Page 12 of Velveteen vs. The Consequences of Her Actions

“Uh, congratulations?” said Velveteen. “I’d really rather not plummet, if it’s all the same to you. Gravity and I have a sort of tumultuous relationship. I think it sucks.”

“Isn’t it convenient for you that the anthropomorphic ideas about emotions and the heart didn’t put sarcasm there?” asked Aurora. She was starting to look annoyed. Velveteen could only see that as a good thing. She found the living incarnation of Winter to be plenty annoying, and it was finally time to return the favor. “Winter has changed. Everything changes.”

“And now you’re a Hallmark card,” said Velveteen.

Aurora, who had not maintained her position as the living incarnation of Winter by being easily thrown off track, ground her perfect, ever-changing teeth together before she said, “Jack Frost came before your beloved Santa Claus. He was the beginning of a sea change, of people learning to love the cold, to see it as something other than an excuse for blood on the snow. The Industrial Revolution didn’t put an end to people freezing to death, but it certainly slowed it down. ‘Wintering in Hawaii’ became something people talked about doing.”

“I get that you’re being all mystic and ‘this is the folk process of reality’ here, but I’m pretty sure the people who lived in Hawaii had always wintered in Hawaii. Colonialism and having better boats doesn’t rewrite the world.”

“No, but it changes the stories people tell about the world—and while there were always Hawaiians, there were fewer of them than there were people who lived where the Winter had always been frozen to the core,” said Aurora. “The more people tell a story, the more sincerely true that story will become. So when the people who had previously lived in the cold began viewing snow as optional, the story changed.”

“Uh-huh,” said Velveteen.

“Winter began to get smaller. The country, not the season itself: we lost land as the concept of our eternal snowfall lost minds,” said Aurora. “More people were being born all the time, of course, so there were more people to believe in us, which kept us from melting away completely. It’s been a delicate balance for quite some time.”

“Uh-huh,” said Velveteen.

“Global climate change, on the other hand, has been an unanticipated problem.”

Velveteen blinked. “Wait, what? Global climate change? You mean the thing the scientists argue about, and then the weather manipulators roll their eyes and go fix the latest drought because who the hell lets people go without fresh water just because it stopped raining?”

“How often do your weather manipulators change the weather to start a blizzard?” asked Aurora. “No one complains when the sleet stops falling, or when the rain is a warm shower intended to kickstart a harvest. No one objects to the snow going away a little sooner. Maybe if we lived in a world without superheroes people would take it more seriously, and stop counting on some savior swooping in at the last moment to set the weather right again. But we don’t live in that world, and the system gets a little more broken every day.”

“Pretty sure that if we lived in a world without superheroes, there would be no Winter to complain about not getting as many snow days,” said Velveteen. “What are you intending to do about it? I mean, what is my part in all this supposed to be?”

“You’re the most powerful animus of your generation. You heard me say that before, didn’t you? There’s no one currently living who can hold a candle to what you do with the beating heart of the world. You’re the strongest life-bender there is.”

“I don’t know if you caught this, or if you were too busy chilling in your mountain and fucking with people who thought they were among friends and hence would not be transformed into living snow golems while they weren’t looking, but if I’m the most powerful, it’s because Supermodel spent decades having animus killed as soon as they started to manifest,” said Velveteen. “I only got away with existing because I had that whole ‘must have a face’ limitation going for me, and she thought it would be interesting to see what I turned into.”

“Have you ever heard the theory that energy is neither created nor destroyed, merely transmuted into something new? She killed uncounted animus, striking them down before they could mature into their powers. All that energy had to go somewhere. If she’d left them alone, you would have been the pretty little puppeteer they tried to convince you to become. But she didn’t do that. She killed them, and some of their strength flowed to you, as the next loch on the line. You’re not the only one to benefit from her wholesale slaughter of your kind. You’re the strongest we currently have.”

Velveteen stared at her, too sickened and surprised to speak. When she finally found her voice, it was to demand, “Does it work that way for all the power sets? Does everyone get stronger through killing children?” I have to kill her if she says yes. I have to kill her and then I have to kill myself, because no one can know this, ever. No one can ever, ever know. Most supervillains were good about leaving children out of their schemes. If they found out that killing child heroes might make their creations and clones stronger, that would change.

Everything would change.

“No, just for you,” said Aurora. “Most of the energy goes where it will. But life likes to cleave to life, which means it passes one to the other, for as long as it possibly can. Right now, you are the strongest. More, right now, the world knows your story: the brave, maligned heroine who rose from retirement to topple a corrupt regime before vanishing from the face of the world. You’re still a tragic figure to tell stories about. That won’t last much longer. The narrative is changing, and you’ll be a villain again soon enough. So we need to act now, while the story is on your side.”

“Wait, what?” asked Velveteen. “How long have I been here?” Time ran differently in the Winter. She knew that, she knew that, but she hadn’t really been thinking about it being longer than the span of a season.

“Long enough,” said Aurora. “Longer than you think. So here is the thing you need to do for Winter, before we can allow you to leave. There’s snow in your veins. There’s ice in your heart. They were put there with the very best intentions, and you’ve nurtured them all this time, feeding them on your own freeze. Now I want you to let them out.”

“I don’t⁠—”

“Winter has given you life. Now give it back, and give us another hundred years of cold.” Aurora looked at Velveteen, and there was no love in her eyes: not now. The time for kindness and making nice had passed. Velveteen thought she preferred it this way. At least they weren’t pretending anymore. “Freeze the sky, and I will hand you to Persephone myself.”

“I don’t know how.”

“Yes, you do,” said Aurora. She stepped back, leaving Velveteen on the unsteady ground alone. “You always do.”

Velveteen looked over her shoulder to where the heroes of Winter waited. Jackie wasn’t with them. It would have been nice to have at least one person she could trust to catch her if she fell. Then, slowly, she turned back to the nothingness.

She knew from meeting Marionette, and from her own experiences with Tag and Supermodel, that the animating force she used to control her toys was less limited than she wanted it to be. It was too big. She needed to draw borders around it and clamp them down, lest she start breaking things she didn’t want to break. She also knew that here, in Winter, the snow was hers to command

—at least while it was running through her veins. So she gathered her strength, pulling it in until it felt like her entire body had become one thrumming nerve, vibrating with the effort of keeping it all inside.

She closed her eyes, and stopped trying to hold on.

The cold burst out of her like a door slamming open, the snow that had been gathering in her veins for a full year—as the Calendar Country measured time—breaking free and swirling into the nothingness. Still, she kept forcing it out, and still, it kept flowing, filling up the world. Velveteen dropped to her knees, and for the first time in all those long and lonely months, the cold bit into her knees, chilling the flesh beneath her tights. And the cold kept coming.