That clearly went down well.
Never mind.
Thanks for the feeback Ench, though while I appreciate the rep very much I'd've liked it if you could have posted the comment here
That's another word the internet has ruined, I guess.
This night, I won't present you with a story, but rather a scrap of a story; I guess it classes as fanfiction, though I'd prefer to think of it as more of an adaption
One of my all-time favourite stories is '
The Snow Queen', a fairy-tale by Hans Christian Andersen, who also wrote 'The Little Mermaid' and many other fairy-tales. It's a story that really stirs my imagination; it's basically about a little girl called Gerda who's best friend, a boy called Kay, is abducted by the Snow Queen, so she travels across the world to find him.
I love so much about it, the amazing (but believable) courage of Gerda, the fantasy of the world she walks through and the people she meets, the increasing bleakness of the world that grows as the story progresses...
Anyway, I've on-and-off entertained a dream of one day writing some sort of adaption of it; it'll probably never happen because I'd want to be too close to the original, and I'd fail completely to make a new story. But there are a few scraps in my 'stories' folder that are basically extracts from various drafts of my imaginary adaption. The shortest, and I think by far the best, is what I'm about to post. It's set towards the final part of the story, but I'd use it as a prologue to my version, and then repeat it probably word-for-word in its place when the plot reaches it.
My version of Gerda, the main character, is a few years older than her counterpart in the original.
'Snow Queen' Prologue
A young woman, barely out of girlhood, leans forwards into a driving blizzard as snow lashes against her, burying itself in the folds of her clothes and the dangling tangles of her wind-swept, greasy hair. She wears a thick mantle of white fur around her shoulders and arms, falling down her skinny legs, but her bare feet are blue with cold and she limps painfully forwards, up to her knees in snowdrifts. The wind screams furiously against her, as if trying to push her back, force her away, but her eyes are half-closed against it, teeth gritted, head bent low as she stumbles on, too cold to shiver but defiant against the pitiless weather and the shade of death that circles around her. She trips and falls forward; the mantle is whipped away from her and flies out behind her like a sail as she grips it with one fist, frantically trying to pull it back to her body. Without it she wears only the rags of a once-fine summer dress.
She finds the strength somewhere to drag the fur back to her, pull it around herself, and soon the snow that filled it when it came free is melting against her skin, chilling her further. Her breath is coming out in heavy gasps of fog. The wind cannot hold her back but will whip the heat away from her, slowly chilling her to death. Snow is building on her face; her naked feet fumble and tremble as if she has no control over them. The howl of the wind is like the baying of wolves, threatening, merciless, hunting for her, seeking blood. If you listen closely, you can hear her voice in response, whispering a single word over and over again with every trembling breath.
“Kay... Kay... Kay... Kay... Kay...”