Prologue to Shards of Ice by R. Phoenix. Deleted scene. Does not require a subscription to view.
He had been innocent once.
Sweet and untarnished, bright and beautiful, with inquisitive eyes that had fair sparkled against the ice and snow of his castle.
Every kiss had diminished the glimmer, made him less innocent, but he loved his human no less because of it.
After all, he knew that with each kiss, he brought his lover closer to death as his heart slowly turned to ice.
All around them spun snowflakes, each dazzling in their uniqueness, but they had nothing on the beauty of the man who knelt before him and begged for just one more kiss.
But the prince had been counting, ever counting, and he knew.
Just one more would be enough to make him lose the one person he could claim to love.
Because his own heart wasn’t made of ice, not like the human’s. He was fae, and his heart was warm, his blood flowing hotly through his veins. So strange, that he should be the closest to human, when his poor lover looked pale and stricken, as though he walked in the midst of a snowstorm.
His lashes were crusted over with a dusting of snow, his pale hair augmented by it, and his body… It no longer shivered, but his skin shone blue. It wouldn’t die, not from the cold that surrounded him at the ice prince’s palace, but it would suffer without the human ever knowing the sheer damage their location caused.
But they were all temporary, and he’d be gone before he realized how much of his body had been ruined in the search for love with a fae who didn’t understand love at all.
“Kiss me, my prince,” the human pleaded, looking at him with the most forlorn of looks.
Maybe he knew it was his time to go. Maybe he’d realized his time there was up, that the prince had grown bored with him and would soon need another vessel to steal the warmth of. Never consciously, of course, but on some level.
“Do you understand what you’re asking?” the ice prince asked, touching the human’s glossy, icy cheek. “Do you know what will happen if I do it?”
The human nodded greedily, and the prince sighed.
“So be it. Come.” He rose from their bed, and he led the human out to the garden. There was a macabre series of sculptures wrought of ice, each detail exquisite.
Each life snuffed with the last of the kisses the ice prince stole before they froze, never to move again.
He guided the human to a spot he thought would suit him, posing him in a dancer’s position with his arms in a circle and one leg drawn up. “Like this, beautiful,” he murmured.
Then he kissed his human, who struggled at first to keep the position. Not for long. Soon, it grew easier as the ice surrounded him still more, as it chilled his body all the way through. Each and every kiss drew more of the life from him, but he stayed up as the cold locked his body inexorably in place.
When those lips were ice, nothing more, the prince drew back with a sigh. He studied the figure before him, the beautiful frozen creature who had once been the most innocent of them all, and he wished he’d had more time before the kisses had stolen the human’s life.
His fault, really, for being so greedy with them…
As ever, he thought of taking a fae lover who could withstand the cold, but they lacked the innocence and wonder of a human. Each human lasted five, perhaps ten, years if he was careful, and he had tried to be so careful with this one. But he’d devoured him bit by bit, drawn to his innocence even as he stole away everything that went along with it until there was nothing left but frozen trust and a form wrought of ice.
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