'Winter Nightmare-land', pt9

As she fought her bonds, TK did eventually take greater note of her surroundings. After all, aside from growing, groaning, gasping, straining, squirming, and bucking against the ice...there was little else to do as the minutes ticked by and she lost track of time. It looked like she had been deposited in what TK could only identify as a "temple-like" chamber; a large circular room with blue-ice walls, and a raised dais-like area in the center - on which the tiger-girl herself was presently imprisoned - ringed by columns, and with an altar-like arrangement at her back, draped with a frozen-looking white cloth. Other odd adornments, few in number, dotted the central area, giving the place a ritualistic, dedicated look.

Again, all had that crystalline, glassy look about them...looking so much more clear and pure than any ice TK had ever seen...but undoubtedly ice, frost, and snow all the same. It would have been deeply beautiful, under very different circumstances. As it was, the tiger-girl could feel only an imposing sense of weight and menace as she looked at those glimmering columns, walls, and floor decorations... Cold seemed to pound from the walls in waves...seeping into TK's bones even through leather, cloth, fur, and flesh. It was a disconcerting cold...seeming almost alive and eager in the way it infiltrated her body... A hungry cold...disconcerting and perhaps melodramatic as the impression was...

Suddenly, startlingly after such a seemingly long time alone, TK's head snapped up as she realized there was a figure approaching her across that dais-like floor. It had entered so silently and smoothly, that even the canny tigress' senses hadn't detected the woman until she was almost on top of TK. Of course, given that the white-draped figure seemed to glide more than walk, and even when focusing on her TK heard no footsteps at all, the tiger-heroine decided to forgive herself for the oversight this one time...

Glaring up with a vicious growl, eyes narrow slivers of glittering green fire and defiance, TK studied what could only be the mastermind behind her capture. She was a tall and regal figure, dressed in clothes that in TK's opinion would have looked overblown in a fantasy movie, with skin so white it looked to be made of the same ice and frost of which this palace-prison was constructed. Like the snowmen who had initially captured her, TK felt something very...wrong...about this figure. Beyond the fairly obvious likelihood that the eerie woman had had the tigress kidnapped and was now holding her prisoner for purposes unknown... This was something more visceral; a sense of "wrongness" that went right to the bone. There was something phony, artificial, about the mysterious and menacing maven. Even her hair looked wrong - it didn't move or swing, and while her clothing shifted and bent, it never rippled or wavered. Was it just the impression that it was frozen? Or was it more of a "plastic-like" quality? TK couldn't be sure, and one made about as much sense as the other. In the final analysis, it probably didn't much matter...but to a creature of instinct like TK, who went with her feelings on so many things, that skittering feeling of "un-naturalness" was deeply disturbing. Even moreso than the simple situation itself...

The woman float-stepped over toward TK smoothly, without a pause, stretching out her hands as she came, as if to embrace the tigress when she arrived. But the cold, cold woman did nothing of the sort, instead stopping a few feet out from her furious young prisoner, and merely stood there with her hands outstretched just-so...as if "feeling" for something. And then her icy, expressionless face broke into a smile which managed to look both bright and happy...and utterly cold and dead all at the same time. Perhaps it was the fact that the "ice queen's" eyes were nothing but glittering, pupil-less crystalline-blue orbs...

"My, my...such a spirited, warm heart my pets have brought me..." she crooned in a voice like an arctic wind. "Yessss..." she stretched the word out with an almost predatory, teeth-gritted smile. "You're just what I need..."


----------------------------
On to "Winter Nightmare-land", pt10