Cirno?s turn.
Fairies are things of the times. We always live in the present. We make the most of every day, and don?t worry about the consequences. What?s the worst that shrine maiden can do, kill us? She can?t! We?ll be up again in a day at most. You couldn?t kill a fairy of spring without killing spring itself! There are no consequences for fairies.
We draw our powers from the times. Some of us draw it from the sun, others from the moon, others still from a flower or a tree or a hill. We live as long as our mothers feed us. My mother was winter. She was a good mommy, and she had lots of children. There were snow fairies and frost fairies and my favorite, ice fairies all winter. She was a loving and cold mother, and we all played pranks on the villagers; we would freeze doors shut and cover the walkways with ice. The shrine maiden got annoyed when out pranks froze some of the humans to death. Still, it was a wonderful, long, cold season.
And then mommy left us, and my little sisters began to melt. The young, frost fairies went first; there were a couple cold snaps, and many new frost fairies were born, but they all faded quickly. The youngest of the snow and ice fairies also melted away. By June all the frost fairies were gone, and my sisters and I had moved up to the mountains. It was terribly hot for us. Humans have said it was an unusually cold summer, but a cold summer for a human is a scalding one for a snow fairy. It starts with what you humans might call sweating, but for ice fairies sweating is bad. Sweating turns to melting. And without food, icy cold, delicious food, ice fairies stay melted.
By July, most of my sisters were melted, and the few that remained played pranks and lived every day to the fullest. They knew their time had come. Perhaps if I weren?t so stubborn, I would have known it too. Instead I gathered the last of the snow from around the mountain, once large piles swept by the tengu in winter now barely a molehill in size, and stuffed it all into a small cave on the mountainside. I managed to fill the cave, and said my farewells to the last few snow fairies. The couple that remained wanted to go out with a bang; most fairies don?t fear death. Most of them fear loneliness and embrace fading away. Only one other fairy joined me in the cave, a rather timid one called Celsius. By the end of July, we were the last two ice fairies.
We waited for three months in that cave, watching the last snow melt a little bit every day and talking about winter and about death. I wondered if the others were right. Was this all just prolonging the inevitable? Should I have pulled that one last prank? Why couldn?t I just accept death like my sisters? Somehow the hope made it worse; knowing death was certain would have been merciful; there would be nothing to fear. But with hope that we could survive this, the two of us spent every day in fear, praying that mommy would come back. We may have not had much in common besides wanting to live, but Celsius was my only friend during those long months. By mid October, we knew the others were right. Just a shovelful of snow was left. It would never last until winter came again. We decided to lay down one last time in my tiny pile of slush, and resigned ourselves to melting.
I woke up three days later to a flurry. My sister was nowhere to be found, and had mother waited even another day I may have gone with her. Usually, fairies don?t spend enough time together to get close bonds and miss each other, but having spent so much time with that last one alone; knowing she was gone hurt. I?m glad Mommy managed to come early that year, (although she told me it was after a long argument with the twins, Fall and Autumn), and I?ve grown strong enough to last every summer since.
That winter I spent a lot of time near fires, learning how to make things cold without snow or ice. The method involved seems to confuse people that like books, like the vampire?s librarian and the village schoolteacher. They ask me how I do it, and I say I make everything cold. Then they ask where all the energy goes. It doesn?t go anywhere ? I just remove it. Once someone asked how I could ?break entropy?, to which I responded ?Have you tried the other fairies? I?ve never seen an entropy before, let alone broken one. Unless you mean the clothesline, in which case it?s all Rumia?s fault! I swear!?
Although for some reason it?s a lot easier to cool things off by making them move. The librarian said something about transferring heat energy into motion energy. I don?t know what it means, but I do know shooting ice really fast helps me cool down.
Right, back to fairies.
Fire fairies are extinguished the day they?re made, fairies of autumn fall with the leaves, fairies of the day set with the sun, flower fairies wilt with winter, and of course, snow fairies melt in the spring. Their time passes, and they each disappear each in their own way. Fairies have no future, no consequences, and nothing to live for but the present. Even the long-living among us don?t worry about anything but the here and now; memories are filled with a thousand friends we?ll never see again, the present has a thousand that are here today and gone tomorrow, and the future will bring about a thousand new ones. While only the strongest survive.
