In the Court of the Ice Queen

A small part of Yuna understood that she might die here, but it was dwindling. There was ice forming on her nipples.

This

had

been just another room in the world, a private bedroom at some small inn on the way to the next stop on her pilgrimage; four walls, a bed, a window. Nothing special, but it would do. Now, it barely looked like something man-made at all, layers of ice curling around the walls, hanging in tiny, glittering crystals in the air, mist rising from the chill-slick floor. The window had turned into a sheet of frozen condensation, the outside world all but vanished under the glaze, sealed out beyond the tiny ice cavern that had been carved out for the two of them.

Yuna slid her dress further down her shoulders, breasts bared and skin aching in the cold, knowing in a tiny, mewling segment of her mind how much of a risk that was. How close to freezing she was getting, the fingers that held the hem of her dress completely numb, gripping the fabric only through sheer force of will. She did not shake, did not tremble, her body perfectly still as the ice leached the heat from her body and questions without answers piled up in the back of her brain. How had she gotten to this point? Why was she presenting herself like this? Didn't she want to live?

At the end of the bed, the blue figure stood, skin the color of thick, pure ice, frost-matted dreadlocks flowing out behind her. Eyes as cold as the depths of space regarded Yuna calmly, patiently, and when the summoner thought to look into them, something in her snapped. Recollection flooded back. All the questions gained their answers. Her lips parted, breath condensing in the air in front of her face.

'

Shiva...'

***

There was something wrong with Yuna's latest Aeon. That much was clear from the outset.

Oh, it could be summoned normally, the blue-tinged ice elemental that she had collected from the Maccalania temple, but there was something different about it, something that only Yuna could see. Each Aeon occupied a space in her mind, a little corner of her imagination that Yuna had to focus on to aid in the summoning, but Shiva was different, the spot in her brain where the ice woman rested seeming to resist Yuna's attempts to grasp it, her concentration slipping off of it for the first few attempts. Eventually the summoning would take, the Fayth would heed the call, but it took an...

effort

that the others did not.

The first time Shiva had been summoned, she had not obeyed. Instead, her head had turned, fluidly, and her deep, calculating eyes had stared into her summoner, appraisingly, as if taking the measure of Yuna's soul. She had not done anything else, forcing Yuna to dismiss the Aeon, and though the rest of her group had questioned the strange failure, only Yuna knew what had truly happened, Shiva's parting words engraved on her hindbrain, as if lovingly carved there by a shard of ice.

You are not worthy to control

me.

In any other circumstances, that would have been enough to prevent Yuna from even

attempting

to summon the ice goddess again; never before had an Aeon

spoken

to her before, let alone in her mind. But a pilgrimage was not normal, and the stresses of combat required Shiva's intervention far sooner than Yuna might have liked. Her heart pounded in her chest to summon the creature again, hands shaking as she reached into the depths of herself and felt the same resistance as before, the Aeon struggling against her call and, for a moment, almost seeming to succeed in doing so.

When Shiva arrived, it was with a definite sense of prideful recalcitrance, as though she was being dragged into battle against her will. Before she had even acknowledged the monsters before her, Shiva's eyes wheeled again in Yuna's direction, colder than before and narrowed now, an anger of the most calculated sort settling within them like snow gathering, with inexorable weight, into a drift. This time, the words burned cold as they imprinted themselves on the back of the summoner's brain.

Fine. Just remember that I gave you a chance.

Without turning away from Yuna, the Aeon raised a hand toward the enemies she had been summoned to deal with. Their eyes locked, the summoner spellbound by the sheer chill menace radiating from what she had summoned. Crystals of ice condensed out of the air, hanging momentarily in front of the Aeon before they shot out, blasting their adversaries to frozen pieces. Unmoving for a moment that seemed to stretch into eternity, the ice elemental stared down her summoner, and Yuna practically trembled, fearing that the creature might turn its power on her a second later.

But the threat remained implicit, and Shiva faded back out of existence, its disappearance causing the tension to slowly dissipate. Yuna was left alone, shaking in the cold. She was able to play it off as if that was the only reason.

That night, she dreamed...

She dreamed of a place that was not a place, and a time that existed beyond notions of time. An elemental void where thought became matter and ideas bent the non-space of that place into coherent shapes. A place where an immense, shining ice castle sat atop an edifice of that chaos, the material

in potentia

wrenched into its cold, towering state by the entity that sat atop the castle's crystalline throne; a goddess of cold, a primal force of entropy that garbed itself in a woman's shape, made for itself blue skin and eyes that glittered like snowflakes. The light of strange and warped stars refracted through the icy panes of her fortress, twisted into cold, blue, shadow-filled shafts of light before it was allowed the honor of touching her. In this place, she was queen.

And she was one of many, Yuna knew, in a place beyond knowing. There were others- creatures of fire, of lightning, of wind and of stranger things- and it was the shapes of these things that the fayth borrowed as they dreamed, their powers the vessel that the will of the Aeons were poured into. In this world they were servants of the summoners, but their forms and names and powers repeated in world after world, spanning realities like a pattern set into the very foundation of being itself. They were entities that existed beyond the will of the summoners, and now, one had turned its attention to Yuna in a decidedly unfriendly way.

In her dream, its head turned, eyes drifting upward to meet with Yuna's disembodied point of view, staring her down for a moment before-

- Before Yuna awoke, Shiva standing over her. She had summoned the Aeon in her sleep.

The azure figure loomed over her in the night, and her humanoid form only made her enhanced height more imposing; a big monster was still a monster, but the familiarity of Shiva's womanly shape made the ways in which she differed from Yuna uncanny and frightening. Yuna recoiled from her in shock, retreating to the furthest corner of the bed, back to the wall, as though that would help her any. Shiva simply reached across the bed, barely even needing to lean forward, and clasped the fingers of one large, chilled hand about Yuna's cheeks, digging into her skin as she held Yuna's chin in the palm of her hand.

With inhuman strength, the Aeon dragged her summoner back across the bed toward her. Ice-clad eyes regarded Yuna for a moment, the fragile human woman trembling in Shiva's grip, aware at all times of the sheer damage the Aeon could wreak if she upset her. The cold leached into her slowly, drawing a blush to Yuna's cheeks, yet she forced herself to remain frozen in both a literal and figurative sense as Shiva lowered her head and brought her lips, slowly, into contact with Yuna's.

The kiss that passed between them was smothering. Shiva's increase in scale meant that her lips covered Yuna's entirely, the coldness of them hitting the summoner like a closed fist. But they were soft, and appealing, and after the initial shock the cold wore down into something subtler, a winter chill that insinuated itself into Yuna's body in a way that was almost warm. It tingled in her extremities, collected in her center mass and filled her slowly, freezing the oxygen in her lungs and the blood in her veins and the electricity firing in her brain. In that singular, immobile instant, all of her problems faded away, the pressures of the pilgrimage and of Sin lifted, Yuna's soul becoming the purest, whitest of snows. She could recall that cathedral of ice, and the being that had wrought it from elemental chaos, in perfect clarity. In the face of such a thing, what could anyone else do but revel in the sheer power of a creature like that? The temple of ice demanded the worship of the cold goddess that made it...

Especially one that could make someone feel as Yuna did now. She felt herself freezing, but the numbing of it took away the pain of the task she had been given, the mission all summoners were called to fulfill. She could feel herself turning to ice, but that wasn't a

bad

thing; ice was clear, without hidden agendas or ulterior motives. Ice could not lie, could not scheme, it simply

was.

Ice was strong, and most importantly, ice

belonged

to Shiva. The Cold belonged to Shiva...

The Cold filled her.

Shiva filled her.

When the ice goddess pulled away, the Cold went with her, drawing the ice from Yuna's body back into the perfect, crystalline vessel that had gifted it to her, but leaving behind a tiny shard, a persistent strip of shivering cold in the center of Yuna's breast that never warmed, even as the rest of her did. The chill of it was constant, an ache in her flesh that yearned for more, for the Cold that had so enraptured Yuna mere moments ago. Without thinking, she followed Shiva with her mouth, attempting to recapture the kiss, before the goddess tautened the muscles in her arm and held her in place. The look in the Aeon's eyes told her, unequivocally, that if anything more was to happen, it would be at Shiva's pleasure alone.

This is the beginning. Remember that what happens next is on you, summoner.

The Aeon's words were a brushing, gentle touch upon the surface of Yuna's mind, spreading the Cold through her head with every syllable. But the chill was only fleeting, it faded back into Yuna's normal body temperature all too soon, which seemed cloyingly, uncomfortably hot now that she had the Cold for comparison. Yuna felt herself sweating, shivering with the dull ache of Shiva's absence, even before the Aeon began to fade away, the end of the summoning like a physical void inside her. Alone again, the Cold's influence began to fade, the strangeness of what she had felt settling in, but not before powerless tears sprang to Yuna's mismatched eyes, grieving for the loss of the Aeon.

Laying awake in her bed, Yuna knew that attempting to summon Shiva again would only lead to trouble. In the aftermath of the goddess' kiss, Yuna had a hard time reconciling how she had felt then with how she felt now, as normalcy reasserted itself and the Cold settled down into a dull ache in her chest. That instant devotion could not have come from her, it had to have been in the touch of the Aeon, but even knowing that could not erase the echoes of it in her mind. She couldn't remember the last time she had felt so strongly for anything...

Yuna didn't sleep at all, that night. The next night, in the twilight moments before sleep settled in, she could feel the dreams of Shiva rising to take her once more. Exhausted, she surrendered to them...

In the crystal palace, floating atop the void at the base of all worlds, Shiva sat upon her throne, attended by ranks and ranks of... fiends? Monsters? What

were

they? Creatures with human bodies and scaled, serpentine tails instead of legs, coiling over and through and under one another in a chaotic, slithering mass across the open floor of the throne room. Some lounged about the throne itself, leaning against the throne, reaching out with trembling fingers to touch Shiva's legs, her arms, her feet, cooing in reverence at the goddess. Others simply reclined into the ice, rubbing nude, pert bodies against those shining surfaces, taking in the Cold in a way Yuna herself simply could not feel.

Unbidden, jealousy bloomed in Yuna's chest, close to the icicle Shiva had apparently placed there. Staring down at Shiva's strange retinue of courtesans, luxuriating in the Cold that had been kept from her, Yuna couldn't help but frown.

The purpose of these serpentine servants was obvious: wearing no clothes but each one bestowed with a sparkling collar of ice about their necks, it was easy to see that Shiva had taken a prurient interest in them. As Yuna watched, the Aeon extended a hand and cupped the face of one of the nearby creatures, a rather busty woman with flowing red hair and a deep scarlet tail, who parted plump lips and gasped at Shiva's touch. Dragging her closer- that extensive tail allowing the woman to rise up and lean practically into Shiva's lap- and with frost forming between Shiva's palm and her chin, the serpent allowed the ageless winter queen to kiss her, cold lips pressing against hers. The serpent's moan of ecstasy resounded through the ice palace like the hum of the rim of a wine glass, radiating the purest of pleasure as it reached Yuna's ears. The summoner watched a ripple pass down the creature's scales, and she realized that patches of them could be seen elsewhere on the serpent's body- the small of her back, her hips, the line of her jaw- that also participated in the shudder of pleasure that went from the top of her head to the tip of her tail.

Yuna had

never

had someone bring her such sensations, especially not from a single kiss...

But Shiva wasn't done there, and when her eyes flicked up to Yuna's, aware of her summoner even in dreams, Yuna wasn't even surprised. There was a challenge in them, a clear demand that she watch what happens next, before the Aeon took her free hand and, still kissing the serpent, stroked down a patch of scales on the curve of her hip. The effect was instantaneous, the serpent practically melting into her mistress, every muscle in her relaxing at once. When Shiva's hand moved away, it left a trail of ice in its wake, sticking to her servant's skin in a line that led from her scaly side down, between her legs...

Where a bare, glistening pussy sat, just above the terminus of her human skin, and the beginning of her snake scales.

Shiva cupped the serpent there, her mere touch enough to turn the woman into a shuddering, moaning mess. Yuna could imagine the things that were happening down there, the spreading Cold and the penetrative ice, but she couldn't tear her eyes from Shiva's face, those glaring, cold eyes, and a pair of lips that Yuna could still feel against her own, parting to mouth a single word:

"

Mine..."

A shift in reality, and suddenly Yuna was staring at the inside of her eyelids. The fugue of sleep had lifted completely, and she had awoken with instant, wakeful clarity. She knew, immediately, that Shiva was there, standing over her. The air was cold, her bedclothes having hardened and frozen against her skin; moving at all was a challenge, the hard frosted cloth resisting Yuna constantly. Actually moving her limbs was next to impossible. Even her eyelashes had crusted over with ice particles, stinging pain greeting Yuna when she tried to open her eyes.

Bound without ropes. Blindfolded without cloth. The Cold could be her captor, too...

Yuna was only able to break through the light layer of frost on her lips, the ice goddess apparently willing to grant her her speech. It still stung, though, the cold air searing her lungs when she took in a breath to speak, the sensations dancing through her body intensified by her blindness, Yuna's other senses reaching out for more stimuli. So many words trembled on her tongue, piling up in her mouth while she decided what to say first; Yuna knew that each word was precious, that speaking was a gift that Shiva could take away if she misused it. Whatever she said would have to be pleasing to the Aeon's ears.

'Are... are you there?' She heard herself whimper, flushing with embarrassment at the weakness in her voice. She was a summoner, damn it, the daughter of Braska...

I am,

the Aeon's words wrote themselves in sparkling ice on her mind.

And you knew that.

'P-please...'

A plea without a subject. Please release you? Or...

A pressure between her legs, pushing down on the iced-over surface of Yuna's bedclothes, the sheet cloth cracking and yielding to what was, undoubtedly, Shiva's hand. Still cold, the fabric had softened in that one small area, and though Yuna was still trapped within her icy clothes, Shiva's control over that ice permitted her access to what was beneath. Yuna hadn't thought to wear panties to bed- or perhaps some subconscious force had pushed her not to- which afforded Shiva easy access to her pussy, the pads of her fingers brushing gently against her lips. Blind and bound and frozen in place, Yuna gasped at the contact, the way the Cold immediately infiltrated her cunt.

Or please grant you release?

Yuna's mouth opened and closed, but words escaped her. Instead, what came out of her was a high, shaking whine of helplessness, tempered with the cold pleasure of Shiva's icy touch. The Aeon was skilled in a way that Yuna doubted a human could be, countless years of experience on forms more varied and differing than Yuna could have imagined brought to bear on the summoner's inexperienced body. Yuna reacted all too readily, as azure blue fingers sought and found her clit, the diamond point of the Aeon's nail catching and flicking against her sensitive bud, which ripped a shudder from the captive human. Shiva didn't miss a beat and pressed her advantage, gripping Yuna's clit between thumb and forefinger and squeezing, the sheer cold of her touch sending a spike of pleasure-pain racing through Yuna's system.

The pressure alone would have been bad enough, a hard pinch to her inexperienced clit that, had she been free, would have sent Yuna flying up off of the bed. But with Shiva, there was always the Cold, and it lanced through the summoner's cunt with disturbing ease, frost moving in branching tendrils across her lips, hardening capillaries and turning skin into unyielding expanses of chill hardness. Yuna had already been so wet, the strange eroticism of her dream merging with the Aeon's attentions the moment she had awoken, and even those juices quickly froze, forming a hard shaft that conformed perfectly to her inner walls.

Yuna clenched down on it automatically, muscles pulsing in time to Shiva's clitoral ministrations, the sting of the ice pulling away from her skin making her gasp.

... Pain wasn't supposed to feel good, was it?

Dimly, Yuna was aware that she had been asked a question, but certain newly frozen parts of her made it impossible to muster up the mental energy to answer. Her every conscious thought found itself directed immediately downward, between her legs, words and questions dying on her lips before the sheer

fact

that her pussy had been frozen solid. The eerie, stiff sensation of pliable flesh made immovable dragged at Yuna's attention constantly, focusing and honing her very being down on that one point of her body that had been inflicted, once again, with the Cold. Deep in her chest, the icicle that Shiva had implanted there throbbed, fingers of Cold reaching up from Yuna's ribcage to the surface of her skin, filling her with a longing that she knew could never be sated.

Well, not without the Aeon, at any rate...

Her freezing cunt would have been bad enough on its own, but Shiva was not content to stop there. In an instant, a ripple ran through Yuna's body, a sort of shockwave of sensation that heralded something new; the ice that clung to her pussy began to move, remaining rigid where it needed to, while becoming supple closer to her sensitive parts, almost massaging the seat of Yuna's pleasure. A frost-laden tongue assailed her clit, each frozen nerve thrumming with its own internal vibrations, her very flesh completely under Shiva's control now. The shaft of frozen arousal the Aeon had made from Yuna's slickness came alive inside the summoner, fucking her in short, sharp thrusts as the ice closer to her inner walls reached out in some unseen way, stimulating Yuna at every point simultaneously.