About

Kai was born to a widow, a boy with eyes too bright and too knowing. From the day he first spoke, he could see the golden lines that tied one soul to another; threads of yearning, affection, desire, and need. In childhood he thought them beautiful. Later, he learned they could be plucked.

When his mother’s loneliness grew heavy, Kai touched those threads and bound her heart to a nobleman who admired her beauty. He thought he was granting her happiness, but instead, he gave her torment. The nobleman’s affection was purely physical, but his manner was cruel. Not long after their marriage, she tried to flee him. Kai plucked and plucked, hoping to redirect his step-father’s attention back to something soft and genial, but all it did was enflame hunger and ownership. His mother paid the price one day.

Grief made Kai blind to everything but guilt. He saw the same hunger in every human light, every reaching thread. To his eyes, the world itself writhed with want. He fled north through the wilderness, seeking a place where nothing desired anything, not even life.

The Kingdom of One

The snows deepened until they swallowed the horizon, and still he walked. At last he collapsed beside a river that had no name. There the Queen of Snow found him. When she discovered the traveler half-buried in frost, she almost left him to die. But he was quiet, and his soul gave off no clamor, only stillness. She carried him to her palace and warmed him by the fire. He awoke to her voice slipping in and out of awareness.

When he asked where he was, she said, “Nowhere. And that is why it does not hurt.”

For a time they lived without cacophony nor even the barest touch. He carved shapes in the ice and built sculptures in the snow; she watched him but did not flinch. He told her of the threads he once saw, the way desire wrapped the living like snares. She listened, because his voice was low enough not to wound her. He found it strange he saw no such threads connecting her, and he inquired about her past, but her silence was stoic.

He began to think perhaps this was love: a love that neither asked nor took. A quiet and calm love, free of passion, fire, and hurt that haunted his past.

Greta

She was the step-sister he had gained through tragedy. She had followed his lonely journey, believing she might bring him home. When she entered the Snow Queen’s hall, she found shock and awe; having no awareness of her existence while the Queen regarded her like a curiosity, a thing that should not exist.

Greta found Kai seated and patient, but his smile was calm and distant as he regarded her, “It doesn’t hurt here. Go home, Greta.”

But Greta shook her head. “You mistake pain for living, Kai. You mistake silence for peace.”

The Queen listened. Her veins thrummed faintly with feeling; that old pain returning.

Kai argued softly, afraid to disturb the quiet that had kept him sane. Love, he said, destroyed all it touched. It had destroyed him.

Greta answered, “Then let it destroy me too. I’d rather burn in action than freeze in passivity.”

For the first time in years, the Queen felt everything: grief, longing, warmth, desire, but one of agony, of true love and she marveled at it. She watched them and wept, aware of the loss soon to come.

When morning came, the Queen stood at the gates of her home as he and Greta prepared to depart. “You have given back what I had buried,” she told Kai. “A gift I did not want. It hurts me to no end.”

He bowed his head, carefully taking her hand in his. “My Dear, it always will. That’s how we know it’s real.”

The Queen’s face broke into a sad smile as stepped aside. Greta and Kai rode into the dawn.

Years later, Greta dreamed she saw a glacier splitting open, and within it, a tablet of carved stone. A man uncovered it; tall, strong, his gaze hard as stone. He read the words etched there by the Queen’s own hand, words that echoed through the ages:

When silence breaks and breath grows thin,
The changeling child shall draw the night…

She woke trembling, the final lines still ringing in her mind of ice, and dead rising, and the end of light.

Rebirths

1st Age:

3rd Age: Dalenar

4th Age: Kai

6th Age: Eros (Cupid)