This journal belongs to : 

Thyia Wilkwine

・Date ~ May 12, 1650.

Squeezed into a pocket-sized crevice within ice-moulded walls, with which I've claimed my home, had I known the royal guards carrying sachets of cinder and ash around as a new-founded additive to our annual traditions would be the catalyst to my own undoings, I'd have restrained my whole being from breaking the willpower to hold on.

Today was a customary, universal tradition in celebration of the first steps taken for the domestication of wildlife known to be Polar Day, birthed from the moment our ancestors had put their differences aside for amity. We had finally befriended the fauna in our boreal terrain, the ecosystem's unruly life forms having worn an untamed, primitive essence within Iceland's glacial regions and snowy parts which border the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans at a time of tension between us, ice nymphs, and animals of nature.

Considering the new arrivals for winter, having migrated south to hibernate and unwind, a shadow of doubt attached to the unformed territories and unaccustomed air about ourselves could not be helped, with most natural creatures of the Arctic remaining rightfully hesitant in trusting us, nymphean maidens, otherwise recognised as lesser female deities, before our initiation of interest in companionship. It took three winters for both parties to warm up to each other before our inevitable, mutual solidarities.

~

A little sneeze was all it took to see life crumble all at once - in one swift go.

I was hauled from the miserably narrow gap of my hiding space by a member of the Queen's Council. It was clear from day one what consequences would happen upon those harbouring tragedies such as me, with an irrevocable penalty of safekeeping Interbreeds being that the transgressors would be banished from the existing societies of our people. 

My caretaker, Winfred Elmere, took the risk, the gamble, the senseless danger of granting a home to a putrescent excuse for a nymph no-body, like me, extending out a full, over-brimming heart on his sleeves and a hand to my frail limbs, taking a chance on me from the first breath I'd drawn, and the shrill sound I'd taken, and the hideous face I'd made. He was there from the beginning and chose a life I'd never should have gotten, with me, as the privileged receiver of his foolish kindness.

They burnt his home down…

our home down. 

~

The small, humble, secluded ice cave in the middle of nowhere, just out of reach from the city's burning gaze, in careful coexistence with the rest of Her Majesty's subjects, so as not to bother anyone from its placidly distant bubble of living, taking up no more than an untouched, almost-forgotten corner of the world that no one would truly miss but the two nymphs that belonged to each other on the other side of the mountainous ice caps.

We were told to flee, as exiled fugitives and pitiable members of a lonely civilisation一 but not before being brandished as outcasts by the permanently engraved etchings of a bloodred snowflake that rests on the frozen sheathes of our neck. A mark to go by for the unwanted entity that I am: a souvenir of the likes.

...

Though now at least, I'll have physical evidence of my affiliation with the only man I'd give my life for. It had dawned on me a long time back that we weren't biologically related... and that messed with my head because I had this idea that someone as important as him in my life wasn't even meant to mean much more to me than the neighbour across the next icecap. But that only meant that our bond succeeded those born of family, knowing we'd found each other on our own accord... or, well, that's what I would tell myself at night.

Needless to say - I finally had something to link myself to him一

even if it was as pathetic as a symbol for treason.

一一♢♦♢ 一一

This journal belongs to : 

Finnean Cherrywine

・Date ~ February 19, 1636.

There was a blizzard.

I had taken shelter in an undersized, compact ice cave smack-dab in the centre of the polar ice caps of Iceland一 

which was where I met her. 

She had just been chasing down a lost Arctic fox, who went by the name Puffincap; the merry scamp was a run-away pet from her village, and he'd respond to nobody but Eirwen Wilkfield, though that day, it found me.

I never thought I'd witness an ice nymph with my own two eyes, but I had. Against all odds, two species that never were supposed to meet knew of each other's existence at that very moment. Puffincap, the "mediator" at the time, or common connection between man and nymph, appeared amused by me in some fashion.

Yet, nothing intrigued me more than the sensation I felt from locking eyes with an ethereal creature such as she.

The cave we had stumbled upon seemed an otherworldly breach or portal of some sort which we had trespassed, its walls almost borders dividing one species from the next, as the intimacy of our unspoken experience had no business tying our souls like ribboned halves together in an intertwined and meshing masterpiece in a single knot.

The invisible string splitting down midway from one end of the hollow to the other, separating our societies, and yet binding them together in an unforeseeable rupture of all things orderly. I always thought there to some truth to fiction, however far-fetched it might have been. 

With me, I pulled out a bundle of Arctic thyme, or thymus praecox arcticus, a special plant I'd been travelling with as a personal token of good luck... and there seemed no other time better than then to repay nature for its fortunes with which blessed my unworthiness. Her presence alone felt too gracious for any mortal to bear sight upon. As my knees kissed the cave floor, I laid the blossoms out in front of me and gently slid them across to her as a peace offering and sign of affability.

She took it well.

一一♢♦♢ 一一

This journal belongs to : 

Thyia Wilkwine

・Date ~ June 17, 1655.

I did not expect the day would come at such a low point in my life when we would venture into the uncharted lands of the Arctic Outcasts. Winfred had told me tales of this place; the desolate slums struck by a bolt of poverty, overridden with steel-skinned, rough brawling bottom feeders, outlaws, crooks and bandits一 you name it, they're there. These lawbreaking rogues hold a felonious repute, and now we are stained with the scorched emblem of the pariahs. 

Winfred hasn't the heart to brave a false front and soothe me with disingenuous reassurances. But he doesn't need to tell me what I can see for myself; the situation was much direr than either of us were ready for. 

What's worse is that the degenerate ruffians who have made a name for themselves in that rotting ditch of a place believe us to be irreparably degraded in light of their own selves; how detestable am I in their eyes if abhorrent, unconventional defects like me are laughably spat upon by the standard 'defects' of society? What more am I to the world?

If they stand higher in the hierarchy of citizens of Nymphallia Kingdom, am I of equivalence to the parasites of Arctic soils, a feeble ice worm without cause to occupy the same air ordinary nymphs breathe? The chain of civilians in differing factions and rankings look down upon even the cruddiest of germs, mutant-formed and unnaturally born. 

There were ancient ones who resembled me and my ghastly materialisation. You would think rarities to be often miraculous and bewitching... but sealing the role as a freak of nature subspecies, and living, breathing, walking proof of anomalies in genetic variation considerably disturbs people to their very core.

I have seen the shaken looks of terrified, pinched, sickly nymphs that cannot seem to decide on just one suitable reaction, accrued together in the span of mere moments from our initial advent into their domains. They don't appear to know how to handle accidents of creation, and neither do I.

But that did not stop them from seizing the abnormal, undignified nymph by association with the outlandish creature that I am. 

There was a commotion, an uproar of aggression, a collision of hostilities.

~~

And I never saw him again.

一一♢♦♢ 一一

This journal belongs to : 

Finnean Cherrywine

・Date ~ March 22, 1639.

We spent the majority of our days with each other, tantalised and captivated by each other's lives. After exchanging gifts, trading secrets and engaging in one another, all made possible through a clandestine means of communication and freshly developed, never-before-heard language of our own, sculpting the beginnings of Arctic Hu-nymph-an Scripture, a decipherable scroll accommodating humans and nymphs. 

Amidst all of this, a war had broken out between our people; it had picked up momentum from the mass killings of whales, reindeers, Arctic foxes and puffins done by mankind, with the endangerment of several species having ignited animosities and incited full-frontal warfare. 

And still, we met in private一

entrapped in our own realm.

...

It reached the point of no return;

an unforeseen pursuit of illicit intimacies overcame us as our deplorable relations grew into a prevalent, inescapable reality of affairs.

~ ~

Three years had gone by, and Eirwen conceived a child with me. An arrestingly delightful baby girl, from whom my heart had been stolen.

一一♢♦♢ 一一

This journal belongs to : 

Thyia Wilkwine

・Date ~ July 20, 1658.

I escaped in one piece.

The next three years were spent roaming unfamiliar, daunting lands, in constant progression from one place to the next. It posed a risk to remain in any location for longer than a week, knowing the people that were after me. 

I'd be lying if I said I hadn't encountered lookouts on my travels, but I evaded capture from their avid, grimy hands. It helped that I had a guardian to have taught me all the necessary survival skills to appease the wilds... but preventing apprehension and execution was a whole new learning experience.

Through the greatest of adversities, the one true source of sanity that had kept me going latched onto me like an extension of my body was an ancient scroll recovered by my Winfred, with its messages being the only connections to my past. 

I wondered what my real parents were like. I had nothing to go by other than the decades-old scrawled writings of scripture, but there was no finer item worth treasuring.

--

My aimless wanderings eventually brought me to a biome of palustrine wetlands, where I'd come across the folkloric, fabled beings themselves: witches.

It was a first for both ends. 

As I stepped foot into their marshes, a leader of their tribe greeted me with her crimped, puckered palms and tenderly shrivelled fingers. 

"Welcome," she croaked.

I broadened my shoulders and straightened my back, face-to-face and nose-to-nose before her limp, frail figure. Truth be told, I'd only appeared self-assured and poised because the incautious loons whom I'd heard from tales to have fallen into ensnarements from giving the impression of vulnerability, and so I thought it sensible to assume a manner of commanding composition.

"Wise ones, lend me counsel," I said, with a civil bow to my head.

They knew of my burdens and thus, offered an enchantment of glamour, which would allow me to emerge as an entirely different entity: a human. She would cover my broken crystals with layers of flesh, along with the faculties required for mankind, be it the tongue of mortal speech so as to blend in with their people.

The only catch to their black-magic bestowments was a rule as simple as they come: conceal my identity. There was the slight matter of concern regarding the double-edged spell conjured upon me, being the curse of truth, which entailed...

that if anyone were to find out what I really am, 

I would perish.

一一♢♦♢ 一一

This journal belongs to : 

Winfred Elmere

・Date ~ March 23, 1639.

The news of an affair shared by a nymph and man had spread like the unravellings of an inferno, trailings of gasoline doused and enkindled.

The Queen had sent troops to surround the cave and entomb the culprits in a chrysalis to encase the reprobates within a glacial mass to trap the lovers in eternal frosted imprisonment. Her decrees rung out like the rich and sonorous, pulse-like echoes that ripple down the river of northern lights, taking to the sky in smeared thrummings of an aurora:

"FREEZE THOSE WRETCHED SCOUNDRELS!" she'd resounded into the vastness of the dark, unending void of the nordic islands.

The iceberg lasted weeks, and last I heard of 'em... Eirwen Wilkfield and Finnean Cherrywine… well, I didn't. 

I went to see it for myself.

~~

The man's life had been snatched by hypothermia, incarcerated within unsurvivable temperatures. Following after, was the ice nymph… who had her life terminated by nomadic tribes of men; the conditions of such a phenomenon soon caught the loose, anxious ear of Iceland's civilisations.

~

She'd been melted alive by the errant, roving streams of snow and rock malevolently set ablaze. 

I'd arrived at the scene in the heat of the mayhem and fervour of flames. 

It was then I'd heard the soft cries of a newborn baby, sounding neither nymph-like nor human. 

Sprawled out in the lush haze of garnet red was an illuminated womb that belonged to the torched nymph and human lover, Eirwen, with one outer blanket of flesh wounds and skin, whilst another lolled over in a coat of frosted glaze, somehow keeping the innermost layer of stalactites intact. The typical lustrous, healthy contents of ice had now been contaminated with blood vessels leaking from the fragmented shell of rime and suspended, frozen waters, which oozed from the rifts and cracks in her skin. Blotches of cerulean and azure-tinted blue, with hues of currant red dribbled from her body like trickles of early morning dew from snow-draped branches.

I managed to salvage a remnant of years' worth of sacred inscriptions and texts, wide-sweeping walls of smouldered passages, incinerated volumes of literature and a living space of a presumable library reduced to ashes, as the only surviving scroll left behind had been conveniently buried in a mound of powdered dust.

As a hermit who lived his life in the peace of monastery and meditation, it was a life-changing experience to resurface from my hibernation into a war zone of wildfire and corpses, only to be found before the helpless wails of an abandoned offspring. 

I extracted the day-old child from her mother's embryo and took it home with me.

~

She smelt of flowers… like that of Arctic thymes.

"I will call you… 

Thyia."

一一♢♦♢ 一一

This journal belongs to : 

Thyia Wilkwine

・Date ~ August 21, 1659.

The town of Borgarnes ushered me in, the daybreak's muted dapples of benevolence and sunlight against the unscathed, magnificent skin that has been glossed over me, its unspoiled, pristine promises encrusted onto the tarnished, desperate garments I've grown into over the uncompromising years, all now but a stranger to broken things, from which I used to be. My whole, sheeny, silk-like and spotless skin was now fit for a royal archetype, qualified to proclaim contempt or disdain upon any plain rag or dull, sullied robes of their choosing; what I'd have given to achieve such perfection in my earliest days... oh, if I could surrender the world and more to keep these alien works about me, inimitably designed for nonesuch as I, an abnormal specimen of which cannot even feel the radiance I am showered upon by the conciliatory, marigold orb curtained over the sky, as the radiance does not reach the cool veins aglow underneath my ice sheets, but the ice-bound heart confined within.

After traversing through all climates and various settings of environment, I had made my way to human civilisation. I stood at the edge of a rocky shoreline amidst shallow ends; the water curved into a clearing of the vibrant town, as the bend of a nearby bank filtered through an incoming rush of water.

I am inexplicably reeled in by the mystifying, surreal-seeming magnetism of a welcome sign from a sequestered village tucked away into the folded hills, the meek, neighbourly post implanted atop a blissful view of the scenery.

It read:

Life is made whole from how we choose to live it.