A gentle snowfall coated the rundown buildings and dirty streets of the New York City slums, livening them up like powdered sugar put on a cake to give it that special touch. Madelyn felt like an outcast as she watched a few children run past, pelting each other with snowballs. No, she wasn’t lost; for how can you be lost in a place that you had never known? She was a stranger to New York City, to America, in fact to most of the civilized world. She didn’t belong here. She belonged in Antarctica, her home.
“What?!” you ask. “How can someone’s home be in Antarctica? Only soldiers and scientists live there, and even then it’s their job!” I agree with you, dear reader; only a few daring individuals make their home in that frozen region, where the coldest recorded temperature on earth is -127 degrees Fahrenheit; but long, long ago, centuries before outsiders first started to explore the continent, there was a great civilization living deep within its interior.
The Antarcticans were a strong and majestic people who carved their living from the ice. They were able to withstand the frigid weather without shelter or heat, for they were not human in the purest sense of the word---no, Antarcticans were a different race entirely, characterized by the bluish tints in their hair. But living in these bitter conditions made them cold towards one another. They did not love. And without love, no one can survive.
Madelyn, however, had always been different. Being the daughter of the king, her heart should have been made from the coldest ice imaginable; but for some mystic reason known only to her Creator, she was born with a heart of gold. She was sweet and sensitive, even compassionate, and as she grew older she grew more beautiful, both on the inside and the outside. The king would often yell at her and call her weak, saying she was not worthy of his bloodline; but he didn’t realize what a treasure he had, because she loved him anyway.
By the time Madelyn was born, the Antarctican population had been dwindling, slowly but surely, for decades. It didn’t matter if she was the princess or not, because the bonds of kith and kin had been broken long ago, and her people had drifted away from each other. She as forced to watch her own family rip itself apart---Michael, who loathed being heir to a throne devoid of honor, abandoned them to go his own way; Alexander got into a fight with his parents one night and disappeared without a trace; Kiara eloped with her beloved; and lastly, Madelyn’s little sister, Cynthia, died from a terrible fever. When Madelyn told her parents, they paid her no mind, because they were too busy arguing to care.
Torn and confused, Madelyn locked herself away in the topmost room of the topmost tower of their grand ice palace and feel into a deep and dreamless sleep that lasted for how long, we will never know. When she awoke, she found herself sealed in a storage container on a plane full of ecstatic scientists who couldn’t wait to share their discovery with the rest of the world; and sadly, they never did.
The terrified Madelyn used her ice powers(every Antarctican had them) to free herself, and in doing so she froze the plane’s engines. That airplane crashed somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, and the few men on board who didn’t drown, froze to death in the icy water. Madelyn, the ice princess, was the only one who survived. She was the last of the Antarcticans, and she knew it from the horrible sense of loneliness she felt as she floated on a piece of the wreckage.
A ship passed by several days later, and by either fate or providence, someone spotted the blue-haired girl in the water. He alerted his fellow crewmen and the rescued her immediately, fishing her out of the water with a life raft and then helping her to get warm. Madelyn had never been warm; it was a delicious new sensation to her, impossible to describe except for one word: love. Warmth was like love.
For the first few minutes, she was unable to understand what the men around her were saying, for they spoke a completely different language than she; but Madelyn had another power besides ice. She reached out and grabbed the captain’s sleeve, causing him to look down at her, and she caught his gaze with her intensely blue eyes. Madelyn held him mesmerized for a moment before she let go, asking, “Do you have anything to eat?” in perfect English.
Captain Austin shook his head as if to clear it, and ordered one of his men to go fetch her something from the kitchen. Everyone was curious to know her story and from whence she came, especially due to her icy blue hair; but Madelyn knew, from reading the captain’s eyes, that Americans were a skeptical people. So from the time that she met them to the time they parted in the seaports of New York City, she never told them a thing in relation to her true identity.
And now here she was, wandering aimlessly, without a family and without a home, on the coldest day of December. A pretty young girl all by herself in the dangerous streets of New York City…
