[MICHAEL:]
Once upon a time there was a little girl and her brother. Their mother had left them years before so they lived with their father. As a young man, their father had beautiful dreams for his life, but as time passed, their realization grew further and further away. The mother leaving made him sad, the years of fruitless struggle made him frustrated, so he drank to take away the pain. But the drink made him tired and lazy and as the years made him older he couldn’t tell if the failure of his dreams was due to life’s cruelty or his own inadequacies

As his dreams grew more and more distant, he grew more and more angry, and so he took out his anger on the little girl. Her face reminded him of his lost wife and her innocence reminded him of his lost potential, so he would look for excuses to beat her. The little boy would always try to protect her but he was too young and too little and too easily thrown aside, so all he could do was try to comfort his sister

The little girl would lie in her bed at night and call out in her mind for someone to take her far, far away. One night her call was heard by the Ice Queen

From the tundra of The Icy Lands, past the Shadow Mountains, she sent a long, great bridge of ice to the little girl’s window. And so, on that night, the little girl opened her window and beneath the shimmering constellations crossed the bridge to the Icy Lands of the Great North

The little boy saw his sister crossing the bridge of ice and climbed out after her, but the bridge melted behind her and halfway across he fell to the strange countryside below

As the stars began to fade before the approaching dawn, the little girl saw a great castle of ice standing in the wide, desolate tundra and made her descent to the beckoning Ice Queen

[ICE QUEEN:]
Here, here where the skies bend
Here where the world ends
Come and escape the fate you fear

Far from the world’s stains
Far from the fire’s pain
Let ice entice and wipe your tears

Here beyond time’s reach
Candles of ice gleam
Soon they will soothe your frail young years
Years that desert you
Here time will not hurt you
Sheltered away from all life’s...

Take my hand and leave the world
Worlds that brandish little girls
We will feast upon your dreams
Live in safe and sleepless peace

Where, where is a warm hand
Here in the Ice Lands
Here we’ll dissolve and dry your tears

No one will find you
My love will bind you
Time will be kind to your sweet years

[MICHAEL:]
The Ice Queen gave the little girl a magnificent room atop her great castle where the little girl could gaze upon the wide tundra surrounding them. Every evening they would feast in the shimmering banquet hall, decorated with ornaments of intricate, glistening crystal, and every night the Ice Queen would gently feed off of the little girl’s dreams, slowly over time devouring them one by one

The little boy, meanwhile, found himself deposited in a strange, humid land, where he stood himself up and began the long, long arduous trek to the Icy Lands of the Great North

[THE BOY:]
Run from the mark and the memory
Run from the dust and the sand
Run from the men with the ropes and the pens who will barter you off if they can
Run from the smiles in the alley
Hide in the cracks and the crowd
Run from the fight with the blades and the knife ‘til you learn how to stand your own ground
Run from the men who approach you
With promises, presents and praise
And women who wrap writhing arms round your back and encase you in thin, silver cages
Run from the mouths of the eyeless
Who writhe in the piles of red
Run from the stalls with the dry, crusted walls where you can barter your body for bread

Run from the edge of their reasons
The quiet entice of the damned
And always you run from the things you have done and the blood that won’t wash from your hands
Run from the call of your conscience
Run from the ghosts that you bred
The sacrificed lives you put down to survive and just hope that redemption’s ahead

Run to the girl in the memory
You may not remember at all
The voice you could hear you forgot through the years and whose face you can now not recall
Run from the race that pursues you
The miles and trials and tests
For when all is said and done, all you know is how to run and just pray that one day you can rest
Run from the edge of their reasons
The quiet entice of the damned
And always you run from the things you have done and the blood that won’t wash from your hands
Run from the call of your conscience
Run from the ghosts that you bred
The sacrificed lives you put down to survive and just hope that redemption’s ahead
[MICHAEL:]
As the years passed, the little girl realized the Ice Queen was slowly devouring her dreams, and so she cried until one of her dreams dripped out of her eye, encased in a tear. As the tear trickled down it froze into a shard of fine crystal. The little girl, knowing her dreams were almost gone, took the shard and for safe keeping threw it out into the icy tundra

One day a gypsy woman passing by the castle found the shard and picked it up to sell at the Apocryphal Bazaar far to the South. Eventually the boy, now a man, reached the Ice Palace. He saw his sister’s silhouette in the window and when the Ice Queen denied him entry, he slew her

He found his burnt out shell of his sister sitting gazing out her window at the tower’s peak, and in a dull, monotone remnant of a voice she told him of what had happened. And so he set off again, leaving his sister in her ice perch, in search of her lost dream

[THE BOY:]
The shadows in the starlight
Where lost things go to sleep
The memories and intentions
The tears you’re too tired to weep

Please lead her back from coldness
And hold us both from rage
Please bring a lost dream back here
And any love that might remain

The shadows in the starlight
The worlds we used to make
Of firebirds and dragons
Before time made them all fade

Please lead me back from nowhere
From roads that go askew
Into a heart of sunrise
To the girl that I once knew

The shadows in the starlight
Where dreams rest when they’re old
The memories of each other
Before our hearts turned cold

Please lead me through the darkness
Please lead me past the shore
Through storms that condescend us
Please let her smile at me once more

The shadows in the starlight
That hide the scant remains
The broken, scattered pieces
When all that you love has changed

And when the tale is over
Please let us both recall
The dream of how we once were
And please let us not have changed at all

[MICHAEL:]
Once upon a time there was a dreamless woman sitting high atop a palace of ice, and a man who roamed the Great Northern Lands in search of a crystal shard within which was contained her last, lost dream