The Story
There was once a wicked troll who made a mirror — a terrible mirror that had the power to make everything good and beautiful reflected in it appear ugly and distorted, while everything bad and worthless seemed fine and great. The troll and his pupils carried it everywhere, laughing at the reflections it made of people and places. Then one day the mirror slipped and fell, shattering into millions of fragments. The larger pieces were made into window panes, and people who looked through them saw their neighbors as warped and unpleasant. The tiny splinters blew through the air, and some of them flew into people's eyes and stayed there, making everything seem cold and ugly. And some of them were fine as dust, and floated into people's hearts.
In a city, up high where the rooftops nearly touched, two children grew up as neighbors and as friends. They were Kay and Gerda, and they grew roses together in the boxes between their windows, and told each other stories, and were as happy as children can be.
Then, one winter, a sliver of the troll's mirror flew into Kay's eye. And a second fragment entered his heart. The roses suddenly seemed ugly to him. Gerda suddenly seemed silly and tiresome. The world went cold and grey, and the only thing that seemed beautiful to Kay was snow.
That same winter, the Snow Queen came. She was magnificent and terrible — tall and pale as ice, wrapped in furs that seemed woven from frozen air. She stopped her sleigh in the street below and looked up, and Kay, who should have run inside, did not run. She beckoned, and he climbed down. She wrapped him in her furs, and kissed him on the forehead, and the kiss was like ice, cold enough to numb everything: the pain of the splinter, the memory of Gerda, the memory of everything warm.
She took him to her palace in the frozen north.
Gerda waited for Kay to come home, and when he did not, she went to find him. She was small and alone and the world was very large, but she went.
She followed the river downstream in a little boat, and the river carried her to a cottage where an old woman who knew magic kept her for a time, dazzled by the old woman's flowers and kindness. But the flowers reminded her of the roses she and Kay had grown together, and she remembered, and went on.
She met a prince and princess who gave her warm clothes and a golden carriage, but robbers took the carriage in a dark wood. A little robber girl, curious and not entirely unkind, gave her a reindeer to ride on, and the reindeer knew where the Snow Queen's palace was.
They traveled north through cold that Gerda had never imagined — cold that seemed to have weight and teeth. A Finnish wise woman told her: "The power to free Kay is already in Gerda's own heart. I cannot give her more than she already has."
At last Gerda reached the Snow Queen's palace, and the guards — great snowflakes, sharp and cutting — flew at her. But she was so cold and tired and determined that she began to say the Lord's Prayer, and her breath in the frozen air became little angels, and the angels held back the snowflakes, and Gerda walked through.
She found Kay in the great empty hall of the palace, sitting alone on a lake of ice, pushing pieces of ice around and trying to spell a word. The Snow Queen had told him: if he could spell the word ETERNITY from the pieces of ice, he would be free. But the pieces would not make the word, and his eyes and heart were still full of the cold shard of mirror.
Gerda ran to him and threw her arms around him and wept. Her hot tears fell on his chest, on the place where the splinter was lodged in his heart, and the warmth of her tears melted it away. When the fragment was gone, Kay blinked and looked at her with new eyes — and he began to weep himself, and wept the shard out of his eye as well. He saw her clearly for the first time in so long.
"Gerda," he said, and it was as if he had been asleep.
The ice pieces around them shifted on their own and spelled the word. They were free.
They walked out of the palace together, the reindeer waiting for them, and the north wind blowing at their backs, and all the way home the world grew greener and warmer the farther south they went. When they crossed back into the city and climbed up to the rooftop gardens, the roses were in bloom.
They were children still — and yet, somehow, not quite children anymore.