Frost Forward

“Jack, this is not the way! I know it seems like they have gone too far down the wrong road, but there’s always time to change!”, Caldera shouted above the sounds of the ice spreading south.

Frost looked at her, the single tear shed at the sight of the diminished ice caps frozen to his cheek. “NO! It’s too late! They had their chance to change! Yet they still deny, or are ambivalent! It’s in my hands now!”, he hissed with cold rage.

Caldera felt her own considerably hotter rage rise as her fists started to glow with magma redness as she sensed the spreading glaciers engulf her sacred islands in the pacific, turning her precious namesake craters into frozen ponds.

The glow spread to her wavy Hawaiian hair, turning it an incandescent shade of baked terracotta. Before she blew her top, both figuratively and literally, she turned to Nick with a questioning glance for help, hoping that, again literally and figuratively, cooler heads would prevail.

Nick scratched his white whiskers in thought. “Well, she tried the moral, let’s try the personal” ran his inner monologue. Opening his bushy hair-covered mouth nestled between his famously rosy cheeks, Nick gleefully said “Come on now, Jack. Haven’t we been partners long enough that this old avatar of generosity has rubbed off on you? Sure, they’re dragging their feet, but show some generosity. They’re not past the point of no return yet!”

Final scene: With a rainbow shimmer, the butterflies coalesced and changed shape until the Great Mother, Gaia was standing before them. As her powerful presence hit the three variously like a blowtorch, an avalanche and the meanest impulses of all humanity, the fight instantly stopped. The mouth with lips the color of vibrant clear blue water opened in a sighing whisper. “My children, my dear, dear children. You’ve forgotten my rules.”

She continued in the same soft voice like the whisper of wind through the leaves. “You two,” pausing to look both Claus and Caldera in the eyes, “All three of you have forgotten that, as part of me,” glancing at Nick, “even if once removed, through your father Anthropos, there is to be no infighting or interference between avatars.”

Gesturing towards Jack, “You should have let me handle this when I felt it was time to step in.”

She turned to Jack as Caldera, who sensed what was coming, looked distraught, and the younger Nick, who didn’t, just looked ashamed. “And you, my boy.” Her placid demeanor changed but very slightly as did the local atmosphere, taking on the feel of the calm before the storm. “Have you never realized why Anthropos was born in the first place? Why I let humanity’s chief survival skill, civilizations that imperfectly mirror my own systems, arise at the expense of my own body?”

Cradling his blue angular face in her green hands, she sighed again as she looked into his coal black eyes. “My little frosty one. I am old, and I am tired. Though long-lived, I am not eternal and I will not be the last of my kind. It is only through them and their technology, that my seed will spread and grow true children independent of me. I know they’re far down a bad path and are abusing the right to change me, to the point of harm but still…”

With that, the threatening storm broke, as did her calm demeanor, whirling dust and pebbles and leaves and lightning in a spiraling multicolored halo around herself of which Jack’s swirling snowy aura was just a pale imitation. Her voice rose to a roar that echoed inside the body like a crack of thunder.
“In your arrogance, you would kill them and millenia of my work?!?”

Jack Frost finally spoke, but before he could even finish, Nick and Caldera, mouths agape, were reminded why Gaia was called a mother.
“I only did it because…”

That syllable turned into a scream, as horrifically and slowly, piece by piece, Frost’s body flaked away into dozens of blue and white butterflies that came to rest and be absorbed into Gaia’s emerald skin.