Flutter (The Discover Series) by Melissa Andrea

determined to tear apart your kingdom if it means they can find the Princess.
    He didn’t know the half of it, but I didn’t tell him that. “So all because of one family’s fairytales, our people are suffering?”
    “There is no proof to show that they are lying.”
    I had put him on the defense, and that caused him to justify a family I was pretty sure he didn’t like.
    I decided it was probably safer to let the subject drop. I looked down at my watch and realized, with an unhealthy amount of disdain, that only 20 minutes has past during the length of our conversation. Even though I knew they hadn’t showed up while we had talked, I couldn’t help but glance past Aaron to the shed in the distance. It still sat there untouched. I came to the decision right then that I would give them another hour, before I marched back down the mountain and dragged her out myself. I started another conversation with Aaron, in hopes that time wouldn’t drag on now that I had set a deadline.
    “How did your kind come across this whole freezing business” I had heard the logistics of it, but none of the history behind it.
    “That’s actually a really cool story.” He answered excitedly. “I guess we could be considered mutants, but not in the X-Men sense of the word. Obviously we do have a lot of the original species characteristics,” he ran his hand down his body to give his words meaning. “A lot of our instincts mirror theirs: the need to be around, or in our case, in the water, the attraction to the sun, and even though we don’t fly, we can control the wind. We are a highly evolved form, but we didn’t know exactly where our limitations stopped.
    It started out with our ancestors by pure accident actually. It’s known that our original kind could survive being frozen under water by adapting to their environment enough that none of their internal organs would be damaged by the freezing temperatures. We had never considered the whole deep freeze until the accident happened about a century ago. There weren’t a lot of us at first. One of the earliest populations of our kind consisted of a small village at the edge of a forest, right off the waters of Spain .
    So the story says that one of the villagers, I believe his name was Eduardo Alvarez, went out to do some morning fishing. He decided to try a new spot on the lake, quite a ways away from the village. The spot had a dock that reached out only a few feet from the shore. A s he was setting up his stuff he managed to trip over his pole and slipped backwards into the water. Now here comes the really cool part,” he paused to consider something and then asked me, “Did you know we can sense fresh and pure water?”
    “Nope.” I replied.
    “Well we can, most of the water we live by is probably the purest water you’ll ever find. The lake their village was surrounded by was, of course, fresh, undisturbed water. The water was slow to freeze as winter came, and it was completely calm that morning. The cool thing about cold calm water -that no one really knows about – is what happens to it once it’s touched. When he fell in, tiny bubbles began to act as surfaces for the freezing to begin. Ice crystals started to form a chain reaction that started from the surface, moving down. When he used the floor of the lake to push himself toward the top, the crystals formed from the bottom, moving up, until they connected in the middle, and he was trapped inside an ice mold.
    It didn’t take them long to notice he was gone, and when they came across his stuff on the dock they knew he hadn’t left the village. The water was pretty deep and it had only taken about thirty seconds for the water to freeze around him, so they couldn’t see his body at the bottom. They had searched for him for weeks, before they finally gave up on ever finding him. He was given a burial, but with no body ever being found, it was just a headstone with his name on it.
    Spring followed and the snow