Jack stared open mouthed. He was being brought to court for his actions? An angry girlfriend, yes. He had expected that. But the only reason for calling a court decision among sprites is if they intended strip him of all magic and to banish him permanently from interaction with any and all faerie folk the world over. Why…he’d be forced to rely on the humans for his needs.
She must be joking, he thought.
“My dear, Qanik! It’s not as though…” but he was cut off.
“How do you plead, criminal!” Qanik burst out, and the ice cubical in which Jack was encased rumbled and then cracked in several places. She tightened the ice about him and gave him a sharp, chest-compressing squeeze before backing off again and thereby leaving enough space within the cube directly around Jack to move his arms around a bit.
“You can’t be serious, Qanik!” Jack replied, and she flashed him an evil-looking glare. “Where are my accusers? Where are my witnesses? Who shall make the end pronouncement? You can’t enact a faerie court against me without proper process. And…besides, I’m not even a sprite so you have no jurisdiction!”
“Wrong on all counts,” Qanik replied very affirmatively. She slightly flicked one hand and a regal ice-staff appeared in it. The other she splayed her fingers out wide and made a gesture followed shortly by the formation of an ice-tiara upon her head. “Let me answer your queries though.”
“Firstly, I myself am your accuser, as of course you intended in the beginning by pretending to love me so that our conversations and time together as you gathered information and attempted to manipulate me to your ends would go unobserved. And therein lies the answer to your second. I am also your witness, as I am the only witness whom you wisely permitted to your doings. And thirdly, I am a Princess. I am the court!”
“As to my jurisdiction, dear Mr. Frost,” she said spitefully, “are you not birthed of Yotinpeyaw, a water sprite of the Northern Tribe?”
Jack could not argue that point at all so he simply nodded.
“Then you are, in fact, a citizen under the jurisdiction of the royal family, of which I am a natural member and thereby an authorized judge.” Qanik smiled, almost pleasantly for a moment. But it may simply have been her pleasure at having out-witted Jack. “Have you any other objections of any consequence whatsoever?”
Jack stood for a moment, hands at his side, ice-box gift stuck in the formed ice prison before him though he had wriggled his fingers free of it.
“No, I suppose I do not,” he replied. “It seems you’ve prepared yourself for this, haven’t you?”
“Very well,” Qanik stated matter-of-factly. “I do not wish to waste time discussing the details of your crimes as you and I alone are both acutely aware of them, and it is you and I alone who are gathered to settle the matter.”
“Settle the matter?” Jack asked.
Qanik nodded as she turned and placed her hands akimbo upon her waist. There was no longer a smile. “The matter of punishment.”
Jack was beginning to notice a sense of dread welling up within him. She had not come to make up with him at all, or to hear his side of the story, but merely to enact a revenge for taking advantage of her and for trying to take the North Pole for his own magical gain. This was likely to end unwell for his part, he knew. And yet, she was slowly apparently giving him room to move within the ice box, keeping his feet and legs planted, since he was not a full-blood water sprite and would not be able to liquefy his form to attempt an escape, but granting him leave to his arms and torso to face judgment in a stance he might prefer.
It was then that two things shockingly came to Jack’s mind. Firstly, he was encased within a water sprite’s magic ice box. Ice boxes such as these are nearly impenetrable, with the exception of striking it in a key position with something exceedingly sharp. A true water sprite, particularly one of the northern tribes who could form very sharp and hardened ice crystals from their own body or the moisture contained within the box, might be able to escape, though still unlikely. Anyone else trapped within one would either need to be released from the outside, or would have to have been given something sharp to carry with them into the Ice Box.
The second thing Jack realized was even more depressing. It was that Qanik did not know the location of his humble abode by the glacier. He thought it far enough east and far enough south of the North Pole that she would not look for him there, as well as he had used some magic to disguise it. She would either have had to have been walking around blindly in the Christmas Eve darkness and literally stumbled into the den, or else she would have needed a help from the one person on earth who had the magic to locate all souls on one evening each year. Christmas Eve.
“Santa Claus!” Jack exclaimed while placing a palm over his mouth and attempting to stifle his voice at the same time.
“What was that?” Qanik suddenly regained his attention.
“Oh?!” Jack said and pretended to be rubbing his chin deep in thought, crossing his other arm before him to hold one elbow with the other hand. “Nothing, my sweet. Nothing at all. Just contemplating how I might make this all up to you.”
“Radsheir!” Qanik uttered as she waved her hand, which was a very, very old word in faerie akin to the English word ‘rubbish’ only much more rude. “I am not your sweet, and you cannot make it up except by punishment and penitence.”
Jack dropped his arms to his side and patted his blue coat in impatience. With a scowl he asked, “And what might my penitence be, your majesty?”
“Having found you guilty of the crimes laid out before you by me, I now sentence you, Jack Frost, to banishment to the human race with no interaction with any faerie folk whatsoever under punishment of death for a period no less than five-hundred years, at which time your demeanor shall be investigated and another period of punishment be enacted determined by your intents and repentance at that time.”
Jack blinked, but at the same moment as he was nervously patting the coat as he listened, he realized that Qanik had no intention of ever letting him recover from his ‘mistake’.
“What?!” he bellowed incredulously, and stuck his hand into his pocket to check on an object he felt there. Qanik apparently did not notice or did not care about his raised eyebrows of surprise as he then continued on. “You can NOT banish me for five-hundred years! Let alone a thousand! That is a death sentence in itself.”
“No,” said Qanik calmly, as she started forming an instrument from ice she was crystalizing into a pyramid. “Five hundred years among humans should teach you all that I think you need to still learn about being a part of this world and caring for others.”
“Five hundred years!! Do you not know how long that is in human terms? Have you not seen the changes they have wrought in five hundred years? By then, even the last of the magic in the few reserves of natural sources will be totally gone. In five-hundred years they’ve brought dragons, oracles, grae-gnomes and hundreds of other faerie folk to extinction! You have no right in any judgment to force any faerie to separate from magic so entirely as to live among those vermin for so long!”
Jack took a moment to calm himself as Qanik continued to work. In that time he felt the length of the tool he had found in his pocket, the small bit of string, and a loose piece of parchment tied to the end of it enough to know it was an awl. The handle was wood and had engravings upon it and the tip of it was terribly sharp. Jack was certain what the tool had been used for in its life previous to recently finding a home in his pocket.
“I will not serve the sentence. I will take death instead!” Jack proclaimed.
Qanik looked up momentarily from the shape she had formed, an ice-pyramid with glyphs carved into all five of its sides including the bottom. She kept her face resolute and nodded to acknowledge Jack’s threat but made no other response to him. Instead she began transferring the magic wills required to bind Jack to his sentence into the pyramid.
As she worked, Jack then took the awl
from his pocket and held it before him on his palm, tip pointing straight towards Qanik through the magic ice box.
As the last of the blue glow of water sprite faerie magic entered the sentencing pyramid, Qanik looked up and saw Jack smiling nastily at her. He had something in his hand before him and her eyes flicked down to it sensing a danger.
“What is it you have, Jack?” Qanik asked urgently taking a step forward.
“It appears Belschnickel found me worthy of a gift this year after all!” he snickered, pulling upon the small tag attached to the tool and both were easily able to see the “From: Santa Claus” inked in calligraphy on the front of the folded parchment.
Quickly, Qanik raised the pyramid and attempted to thrust it with magic into the ice box she had created, but old Jack Frost was faster. He summoned a blast of arctic ice and wind with his portion of Water Sprite magic he possessed and the fierceness of the Alven warrior packing a punch behind it. The awl launched forward, directly point-in to the ice and created an immense crack in multiple directions. The blast of the magic and air behind the attack pushed through the crack and hole it had created and knocked the sentencing pyramid out of Qanik’s hands and onto the snow-dusted floor of Jack’s living room. It seemed to make an immense tinkling sound that reverberated with magic each time a side touched the ground and it bounced further.
Then Jack gave one more thrust at the ice box and the front of it burst open before him throwing shards of ice crystals and water into Qanik and pushing her back to the wall. The Christmas tree Jack had formed and decorated in a desperate and depressed last-ditch effort to keep the spirit of the season about him and secretly hope for a visit from Santa Claus was knocked over as well. Most of the ornaments he had formed and hung upon it crashed and shattered, adding to the ruckus.
Qanik sat against the wall so dazed she could not quickly form into water or ice and remove herself from the danger or attempt to reform Jack’s prison. He in turn rushed as quickly as he could out the front door, carried on a wave of snow and wind and laughing heartily the whole way. In an instant he was gone, escaped from Qanik’s wroth yet again.
She slammed her magic in blasts out from her and tore apart the entire den. The gnomes who had risked dwelling with Jack dispersed in fear and she rose above the destruction on a pillar of snow, howling and raising her hands to the sky.
“Belschnickel!” she shouted at the top of her lungs and put behind it the arctic winds to carry it to the North Pole. “Our alliance is at an end. Never ask for my help again!”
~~~
In his private workshop just off his family room in his rustic home in the center of Santa’s Village, old Belschnickel watched on his monitoring system, powered by the magic of the North Pole and regretted he had alienated the princess. But he knew it was the only possible result when he placed the awl in Jack’s possession. He knew the little misfit Alven would need some help. He needed some mercy amidst the justice Qanik sought. And he could not deny even Jack Frost the gift of mercy during the season of Christ. It was, after all, the whole point of the season.
~~~
On the wind, traveling at speeds the IPMA agents in their specialized, magic-designed vehicles could only dream of, heading straight to the ice shelves of the Arctic, Jack laughed brilliantly. He glided and rode upon the wave of air and held out the awl which he managed to pluck up before escaping his home before him and read the parchment label.
“From: Santa Claus” it read across the majority of the front of the paper. In smaller lettering below it continued, “To a young man who is on the naughty list.”
Jack’s teetering dwindled and he finally opened the fold to read the message within. It was very tiny print, fitted to the two-inch by two-inch square inside and he had to focus tightly upon it in the winter moonlight.
“Jack. You might not deserve this gift. It is from my private tool collection I use to form toys for the most special of children. But I knew you might need it. As I will not ever track your location on future Eve’s ever again, be sure to have learned the lesson from this evening. You may yet find forgiveness, if you can return the love you’ve been shown in the past.”
For an instant, Jack nearly threw the awl into the ice and ocean below him with fierce anger. But something about the gift made him pause. What love had he been shown before? So little. So little from so few. Perhaps Qanik had cared for a while. Maybe few others for brief moments, like Santa himself. But he had known such pain as an outcast and misfit of both Alven and Water Sprite society, and mocked and belittled by others, including mankind. What love had he been shown?
He traveled on, looking upon the awl. It was warm in his palm. It seemed to sparkle along its metal tooling tip as though it were magic, despite Jack deciding it must merely be a reflection of the moon.
In the course of a few moments, he decided to tuck it deep into his pockets to ponder. It landed next to the ice-flower which Qanik had given him many years earlier. She had formed it for him when she had found him stranded on a much-too-warm-for-Jack’s-comfort island where humans had trapped him and were hunting him for his magic. She had told him while she carried him back north to the North Pole to be healed that it was to remind him that beauty exists in all places of the Earth and with all beings, despite it being hard to find sometimes.
Where was her wisdom this night? He wondered sarcastically. But then, perhaps, he acknowledged, she had treated him with wisdom he yet needed to learn himself.
He flew on into the night of early Christmas Morning at the North Pole while the human children of the Earth began waking and finding the gifts Santa Clause had brought them and wondered to whom he might turn.
~ The End ~
About the Author
P. Edward Auman is known to be of the rare humans with whom many faerie folk are willing to consult. It is said that if there be any true dragons dwelling in the Earth still today, he would be the one human to know it because it would be another faerie who had tattle-told directly to him. The board of directors of the IPMA, granted Eddie final decision on how and when to support persons of magic among the human race, such as Belschnickel, aka: Santa Claus, due to the environment of trust he imparts to all. However, the activity for which Eddie is most famously known is his creation of 43 clones to assist him in all of his many ventures. 42 clones survive today, following a mishap with a gene-splice bio-fuel algae agent, to which Eddie responded, “42’s probably good enough. It is the normally accepted answer to the Universe and everything in it anyway.”
The Old Silk Hat, A Frosty The Snowman Prequel – An IPMA Short – 12/23/2012
Seeing Devils: An IPMA Adventure for Halloween 2013 – released 10/31/2013
Speak Rain – released 1/27/2013
Troll Brother – Children’s/YA Contemporary Fantasy – released 7/6/2013
The Yeti Uprising: An IPMA Adventure for Christmas 2013 – released 2014
The Goblin Queen’s Cache – An IPMA Short – 11/12/2014
Troll Brother 2 – TBR late-2014
The Play House, Troll Brother 3 and More to come 2014 and beyond!
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www.TrollBrother.com
www.PEdwardAuman.com
www.IPMACreative.com
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