Blue.

It’s the first thing Minseok remembers—sparkling, flawless, smooth—surrounding him on all sides. There’s slick at his back, the dark shade melting translucent and wet against his skin. Above Minseok the blue glimmers, as if the sun itself is trapped within sapphire. Somewhere above him Minseok hears a sound. Tink. Tink. Tink. It grows louder. And louder. Louder. Tink. Tink.

Crack.

A spike of silver, gleaming sharp and vicious stabs through the blue, there are voices, and Minseok feels himself lifted up and out into a world of white.

When he is six months old Minseok understands that the blue is ice.

Ice is bad, Nana tells him, very bad. It is a cold dangerous thing that seeps into village each winter and spreads death with spindling fingers until the weather shifts and the spring-weed finally forces its way through the snow to dot the fields yellow. Minseok is lucky, Nana is fond of reminding him, every time fresh snow blankets the ground. He should have died, a fragile baby found in the ice, with black hair and blue fingertips and nothing but a scrap of cloth beneath him.

He should have died.

But he didn’t.

In his sixth winter, Minseok wonders if maybe, dying would be better.

He cannot feel the cold—at least, not in the way that Nana feels it, creeping into his bones and stiffening his movements until he moans and moans about the pain and his old old age. It does not bother him, and the bear fur Nana tries to wrap him in itches his skin. At school he builds a fort of high ice walls and hard-packed snow. He takes off the furs where his classmates cannot see him and wonders why they whisper when he walks past, voices low as they mutter cursed, evil, devil-born, poison in our midst.

To not feel the cold—to be different—is a thing Minseok must hide.

He does not completely understand—only knows that the whispers make Nana shift side-to-side in the market, eyes darting hither and back as she searches for a threat that Minseok hasn’t learned to see. She buys him a new coat after the solstice passes, a size too big with real wolf fur and new boots that match. Minseok knows better than to tell her to return it, even though the coat costs more than Nana makes in six moons and the potatoes are almost gone in the cupboard. He is normal now, protected from the cold and the whispers slow—never quite gone but not as vicious as before.

Minseok scratches himself beneath the fur.

The hum begins in his tenth winter. It is feather-light, a near-silent murmur that snakes and teases in the air and Minseok hates it. It is distracting, a whistling thing that never truly tells him anything but merely pushes him towards mountain peaks and frozen caves while Nana stays inside and just as the snow starts to melt, Nana buys Minseok a new coat.

He rarely wears it.

Though he never tells Nana that.

He shrugs it on only long enough to stagger out of town and shrug it off again, depositing it and his boots in whatever place is closest—a cave here once, a stripped-bare branch another time. Even between boulders, though that time when he’d returned for it he’d found that a local fox had snuggled into it and bit him when he tried to take it back.

Free of the coat, barefoot and gloveless, Minseok learns the mountains. He climbs white paths, scrabbles across icy expanses, swims in frozen rivers and buries himself alongside the wild creatures in burrows of snow and rock. The hum grows. It pushes his mind back and forth, from one mountain to the next, expanding his territory as the years pass, swirling around him in a lilting hum of snowflakes and cold and blue.

Then one day, in his thirteenth winter Minseok slips. He is climbing a mountain face, grip strong and feet sure. He can climb. He is safe. But that day a blizzard-brutal wind throws him against the rock face, tearing at him, his hair blowing in his eyes and he can’t see. He misses a hold and falls.

He is certain he will die.

But then the ice shifts, creaking with stiffness much like Nana says her bones do, melting and remolding into a ledge that his hand catches on, not slick like he expects but rough and easy to grip and Minseok dangles, hundreds of feet about a ground that should have killed him. And Minseok realizes a single thing.

The ice is alive.

Around him, the hum bursts into song.

He stops speaking to his classmates. He ignores the whispers of wrong strange bad that filter through on a chilling breeze as he passes through the market. He is distracted by the ice-song, with its near constant melody always in the wind.

The winter opens to him, shapes itself to his pleasure. A glimmering fox of frozen crystal that runs at his side. A bird that flies above him, sun glinting off diamond-clear wings. A fortress, like those of his school years, with high walls and packed snow that leaps from the ground with nothing but a word from Minseok’s lips and the mere feeling, the mere belief that the ice will obey his command.

He goes to the mountain and finds game, deer and rabbits and beavers that the snow leads him to, flakes dancing in a line to his prey. Minseok never takes more than he and Nana need, but nevertheless, they do not go hungry and their beds are covered with thick new furs.

The whispers in the markets grow louder, and Nana sews Minseok two new coats.

But by Minseok’s nineteenth winter, all the coats in the world cannot hide what he has become.

From a distance, he appears almost elderly, his youthful face a shocking contrast to the bright white that his hair has become. The villagers stall in his path. The butcher freezes up when he approaches with a fresh kill. The medicine woman can barely speak when he collects the herbs for Nana’s aching bones. The whispers become loud, warning shouts of hide run flee Icechilde.

Minseok watches them cower, with his fingertips frostbite-blue and eyelashes crusted with ice like glass after a particularly cold night, eyes a strange, piercing crystal that lies somewhere between vibrant glacier blue and icicles dangling from trees. His skin is pale, drawn tight over high cheekbones that remain obscured behind loose strands of snow-blinding hair.

Like that, so obviously different, it is not long before the whispers become something else, something darker, and the rumors of fae spread throughout the village.

It is then, in Minseok’s nineteenth winter, that he finally understands why Nana bought him so many coats.

It hits him with startling clarity, as he is roused from sleep by the firelight of torches and the clanging of spears and ice picks and the frenetic murmuring of a mob finally forced to action that Nana was as afraid of him as the rest of them. She had whispered different strange bad cursed devil too. She had called him Icechilde.

And as she opens the door, ushering in the men with murder cradled in their hearts, urged on by fear, Minseok realizes, he is also afraid.

He is afraid