A hammering flurry of knocks on the door awoke her suddenly.
"On the orders of the Duke of Weselton, we command you to open this door immediately!"
She shot up out of the bed with a terrified jolt, clawing at the sheets in the dark to orient herself even as the knocking continued, unabated.
"Whoever you are," the voice from behind the door roared again, "if you do not open this door, we will not hesitate to break it down!"
Her whole body shook at the crashing of fists against wood, and she desperately pulled on her gloves to steady her thundering heart in her chest.
What's happening? Who is shouting? Where is Hans?
The questions were like a circle of bats shrieking at her in that darkness, and she choked back a cry of panic as she crawled onto the ground, gripping a bedpost.
"We warned you!" the voice bellowed, and following it soon after was the deafening crash of whatever the group behind the door were using to break through it.
Her hands were glued to her ears all the while, trying to block out the noise; though she didn't quite realize it yet, the frozen tears that fell to the ground in a tiny, sputtering hailstorm were evidence of her subconscious understanding of the situation.
They're coming for me.
As the door finally gave way in a splintering boom, she hid her face in her gloved hands, and her body became like ice.
"Queen . . . Queen Elsa? You're alive?"
The question was posed in such a shocked manner that she was forced to finally look up, though she was equally startled by the sudden silence that had descended upon the room.
Still, she could find no words to answer the man—some castle guard at the front of a whole group of them, by the looks of it—nor even to ask questions of her own.
Her chilly, haunted look seemed to deter them from asking anything further; nonetheless, the quietude that had settled in the darkness was soon snuffed out by another voice at the back, which snorted derisively.
"Well, this is a surprise," he said snidely, revealing himself to her as the very same Duke of Weselton whose name had been uttered as a means of intimidation not but a few minutes before. "But no matter—this just means that we'll be locking up two traitors."
She looked up again at that remark, and her heart pounded with sudden, bewildering terror.
Two traitors?
The first guard stepped in close to the Duke, his expression showing some consternation with the judgment. "But, sir," he protested, "if the traitor King Hans locked her up in here, doesn't that mean that—that perhaps she is innocent?"
The Duke scoffed at the question before waving the man away. "Innocent of what? Turning the entire kingdom into an icebox on a whim with her accursed power?" He sneered at the guard as the man looked away, embarrassed to have spoken at all. "No. I think not."
When her gaze grew hard at this pronouncement, he eyed her for a moment; afterwards, he turned back to the men. "Whatever reason the princeling of the Southern Isles had for keeping the traitor queen here, I don't know—nor, frankly, do I care to know," he said bluntly, twitching his moustache. "All that matters now is that she is put back in a proper prison cell where she belongs, awaiting what will likely be her death."
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The North Wind
قصص الهواة[Frozen; Alternate Ending; Hans x Elsa.] "If they knew you were still alive, they would never stop hunting you," he told her bluntly. "As long as you're here, you're safe from them." Elsa's stare turned hard and bitter at these words; and yet his da...
