards were pulled from their hosts, phasing through flesh and bone harmlessly. For a second, they hung suspended. Then with a magnetic force, they were wrenched through the air with a such a velocity that left them a blur.

The surge in power Ada felt as the missing pieces slotted back into the spaces made the air crackle with energy. The nordic runes that crept sluggishly over the walls of the chamber like oil on water went crazy, scattering like a frightened swarm of hornets.

Urðarbrunni.

Queen Matilda spoke the final words of the spell, and the contract was complete.

A white light engulfed everything.

Having never experienced it before, it took Elsa several minutes to figure out the sensation she was feeling.

Staggering, exhausted across the expanse of the frozen glacier, Elsa concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other. Her feet were blistered and bloodied, cut from walking barefoot over the uneven ice sheets. Worse: there were rifts in the ice, pitfalls and cracks that ran along to form ravines so deep Elsa couldn't see to the bottom. In some places the ice was wafer thin, an illusion concealing a long fall and an agonising death deep at the bottom of the glacier. It made Elsa's progress agonisingly slow, as she had no choice but to carefully test the ice as she walked, ready to reinforce it with her own if it failed beneath her. Still, she staggered forward, one blistered foot in front of the other, the blizzard tearing at her clothes and hair, snow stinging her eyes.

That was when Elsa felt it. She gasped aloud, clutching her arms tight around her body. The pain at her feet became excruciating. The feeling ate its way into her, into the marrow of her bones. When she breathed, she felt it, stabbing at the pith of her lungs.

For the first time in life, Elsa felt cold.

The pain from the stinging wind was unbearable. It felt like a hailstorm of needles being driven into her skin. She couldn't continue on like this. Elsa raised her hands to create a shelter, to wait out the storm in.

Nothing happened.

She could visualise the shelter in her head, but it wouldn't translate. The warm undercurrent of her powers that tingled under her skin wasn't there anymore. She stared at her hands, quickly now turning numb.

Her powers. They were gone.

She could hardly think how, or why, or even think at all. All she could think of was warmth, shelter, heat.

Elsa only staggered another fifty feet across the ice before she fell. She tripped, and there, lying in the snow, the easiest thing seemed to be just to stay put. The cold that ate away at her body seemed to be leeching away now, replaced by an almost pleasant warmth. In fact, her forehead was hot to the touch. She laid her head into the snow for relief. Once sharp, cold and cutting, it seemed soft now. Like a comfortable pillow. Perhaps, she would rest her eyes. Just for a moment…

Elsa forced them open again, when she imagined her sister crying as they unburied her cold, lifeless body from under the snowdrift.

Anna. She had to get back to Anna.

No. She had to get away from Anna.

Elsa pressed her palms against her eyes. Everything was so confusing. Her forehead was burning now, and the world seemed to be turning on its axis.

The last thing Elsa saw before she passed out was the blizzard as it momentarily parted. Like a mirage floating upon the horizon, hung between curtains of white. Arendelle.

Elsa dreams. A dark, convoluted tangle of dreams, fiction and memory weaving round one another in a dance. She dreams she wakes up, only to sleep. She cannot wake up. When she stirs, close to the surface, it feels as though there's a weight on her chest, pushing her back down to the depths. Sometimes, she has a vague awareness of voice and movement, but she's never sure if that too is her mind playing tricks on her.

She's aware she's sick. She feels it sometimes, when she's close enough to the surface. Her forehead is boiling hot and her throat feels as though someone's stuffed a burning coal down it. She's exhausted, from fighting both the illness and the dreams. It's easier to slip back into slumber, away from the nonsense whispers that echo as though she's deep underwater.

She dreams for hours, days, years, millennia, and when Elsa finally wakes, she wakes to a delightfully cool feeling, brushing her forehead. A hand, teasing tendrils of hair back behind her ear, drawing her back to consciousness.

For several minutes, Elsa was content to lay there, exhaustion heavy in her bones, letting the hand gently brush against her head.

When it was removed, along with that cool relief, Elsa couldn't help but release a small noise, like that of a child deprived of a toy.

"Elsa? Are you awake?" She knew that voice. As content as she was to lay there forever, it prompted her to push her exhausted eyelids open.

The dim light of the gas lamps stung her eyes like the midday sun. She squinted, shut them, and tried again. It was easier this time. Something had moved in front of the glare of the lamp. Blinking, Elsa looked up to see her sister hanging over her, hair falling like a long curtain, surrounded by a halo of light.

The voice that crawled out of Elsa's hoarse throat was chipped and cracked: "Anna?"

"Oh, Elsa." She leaned down to hug Elsa. As well as she could, with Elsa lying prone. She spoke into the material of her nightgown: "You slept for so long, and your fever wouldn't break. We were afraid you'd never wake up."

"What happened?" Elsa managed to ask.

"The rescue party found you collapsed out on the ice. You've been asleep for a week, Elsa!" When Anna pulled back, her eyes were wet with tears.

"What… what was I doing out there?" Everything felt so jumbled in her head. The Spring City, and the weeks she was someone else. Somehow, she'd ended out on the glacier, too. She couldn't tell what had actually happened and what had been a fever dream.

Only Anna's hand, which had returned to her forehead to brush back her hair, felt real.

"I don't know," Anna said. "You disappeared, weeks ago. No-one knew where you were. The staff were frantic."

The staff…? Elsa's eyes, now adjusting to the light, roamed around the room. They were in Elsa's bedroom, in Arendelle Castle. There was her quill sat on her desk, exactly how she'd left it. Her books. Her dressing gown, hung on the hook by her door. The only thing that was different was the shutters on the window had been barred against the storm that still rampaged outside.

It was true that she thought she'd seen Arendelle out on the glacier, but it'd been her mind playing tricks on her, right?

"I'm… home?" asked Elsa, in disbelief.

"You're home," Anna echoed, leaning forward to press a cool kiss to her forehead.

It would be effortlessly easy to accept this. To lie back and take her sister's caresses and think no more of it. But Elsa forced herself to ask, "But, how? How did I get here? Before, I was in a hedge maze in the Spring City. You were…" her words dried up as she remembered how they'd last parted. How could she be allowed back into Arendelle after what she'd said to the Admiral? Unless the bars on the window weren't to protect against the storm outside.

But to her surprise, Anna laughed. "It sounds like you had some interesting dreams while you were out."

"…Dreams?"

"You have never been to the Spring City before, Elsa," Anna said, speaking very slowly to Elsa, as though she was a small child.

Wait, what?

She supposed it was possible that everything that happened in the Spring City had been a dream. Certainly, if she'd been told about what would happen a month ago, Elsa wouldn't have believed it.

"So the wedding was in here Arendelle instead?" she said, trying to make sense of this.

But Anna's brow crumpled in confusion at this, too. "Wedding? Is there something you want to tell me, Elsa?"

"You must remember that," Elsa insisted. "The Winter Paegent. I married Prince Jareth."

"Wow, Elsa. And you thought I was weird when I was sick and woke up thinking I was Joan of Arc."

Despite herself, Elsa's lips twitched upwards at the memory. "I remember that. You burst out of bed yelling, 'Where is my horse?'"

"It took ages for Kai to convince me I wasn't a holy warrior fighting for the glory of France," Anna said, stifling laughter. "If there were any Englishmen in the castle, I would have run them through!"

"With what?" Elsa said, laughter hurting her painful throat. "That chair leg you were brandishing around?"

"In my defence," said Anna, "I thought it was Excalibur."

"Now here I was thinking Excalibur was King Arthur's sword…"

"Hey! It was a dream, okay? It doesn't have to make sense."

Their laughter was easy and comfortable. It was almost like the last terrible month had never happened. Back when things were simple and easy between her and her sister. Before everything got so screwed up. Back when she and Anna could have a dumb conversation about Joan of Arc.

And Elsa considered: Maybe it was. Maybe it had all been a dream.

The months of tension that had begun the day Franz mentioned the Paegent began to leak away. All the stress she'd held in her muscles began to relax.

If it didn't hurt just to talk, she might have shouted aloud. It was all a dream! Everything was going to be okay.

As the sisters chatted easily, Anna left Elsa's forehead to hold her hand, dangling freely in the space beside the bed. An old echo of fear hit Elsa's chest as she thought: I shouldn't be touching her. My powe—

She recalled the realisation she'd had on the ice. Experimentally, she tried to frost over a fingernail. A small display of power, since she didn't think she had the strength to do much more. But just like on the glacier, nothing happened.

Anna was part way through a story, punctuated by giggles, about how she'd put pepper in Kai's tea as a child when Elsa burst out, the words tearing her hoarse throat: "My powers! They're gone."

"Huh?" said Anna, who looked quite put out at the interruption.

"My ice powers!" It hurt to shout, and she moderated her voice. "My ice powers. They're broken… or… or something. I— I can't feel them like I usually can." A note of panic crept into her voice. Even though they'd caused her so much grief, her powers had been a part of her so long that to be without them felt… wrong.

Like a part of her was missing.

But to her surprise, Anna smirked. "You realise I'm never gonna let you live this one down, Elsa."

"What?"

"You must have hit your head on that ice or something. Ice powers. Oh boy." She was still laughing when the knock came at the door, managing to swallow down her giggles enough to call for their visitors to come in.

Although her ice powers might have vanished, when Elsa looked up to see the two people in the doorway, her blood froze cold.

Anna clamped a hand over her mouth to stop the laughter, twisting in her seat to face the visitors.

"She's awake!" Anna said. "As, uh, you can see. Oh, but Papa, you have to hear this. She's convinced she has ice powers. Pew pew!"

They didn't look a day older than the day she'd hugged them goodbye. Flesh and blood, they were there, everything she remembered and all the things about them she'd forgotten. It'd been five years since they died, but the King and Queen of Arendelle walked into her bedroom as though they'd never left.