Inara's sister

It is said that when snowflakes gather, they form a huge swarm, but she is, of course, the biggest white bee of them all. Sometimes, the Snow Queen flutters around the city in the body of a bird and looks through the windows, and when she does, they become covered with ice, forming strange shapes.

It is also believed that she can freeze your heart, your soul, and/or take you away to live in her ice castle forever... However, have you ever wondered what her past was like? Or how she became an ice woman? 

I have. Before dying and forgetting everything, I asked myself that many times...

Could I have done something different to change her fate?

***

Alphonse and I got engaged a year before making that trip, and we decided that the ideal thing to do was to spend two months travelling before our wedding. We went to a ski resort that had a recently-constructed ski lift; that was his wedding present for me. I had told him that I had always wanted to go to the snowy mountains, it was almost an imperative in my heart, and because of it—I guess— I felt that I was going to blow up due to the excitement I felt when we got off the train and I got to see the mountain range. It rose up so majestically with its peaks as white as clouds.

The nearest town was filled with stores of craftsmen willing to enthrall the passing tourists with their works. The main square had metal benches, and a variety of flowers embellished the corners. People riding horses passed by and everyone seemed really nice. That afternoon was very romantic for us. We looked around for the humble hotel in which we had reservations: a rustic, but neat place, with two separated bedrooms where we could rest as much as we wanted.

Alphonse really wanted to rest, so after having lunch, he decided that we should take a nap, however, the thrill of being high upon the mountain range didn't let me sleep. Sitting still obediently looking through the window wasn't my thing, so I grabbed a note card from the desk and wrote a message: “I went out to explore the city. I will be back before dusk.”

I entered his room quietly and left the note beside his keys, thinking that it would be easier to spot if I put it there.

Thus, I put on my coat and went out feeling so jolly that I wanted to jump around like a child. I walked around that cold and little town, and visited some craft shops where I bought a beautiful bracelet. Then I kept walking up the colorful streets until I reached the base of the mountain. I found a dirt path which I thought would take me to the ski resort. I walked through the trail looking at the landscape so engrossed that I didn't notice when the trail split in two, so I ended up deep inside the mountain, away from the crowd. I sat down for a moment to feel the snow, and with it I made a figure that slowly started to look like a bird. Smiling because of the funny figure I had left on the road, I kept going up until I got tired. Then I noticed that my destination was far away still, so I decided to turn around and go back, but a gentle blizzard sent my scarf flying. I ran after it and when I finally reached it and picked it up, a white figure suddenly appeared and pounced on me. At the same time, I heard a spectral, guttural voice that scared me, so I fell on my back screaming out of fear as I tried to escape.

***

  Hundreds of years ago, in a small town at the foot of the mountain range there was a rustic and peculiar home. The marriage that lived there had two daughters, Inara and Yanara. They both possessed an unusual beauty, one that was not merely superficial, for it glowed with a radiance that made everyone fell for it. Moreover, magic dwelled in the hearts of the two girls, allowing them to see things that others could not. They immediately knew if someone was lying to them, and they also knew what herbs were useful to cure which illnesses. They even had foreboding dreams and could easily find lost objects, no matter their size. All these things made the two sisters very popular in their town.

As the years passed by, one of the twins, Yanara, started to shine less bright than the other; she was so dazzled by her sister that she couldn't realize that she herself was astonishingly beautiful and generous as well. Deluded by her desire to stand out, she began to act even more generously and politely, but for the wrong reasons, and thus she began to walk away from her inner light as she sought to be praised and applauded by everyone she knew.

During a sunny day, a mysterious, big shard of glass landed at the feet of the girl, who was now a teenager, and she immediately knew that it was a magical object, for she could sense it by the energy that it emanated. She felt as if it was her lucky day, because she didn't know that the shard was the piece of a mirror forged by the very Devil. As she used the shard like a magnifier to look at different things, she began to see the world with different eyes, and although she thought she saw things more clearly, in reality, she saw then through a distorted perception.

She took the mirror shard home and there she boasted about her finding to her sister, but her sister, instead of being jealous, stared at the shard fixedly for a while in an attempt to analyze it, and when she noticed its power, she frowned and pulled it away. After warning her sister about the evil within the mirror shard, she asked her not to use it. She even offered her help to get rid of it, but Yanara didn't take that well.