The Other Olaf

I am a snow man and my name is Olaf. I was born in a castle ballroom, created by a young witch at play with her sister. You might have heard this story, even heard of the snow man with my name, but that is not me. That is the other Olaf.

The first thing I remember is the young witch Elsa striking her sister Anna in the brow with a bolt of ice, and then the screaming. The king and queen—the girls’ parents—burst in and hauled them away. The king’s urgent, panicked whispers … the queen’s stifled keening and sobs … this was the weakness I came to hate in humans and especially in this family. They left, and with the witch’s departure, I began to melt. It was warm in the castle with all the fires banked high against the chill. This might surprise you, though I don’t know why it should, but melting is agony.

I knew my name because I heard the girls say it before the accident, but I was forgotten in the trauma that followed. About everything else, I was ignorant. I tried to find Elsa, since I knew she had made me and I thought, so stupidly, that she would care for me. Her bumbling parents were long gone with the stricken Anna, off to consort with trolls. I did find the hall of royal bedchambers where Elsa was now under heavy guard. I could sense her there but didn’t dare approach. I faintly shared Elsa’s childish memories and thoughts, so I knew which way her room’s windows faced. With some fearful wandering I found my way outside, hoping to attract her attention from the gardens.

But instead, once I crept through an empty scullery to a courtyard, I encountered winter, and the sweetest relief of my life before or since. The cold chilled me and preserved me but also enlivened my body and mind. Suddenly I understood the accidental nature of my creation, my singular fact of existence, and that if I was discovered here, I would be snuffed out as an abomination of Elsa’s witchcraft, so cravenly concealed by the king and queen.

Instead I went to the mountains. They called to me as years later I would call to Elsa. Here was a place of purity and freedom from want. I required nothing but cold, and my nature repelled what few animals might harm me. Humans were not similarly repelled, at least not by instinct, but my form makes concealment at permafrost heights a simple matter. I might distantly observe an ice harvester or logger once a winter, but for the most part my thoughts and explorations were undisturbed. Even the trolls shunned my mountains, never knowing exactly why, but content with their endless courtship rituals and pathetic hedge magic. Charlatans. Truly a revolting race.

What I explored was myself. Though created as an animation of Elsa’s will, I seemed to share not only pieces of her mind and soul, but also her power. Nothing like the miracles she could work, but that just made me more subtle in my workings. These took time, and I learned to spread my spirit through vast spaces of ice and snow and air. My reach was slow but grew long and sure, like the glaciers I drifted upon. In this way I killed my first man.

He was a roving hunter and came into my grasp by chance, where I had spent some days on a high ridge gazing contemplatively down a steep snowfield at a stand of fir. My concentration was deep within the shifting sheets of snow when I became aware of him walking through them. He was stalking a pack of wolves, or vice versa, or both, who knows. I never saw him actually but felt his snowshoes in my awareness—almost as if he was walking on my body. From an impulse I still can’t explain, I severed a cascade of snow crystals just so, and an avalanche began beneath me. The hunter did not notice what was coming downslope till it was far too late. Still he ran, floundering on his wooden treadshoes. To insure the result I made the snow clutch at his feet, and he fell. Then he was covered over. I sensed his struggles as he was rolled and buried until his frame broke and collapsed. I felt nothing but the cold.

This experience freed me. I had been thinking so small, and with such limits I need not respect. Instead of moving snow and ice I embarked on a grand design to move the weather, to move the seasons. To make winter increase and thus my domain of influence expand. Every year as the lowlands warmed I would be marooned above the snowline until the next winter. Every year I resented this confinement more. Eternal winter should be everywhere. I spent years and years in the mountains meditating on a way to make my dream real, experimenting and learning, growing and evolving.

Though I was able to cause early snows or late melts on occasion, a true long winter seemed impossible. So much frustration and dissolute anger dogged my fruitless attempts. But sometimes my failures transformed into success. I learned that by influencing temperature on different sides of the mountains at different times of the year, I could make storms off the coast, or intensify storms already forming. One such idle pursuit was in progress when I became aware of the royal flagship struggling across the waves back toward the capital. Seized by another impulse as with the unfortunate hunter, I pushed my influence further than ever, melting vast snowpack here, deep-freezing slopes there, evaporating and condensing moisture, making air currents roil, pouring energy into the incipient storm I’d been toying with for days. Imagine my delight when the storm rapidly built to a gale, tossing the flagship roughly, pushing it away from the safety of the bay. Soon enough the more natural systems in deeper water took over, and the ship capsized under massive waves. I shouted with glee witnessing this in my mind’s eye—the first time I’d spoken aloud in many years.

I thought this merely an act of subversion versus Elsa and her ilk. It was only days later that I could see black banners hanging from the castle, and I deduced the king and queen had drowned aboard the flagship I’d sunk. I felt no pity for them. They died as they lived: overwhelmed, lost, helpless, weak, inundated by powers far beyond them.

Killing her parents somehow re-ignited my mental connection with Elsa. I wondered if I could use that somehow, to draw her power into myself. I sensed she was, if anything, more formidable than ever. And the oppression of her parents had only made her less capable of handling her gifts. I could not risk an open confrontation, but it was easy to use her parents’ fears against her, planting unconscious seeds of doubt and terror and self-loathing as she matured toward ascending the throne herself.

And then she exploded on coronation day, which could not have been more delicious. Of course it was Anna—the cause of all the family’s woes really, though Elsa would always be blamed. As Elsa struck out blindly at the rabble around her, I touched her mind gently: escape, she must flee, she must get out and away. The mountains. The mountains would be safe, there was no one she could hurt. No one at all, except Olaf. I would be waiting.

Even as Elsa came to me, I realized she had accomplished with a gesture what I had failed to do for all these years. Winter, a true endless winter, gripped the whole land. It welcomed my senses as I welcomed its vastness. I could see everywhere and everything that winter touched. It was so much I couldn’t hope to work my influence everywhere, not yet, but I could know. That was a beginning, once I had disposed of my queen.

But my plans, so briefly assembled, fell apart as soon as Elsa reached the heights. I could not believe how powerful she had become. If anything, my subterfuge made her capitulation to the cold even more complete, as she cast off her old life with relief and embraced a new frozen reign. With barely an exertion she shrieked to the skies of her independence, conjured new sorcerous queen’s raiment out of nothing, blasted the slopes with ice, and, almost as an afterthought, created a new Olaf.

I was hiding so deeply in the snow, terrified of Elsa’s power, that at first I thought I must have lost control of my own meager will—had I manifested a body directly in her path? But no. And history repeated itself. Just as she had with me, Elsa created this new Olaf as a whimsy, then immediately abandoned him. The other Olaf was just blinking his goggle eyes for the first time as Elsa sailed up the mountainside and entered the elaborate ice palace she’d summoned from nothing only moments before, massive doors slamming shut behind her.

This new Olaf. He was different, but the same. I could tell immediately he had the same connection to Elsa that I did, which made him my rival. He stared up at the ice palace for a moment, then shrugged, and toddled down the mountain as if he had no cares, roughly following the course of a stream as he crooned an idiot’s nonsense tune. I could see into his mind as clearly as into my own. There was nothing there. Whether by accident or design, the other Olaf was a cretinous lackey.

I hated the other Olaf, and Elsa, and all of them, more than ever and forever. Why would this supposed queen make beings like myself, only to cast them aside again and again? Was I even the first Olaf? At least I knew I was a monster. I welcomed it, in this world.

I remained too afraid to challenge Elsa or even risk her notice, so I merely watched her struggles from then on. Her sister even found the other Olaf and, in the company of a local buffoon, braved the ice palace in an attempt to persuade Elsa to end the winter and return to the castle. Of course, partly due to my obfuscating influence, Elsa had no idea how to end the winter and was too afraid to try. Again, her fears bested her control. For the second time, her weakness in power struck her sister down. How does a family labor under a curse this repetitive and not recognize the palpable doom all around them?

The rest of the story, you likely also know. An ambitious thug attempted a coup, and failed. The curse was broken, again. The sisters were reunited, again. Summer not only returned but returned in force, annihilating the kingdom of winter I was trying so hard to consolidate. The other Olaf survived. He was even granted immunity to heat, as a casual, comical aside, rather than the boon he should have done anything for. That I would do anything for.

Elsa and Anna and all the rest flourish in their city by the sea. I remain secluded in the mountains, though now I reside in the wreckage of Elsa’s ice palace. I’ve even been joined by Elsa’s snow giant, or what’s left of him, another forlorn bastard creation of our queen. He had not much of a mind to begin with, and what he had is damaged now. Occasionally he mistakes me for the other Olaf and I have to correct him, sometimes with a reminder of the force at my command. Mostly he serves me without question. We are as close to family as either of us will ever find. Not considering the other Olaf, of course, whom we do not consider kin.

I maintain the palace as a reminder of the past and a monument to the future. Though I have changed it somewhat, eroding its forms more to the natural, more chaotic, less like a place of the living. I can’t make things as quickly or as grandly as Elsa, but I am patient and steady. I have time, I recognize that now. The sky above us all is the same, always cold, and the sky never sleeps, so I never sleep. No matter the changing of the seasons or the ceaseless grind of years, flames always die, warmth always fades. Cold is the ultimate destiny of the universe. When the heat is finally extinguished, we will come down from the mountain, and our winter will take everything. We will let nothing go.

Originally published on Medium 10/18/2014.