Haunted by Frozen Shadows · 12:55am Sep 29th, 2017
Except for a final polish, the next chapter of Frozen Shadows is done and ready to hit my FIMFic archive this weekend. I spent at least 1 ½ hours last night and almost as much time in discussion with my husband Tale Weaver, straightening out some long-standing issues with FS as far as how the heck I am going to get from where it started to where it ends and make it actually make some SENSE timeline wise. It was only in the late hours of the night after straightening out Nyx’s insanely time-tangled tales that I gained even more than my already boundless appreciation for the sheer brilliance of showrunner Mr. Steven Moffatt for the effortless way he fielded Matt Smith’s timey wimey stories in Doctor Who.
Two years ago, I wrote the end scene for Frozen Shadows first, inspired by a piece of music by the New Age group Between Interval…a haunting piece called, “Leviathan” and the sheer power of it the first time I heard it. I sat at my desk during a lunch break, in the grip of a vision as its deep, haunting tones invoked scenes before my eyes of the loneliness, the eternal quiet and paralysis of King Sombra’s 1,000-year stasis under a hundred tons of solid ice in the Frozen North. One cannot appreciate the depth of pain in either his sentence or this amazing piece of music when taken separately…only together did they invoke a powerful trance state within me that after its end let me come back to my surroundings, my face wet with tears, my heart aching for Sombra and my head full of the most incredibly vivid images this accompaniment invoked within me. It is why this story and this shadowy piece of atmospheric music must be completed as complements to each other at any cost.
I know this is bit of a digression from the announcement that the story is back on track, but I wanted to let my old friends and new followers know why it is so important to me that I not let this story die. I have been a little moody off and on lately since the synopsis reveal for MLP’s season finale, feeling certain that we will never see the King of Shadows back on the screen, but that does not mean his legend and stories are done forever.
Far from it. Frozen Shadows was originally intended (and written) as a single scene – a one-shot chapter pulling the reader into the pain felt by my TimeWitch, mirroring how she felt gazing up her lifeless love, ensnared by a fate she saw coming and could do nothing about. But after it was written, I realized no one knew anything about Nyx at the time…why did she love King Sombra? How could she love such a tyrant and why should anypony care if she did? Yes, the scene could be told in one short story, but to empathize with her, the King of Shadows and feel the true power of both his story and Between Interval’s music score in tandem with one another, one had to get to know Nyx first.
Once I committed to writing more than the one scene, I knew Frozen Shadows would be doomed if I didn’t get Nyx’s crazy timelines right, make them make sense and yet at the same time draw the reader into that depth of pain felt by her – pain so intense at times it drove her mad. In the world of both humans and MLP, only love and loss could do both so effectively and my time-hopping Marazon lives with an entire lifetime of both, every moment of her life, in every breath she takes.
In a way, Nyx’s pain is my pain. Pain that we may never see our Dark King again as far as the show is concerned – he is a character not completely dead, yet as effectively in limbo as if he were never released from the ice of his prison. Will it release me – or any of us – to tell his untold stories? Perhaps not, but in the end, it will be the legacy with which we will honor him and what he represents to all of us in our own, individual ways.
Nyx
