Secret of Frost and Moon

Borrowing and Breaking In

Alaia Skyhawk: Hehe, this one is going to give you giggles :)

Disclaimer: I don't own Rise of the Guardians, the Guardians of Childhood, or any related characters etc. This story is written purely for entertainment purposes.

And a shout-out to VanRah on Deviantart, for letting me use their awesome picture of Jack Frost as the new cover for this story! Seriously, go check out their page!

~(-)~

Chapter 40: Borrowing and Breaking In

Pale fingers tapped on the wooden surface, in between turning the pages of the book before their owner. Blue eyes scanned over words, not really reading them... what with him having read this particular book roughly thirty times over the past few years.

Jack pushed the tome away and planted his head face-down on the table, as if that thought sapped any remaining will he had to continue reading it. Lately, all the books the sprites seemed to be finding were either love-lorn poetry or romance novels aimed at wealthy ladies with too much time on their hands. One exception had been a book written in French. Vingt mille lieues sous les mers: 'Twenty thousand leagues under the sea'. That had been a good read, and was a lucky find considering it was a brand new book only published the year previous, 1870. But even when he'd paced himself he'd gotten through it far too quickly. And now, with Southern Winter only just starting, along with the months-long Southern Polar Night, he was running out of reading material and also things to do that he hadn't already done hundreds or even thousands of times.

Jack Frost was bored... very bored.

He lay there with his face on the wood, unwilling to move yet at the same time desperate for something to do. Something fun. He needed a distraction, to take his mind off his boredom and also off the fact that if not for certain restrictions he could have been making children all around the world, happy. While still no means perfect with his control of frostdust, years of practicing during the Southern Polar Day meant he was certainly now capable of spreading it wide-scale and worldwide, if a little clumsily. But every time he'd asked the Man in the Moon if he could actually be the Guardian he was, instead of waiting in hiding, the only answers he got were 'not yet', 'be patient', and 'the time will come'.

It was infuriating.

Jack shoved himself up and away from the table, and then settled back to the floor to begin pacing in agitation. He had a sizeable collection of books now, up almost to five thousand various tomes, but that didn't change the fact he'd read all of them at least a dozen times, apart from the romance novels which he's foisted off onto Ombric before getting past the few pages. He needed something more interesting to read, something new to pass the time, and the best place for that would be a library.

Jack began to mutter under his breath. He knew that visiting the Boston Public Library, which had been opened in 1854, wouldn't be an acceptable reason for him to stray to the North of the World into regions in the grip of summer. Not only that, but the library had extensively catalogued their collection, and there was every chance they'd notice a book was missing if he borrowed it, even if he put it back once he was done. What if someone asked to lend the book he'd borrowed, while he was borrowing it?

Jack paced some more, able to name several other large libraries, but all of them posed the same problem, and he'd already read everything in Ombric's collection that wasn't a spellbook...

The Spirit of Winter paused in his pacing, a flicker of an idea coming to him, before he glanced around almost furtively and retreated to his sleeping chamber. And once there he created an Ice Mirror large enough to step through, and set it to show a place he'd only been to once before.