Do You Want To Melt A Snowman?
The mountain rumbles beneath him, a deep, ancient sound that vibrates up through his snowy feet and rattles his twig arms. Olaf the snowman stands at the crater's edge, peering down into the glowing heart of the world.
"It's very... orange," he observes to no one in particular.
Behind him, the landscape has changed. The forests below have been logged and regrown, logged and regrown again. The castle in the distance has new towers, then older ones, then new again. People have come and gone, too. Kristoff, his beard long and white, finally stopping his adventures; Sven, gone to whatever meadows reindeer go to; Anna and Elsa, their stories finished in their own time.
But Olaf remains.
He's been everywhere. Seen everything. Sung his summer song on every continent, to audiences of penguins and camels and confused city-dwellers. He's learned that magic snow doesn't melt, but it can be chipped and broken and scattered... and then always, always, it comes back.
The volcano belches smoke. A warning? Maybe just a greeting.
"I've done oceans," Olaf says to the mountain. "I've done deserts. I've been to the bottom of the mines and the top of the highest peaks. I've been crushed by glaciers and scattered by avalanches and once, a very confused bird carried my head halfway across a fjord before dropping me in a haystack." He smiles at the memory. "But I've never done this."
He looks down at his chest, at the three lumps of coal that have been with him since the beginning. One of them fell out decades ago and was replaced by a particularly nice pebble. It works just as well.
"I wonder if it will hurt," he muses. "I don't think it will. Nothing else has, not really. Just the feeling of coming apart and putting myself back together. Like yawning, but longer." He pauses. "I wonder if I'll come back from this. Or if this is finally the thing that's too much, even for magic."
The volcano groans. A plume of ash rises, darkening the sky.
Olaf takes a step closer to the edge. The heat hits him in waves, making his surface glisten.
And then he leaps. "Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!: he calls out.
The descent takes longer than expected. He has time to watch the crater walls rush past, to feel the heat intensify, to see the bubbling orange lake below growing closer and closer.
"It really is beautiful," he says, and his voice is barely a whisper against the roar of the mountain.
He hits the surface. He giggles.
For one infinite moment, Olaf exists as himself: snow and magic and dreams and songs, suspended in liquid fire.
And then he doesn't.
The volcano swallows him without a sound. Bubbles rise. Steam billows. The mountain shrugs, indifferent, ancient, eternal.
Hours pass. Days. Weeks.
Nothing reforms. No mist gathers. No snowflakes spiral.
The volcano cools, eventually. Goes dormant. Becomes just another mountain, just another peak in a range of peaks. Forests grow on its slopes. Animals make their homes in its shadow.
And Olaf...
Well.
No one really knows what happens to magic snow when it meets the center of the world. Maybe he's still there, somewhere, suspended in that endless orange glow, watching. Waiting. Dreaming of summer.
Or maybe that was the surprise all along.
