Page 132 of Velveteen vs. The Consequences of Her Actions

She slid down from her own reindeer, musing as she did that it was a sign of Winter’s dominance that her own powers hadn’t manifested a sleigh to ease her journey to the mountain. She was a princess—hell, she was the Princess—and she should have had every luxury a toy line could imagine, every little kindness to ease her way. She hadn’t even been able to find a saddle.

The hem of her gown whisking their footsteps away as it dragged against the snow, she followed the others to the mountain, and to the dark cave that both warned them away and welcomed them inside.

* * *

It was dark inside the mountain, at least at first. But as they walked, Velveteen’s snow beasts began to glow with a cool, silvery light, as if they were slices of stars dragged down to earth and forced to shine. The light reflected off the jewels in the Princess’s tiara, becoming rich and rainbow as it filled the air. Before long, they could all see perfectly well.

“All right, now,” said the Princess. “Since I can’t think of much more privacy than you’d find in a cave carved out of the side of a giant-ass mountain, this seems like as good a time as ever to ask what the hell we’re walkin’ into. Santa Claus, I understood. We’re not friends or anything, but we’ve been in a few of the same parades, and he’s my best friend’s daddy. I get him. This Aurora lady, though, I don’t know anything about. What can you tell me?”

“I can’t call her the Queen of Winter, because she’s not the Queen; the Snow Queen is the Queen. Winter isn’t just a monarchy. She’s more like a very limited goddess, or a very incarnate force of nature. She’s in charge of everything that happens in her country, and she enforces the laws without mercy. I can’t say I’m her biggest fan.”

“That’s all right, really,” said a woman from somewhere up ahead of them. Her voice was kind, but it wasn’t warm: it didn’t sound like the voice of someone who was capable of warmth. “I’m not your biggest fan either. You left us, Velveteen. We offered you everything, and you left us. You could have been our savior. You chose to be one more runaway, seeking warmer climes. What do you want from us? You should know you’re not welcome here.”

“We’re here because we want Jack back,” said Velveteen, and her voice didn’t shake, although her fingers tightened on Tag’s, bearing down until it hurt.

“I see.” In the distance, Aurora snapped her fingers. The light from Velveteen’s snow animals went out, leaving them in darkness. “I suppose we may as well begin negotiations.”

VELVETEEN PRESENTS JACQUELINE CLAUS vs. Existence

Jacqueline hadn’t been lying when she’d told the transformed Velveteen that she’d spoken to Aurora about what she was intending to do. She had spoken to Aurora, after all, had informed her she was going to make a gesture so selfish and sweeping that it would probably stop her heart, and had walked away before the living soul of Winter could answer her, counting on the season’s need to maintain a form of equilibrium to save her. Winter had replaced Jackie with Jacqueline as a punishment, yes, but also because there were too many stories associating a frostbitten gamin with the more central Spirits of the Season. Winter needed someone to fill the shape she made in the world. Whether it was her or some other version, replacing her as she had replaced her predecessor, she had no way of knowing and, honestly, hadn’t particularly cared.

So she’d known what she was doing when she’d gathered her allies and gone to confront Velveteen as the animus whose powers were essentially fueling a complete revision of reality as she understood it. She’d known she was gambling with her own existence. But until the moment when the snow globes shattered against the floor and filled the air with swirling crystal mist, she hadn’t known it would hurt.

For her companions, the glass had broken, the mists had filled the air, and the saurian reality entrapping them had simply faded away, releasing them back into their own forms, their own world. And Jacqueline had been gone, brushed away like she had never existed. Maybe that was too much to pay for setting things right. Maybe it wasn’t. Jacqueline had been created as the selfless spirit of Christmas, the child who gives all their gifts away, the parent who fills every other plate at the expense of their own. By giving her own existence to restore reality, she had been endlessly, almost effortlessly selfless in a way even Aurora had to approve of.

But maybe it was. Because Jacqueline had only ever been a punishment for a girl named Jackie, a selfish spirit who existed for her own enjoyment, and would no more have traded herself for the world than she would have tortured puppies and kittens for fun. Jackie had been brisk and brusque and a bit of a bully, and she had ceased to exist after a single act of selflessness, which had gone so counter to her nature that she couldn’t survive it. It had replaced her with Jacqueline, who had committed her own act of sacrifice remembering Jackie, and hoping, with pure selfishness, that lightning could strike twice. This had never been her world, any more than it was Doctor Darwin’s. If she could give it back to the person who truly belonged here, she could fade away happy.

The glass broke, the mist swirled, and Jacqueline Claus, adopted daughter of Santa Claus, found herself standing in an infinite white plane. The sky was a wintery gray, so layered with clouds that it became a single uniform color from horizon to horizon. Black branches broke the snowy ground in places, twisted and leafless. A wind blew around her, frigidly cold, cutting her at once down to the bone.

Jacqueline looked at her empty hands. She had no snow globes, no bits of hand-crafted magic that would allow her to travel out of this place; unlike Jackie, who had been the child of two beings born of wonder and whimsy, the ice in her bone had long since thawed and dripped away, leaving her dependent on the gifts of others if she wanted to be anything other than ordinary. Without her snow globes, she was trapped.

At least she wasn’t cold. She had been born to Jack Frost and the Snow Queen, and raised by Santa and Mrs. Claus, and none of her four parents would have survived for long in the North Pole if they’d been easily chilled. Shoving her hands as far into her pockets as they would go, she turned until the compass in her heart told her she was facing true north, and then began to walk. The snow clung to her feet, trying to drag them down, but she shook it off and forced herself to push onward, toward the unremarkable horizon.

The wind blowing from behind her wiped her footprints quickly away, making it seem as though she had never been there. And on she walked, into the nothingness, into the narrative space where all deleted characters and unmade choices go.

* * *

It is perhaps true that the greatest difference between the Seasonal Lands and the Calendar Country is in their relationship to true reality. In both places, cause and effect are inexorably linked, making it impossible to act without some reaction, however small, inevitably following after. They have their own logic, these paralleled but unconnected worlds, and they operate according to the strict rules of their own natures.

There are those who theorize that the existence of magic in the Calendar Country is a sort of bleed-over from the Seasonal Lands, the essential magic which fuels their existence leaking through the places where our worlds meet and permeating the tissues of our more rigid reality. According to those theorists, if we were ever able to separate ourselves from the Seasonal Lands, all magic would fade and disappear, leaving magical heroes such as the Princess and Jolly Roger without access to their powers. Others hold that all superpowers are eventually indistinguishable from magic, and that losing that connection would simply do away with superhumans in their entirety. Not everyone believes that would be a bad thing.

Regardless of the origins of magic, the Calendar Country has always existed alongside the Seasonal Lands, and more, while each sovereign nation of the Seasonal Lands has the strongest connection to the Calendar Country during their time of manifestation, all four seasons exist at all times, and can be accessed by those who follow the proper steps. Santa’s Village does not turn to snow and blow away during the summer, nor does the Easter Bunny’s Warren vanish into root and dust when the autumn moon hangs high. To accept the existence of the Seasonal Lands is to accept that seemingly contradictory things can exist at the same time, side by side and in parallel with one another, influencing but not erasing their counterparts.

By looking at the decades of documentation covering life in the Seasonal Lands, we can find plentiful evidence that their residents are more mutable than residents of the Calendar Country: they are made and remade by what we believe of them, the wild frenzy of Christmas slowly sanded down and reshaped into a capitalist wonderland, all but divorced from its religious roots, yet enduring all the same. Halloween going from a night of terror and the unquiet dead to a celebration for children, jack-o’-lanterns and harmless frights. Almost all new things can find their footing in old traditions when looked into with sufficient focus.

So it is with the girl called, alternately, Jackie Frost and Jacqueline Claus, depending on the specific iteration of the Calendar Country the documentation has been taken from. The biological daughter of Jack Frost and the Snow Queen, she is always an ally to Santa Claus, but in some versions of the living story that is the Seasonal Lands, she is also his adopted child. This connection leads us to her oldest known incarnation, Snegurochka the Snow Maiden, born of snow, destined to either melt or become human when her heart was thawed.

So it is with the girl called Jackie Frost, whose heart was thawed by her own selflessness, leaving Jacqueline Claus in her place. But in the Seasonal Lands, echoes of what has been will always remain, caught like fallen leaves in the ice over a pond, unable to disappear or rot away.

But two things cannot exist in concert. Something will always need to be made true. Something will always need to win.

* * *

In Aurora’s cavern, carved into the side of the oldest, coldest mountain in all of Winter, Victory Anna and Tag stepped closer to Velveteen, while the Princess and Polychrome stepped forward to stand in front of the trio. It was a logical formation, putting their two most physical fighters in the lead; Victory Anna mostly fought with projectiles, and she could shoot around the bricks as necessary, while Velveteen and Tag were more effective long-range.

Velveteen hooked her fingers into witch-claws, hands still hanging loosely at her sides, and the thin layer of rime and snow that coated the walls around them peeled free, forming rapidly into a legion of snow snakes and long-legged ice spiders. They slithered and skittered away down the hall, into the brightness up ahead of them.

“Dude, what the fuck,” squawked Tag, jumping to avoid stepping on an ice spider. He staggered, catching himself on Velveteen’s shoulder, and in a softer voice, said, “The creepy lady said it was time for negotiations. Are spiders a negotiating technique I’m not familiar with?”