She is a delicate little creature with a narrow waist and a light step. Her skin is pale, never flushing with cold, glittering like frost, and her lips are almost blue. Her pixie-cut hair is white as snow, her gray eyes large and sparkling, and her ears come up to sharp points. She wears a silver dress that flows and flutters like the wind itself. Sometimes she is as tall as a man and others as small as a pinecone. Where she sets her foot, frost spreads beneath it, and where she passes by, snow follows.
The Winter Sprite flits from place to place, never seen but always there. She waves farewell to the huge flocks of birds flying south and tucks the bears and voles into their beds. When the leaves leave the branches bare, she decorates the trees with a painted layer of ice or a dusting of snow like powdered sugar.
Always winter somewhere, she is always busy, but it is more than work to her. Everything she does is who she is, and she delights in doing it. No sorrow or care ever touches her; she is as immortal and unchanging as the seasons, fleeing before spring and returning on the heels of autumn, always moving, dancing through the world, and skating through life.
And people? People she barely notices. People huddle in their houses where the chill of her breath and the bite of her teeth can not reach. They bundle up in warm garments until they are twice their normal size and stay close to their cities and buildings and yards. Some of the younger ones will play with her gifts, but even they stick close to the fires and lights, running inside when she gets too cold for them.
If she did pay attention to the humans, she may have known the locals call this particular forest haunted—a fairy ground, a place of mystery and mischief and danger—but she does not. She does not even notice that no human ventures this far into these woods until the day she is startled by a girl staggering through the snow drifts and tripping on the buried roots.
Only then does she remember that humans do not come here.
Curious, the Winter Sprite alights on the branch above the girl’s head, a puff of snow dislodging beneath her feet and falling to the hat below. Far from being annoyed, the girl looks up, quickly, and at once, the Winter Sprite flees, fluttering behind the trunk of the tree in a flash of light.
“Wait,” the human calls, softly, as if not to disturb the stillness, but even a soft cry can cut like a knife through the silence of a deserted wood with sound muffled by snow.
The Winter Sprite does not wait, darting through the trees, icicles, snowbanks, and undergrowth with the speed of sleet, leaving the human far behind. However brief the glimpse, she knows the spectacles the girl wears, knows them instinctually, deep in her bones: the frames of the texture and appearance of ice and lenses like prisms, catching the light and reflecting truth. With glasses like these, even a human can see a seasonal sprite.
Uncommon, unheard of, unknown. Humans have no use for sprites.
She casts back her thoughts to what she knows or had heard. The Winter Sprite is not sociable, and the most regular contact she has is with her sisters, Spring and Autumn, but over the forever she has traveled on the north wind, she has met and spoken with her cousins the fairies, however seldom the occurrence. From what she can remember, humans have not had business with the fairies for countless passes of spring and winter.
So, what can this mean?
Disturbed as she cannot remember ever being before, she makes a quick pass at the nearest fairy circle, uncovers where the girl received such magic, and is gone again before water can fall from an icicle in the branches and hit the ground.
The being who provided the spectacles is neither fairy nor human but something undefinable, something with age and wisdom and power. It takes the form of an old woman—hunched with age with gray hair and a big nose—but it is not, and it lives in a small house—made of old wood and sitting closer to the trees than to the town’s houses—but it might be there today and gone tomorrow, house and all.
But it is there today.
The Winter Sprite blows through the door in a rush of frigid air and a flurry of snow. The fire in the hearth flares brighter and hotter at her entrance, and she retreats to the corner, sweating. The beads of sweat freeze on her skin and as they fall away, melt to hit the floor as a drop of water.
“What a mess,” the creature says in a harsh voice, emerging from the shadows across the room from the Sprite. The Winter Sprite hesitates, considering her next move against this being of unknown power and motives.
The creature continues to talk as it sweeps the snow toward the fire with a broom. “And after all the trouble keeping you out, too. I hope you’re more polite to the humans; they are not as forgiving as I am.” The snow melts before the fireplace, turning to sludge and then to a puddle on the floor.
Braving the heat, the Winter Sprite alights on the table, no taller than a candle. Her feet leave footprints of frost on the wooden boards. “It is about a human that I come.”
“Oh?” It sops up the melted snow with a rag, poking it around the floor with its foot.
“Yes.” The Winter Sprite waits as the creature ignores her, busy in its work. “You sent a human looking for me,” she says at last. “You gave her the spectacles.”
“Did I?” it says. It rings the rag out over the fire. The drops of water sizzle as they hit the flame and wink out, and still the fire burns unchanged.
“You did.”
“A bit of a girl,” it says, turning to face the Winter Sprite at last. “Barely a teenager, unless I miss my guess. Human ages are so hard to tell.”
“Yes,” she says. “What did the girl want?”
“She came for the spectacles, and she could pay for them. What more do you want from me?”
“Why is she looking for me?”
It laughs, low in its throat. “What will you pay for that information?” It drops the rag into the fire, which roars its pleasure, eating the damp rag to ashes, leaving no evidence that snow had ever been there.
Fast as a storm, the Winter Sprite grows, still standing on the table, and now with her head brushing the ceiling, she towers over the other being. A rush of blizzard winds howl through the room, snuffing out the fire like a candle flame, leaving the room dark and cold.
“You will tell me,” she says, calmly, though her words echo with the roar of the coldest winds.
It does not move, but it does speak, for not even a being such as it can stand against the force of nature. “She wanted to ask a favor not within my power to grant. I directed her to you and gave her the spectacles to see, no more. You should speak with her. There is no malice in the girl’s heart.”
Without another word, the Winter Sprite hops on the wind, shrinking as she does to no bigger than a bird, and flies through the window, banging the shutters shut behind her.
The sun and the stars pass by several times, and the Winter Sprite ponders what she was told. The girl returns to the woods each sun time, begging the crisp air for an audience. Sometimes, the Winter Sprite allows the human a glimpse of her, but always she darts away before the girl can get a good look, testing the human’s resolve and intentions as she debates her own final decision.
Still, winter is not hard to find, and the girl is persistent. Whatever it is she wants, she is willing to walk through the snow deep into the woods each day for only the opportunity to ask. The Winter Sprite is impressed and bends to her curiosity.
The morning she shows herself is crisp and cold. The morning sun shines brightly, making the snow sparkle like diamonds and glancing off the icicles in a thousand lights more beautiful and more wondrous than any that humans can invent.
When the girl arrives, calling for the sprite, begging that this is her last time in the woods, the Winter Sprite sits herself in an old woodpecker hole at eye level and calls back. “Looking for me, child?”
The girl stops, slipping on the snow but not falling, and at last, her eyes find the Winter Sprite. “Wow,” she says, the word a whisper skating on her breath. “You’re here.”
“I’m here,” the Winter Sprite agrees with a slight smile. “I think you wanted my help?”
The human nods vigorously. “Yes,” she says. “I wanted to ask if you could send me a white Christmas?”
“Pardon?”
The girl explains, telling the Winter Sprite the number of days until the holiday, where exactly the girl lives and how far, and how by ‘white’ she means snow-covered ground all day. A true winter wonderland. “Please, please, could you?” she begs. “We never get a white Christmas! It would mean so much if I could see one just once!”
The Winter Sprite has no knowledge or care for human holidays, but she is flattered by the delight the young human took in her season. The few times people catch her attention, they always seem to spend as little time with her as possible, rushing along until spring arrives to chase her out. And she is impressed by the girl’s tenacity.
“I will grant your request,” she agrees. “Just this once.”
“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” the girl cries, jumping up and down and clapping her gloved hands. “You’ve no idea what this means to me.”
Human directions mean nothing to the Winter Sprite, so she simply follows the girl as she takes metal machines back to her homeland and then waits nearby, carefully keeping track of the passing of the sun and stars until the time comes.
Then, the night before the human holiday, she works her magic. Draping the town with a thick white blanket and coating every rail, roof, and branch with icicles, she crafts her winter wonderland. As dawn breaks, painting the white canvas with rose, peach, and gold, the Winter Sprite thinks it is her most beautiful work.
Just as the many colors turn to the sun’s most common yellow, the girl runs out onto her back porch, wearing merely a normal garment, none of the bundled layers humans normally wear to keep winter out, and clutching her spectacles to her face with one hand. She laughs, her smile bright as the sun glinting on the snow.
The Winter Sprite sits on an ice-covered twig of the nearest tree, swinging her legs, and she waves when the girl finds her.
“Thank you!” the girl shouts, waving back.
Leaping to her feet on the twig, the Winter Sprite curtsies to the girl, and then, with a laugh like clear bells, she leaps onto the north wind and lets it take her where it wills.
–
Ariana G. Weberg is a freelance writer and editor. Her favorite season is winter, and she gets very excited about Christmas. A lover of fantasy and science fiction, she enjoys reading, watching, and discussing stories, especially while drinking iced or hot tea.
© 2023, Ariana G. Weberg
Halfway Down the Stairs 
So good!! Love the sweet ending!
LikeLike