1 The Boredom of a God is a Terrible Thing

Twenty-seven years ago:

Xueshan, the God of Snow, was bored. There were plenty of pastimes in Heaven to indulge in while waiting for the start of winter. There was choosing what robes to wear for the day, and what incense they should be scented with. There was composing poetry, reading it aloud, and discussing it. There was flirtation and everything which went with it, such as falling in and out of love. There was hunting, practicing martial arts, and playing games. There was currying favor, jockeying for position, paying court to the favored beauties.

There were so many things to do…and he was bored with every last one of them.

To others, he looked like the handsomest young god among all the other young gods, dressed in brocades and silks with frost and snow patterns, mostly white and silvery grey, with hints of dark brown and black. His ornaments were icy jade of the highest quality, clear enough to read through, and the metal buckles and chains he wore were platinum. His hair was pure white, as was his skin, but his brows and eyes were black. He smelled like wintergreen, cedarwood and the morning after a fresh snowfall. Quite a few of the unattached goddesses (and a few of the gods), wanted to entice him into their beds, but thus far, no one had succeeded. It must be true what they said—that the gods of winter had ice for hearts!

Right now he was loitering around the Courtyard of the Seasons while a young goddess read her latest poem, although he was hardly paying any attention to her at all. All he was waiting for was the moment when the sun reached the proper place—.

Changing into a gust of icy wind, he leapt up into the sky and headed for the human world. Never mind that he cut off the goddess who was reading aloud, never mind that he disarranged robes and ruined elaborate hairstyles, he just had to move!

Rushing down to meet the earth, he caused some light snow here and there over the Himalayas, nothing too violent yet, just like a runner stretching before a marathon, before descending to the plains. He didn't often bother with inhabited areas, as that was someone else's job, but it looked like there were an awful lot more humans around than, say, two or three hundred years ago. What were the beetle and centipede like things which crawled along the roadways with people in them? What were the things which looked a little like dragonflies that darted through the skies with noisy roars, trailing clouds behind them?

Clearly he needed to spend more time looking around on Earth. The human world was fascinating!

As he traveled over the earth, he noticed a small lake that was already frozen solid. It was unnaturally oval in shape, and stranger still, there were people thronging around it—and moving on it! He saw that most of them were young girls and young women, and that they had knives attached to their boots.

They were also wearing very short, formfitting dresses, and their legs—he could see almost all of their legs. Well, he might be a god but he was still male, and he liked to look at pretty girls. He coalesced into a solid form to watch more closely, but he was still invisible.

Looking at the girls from closer up, he could see that the dresses were not as immodest as he thought. They were also wearing heavy beige stockings, so their legs were not bare after all. Most of them were quite young, their bodies still those of children, which was a little disappointing—but some had the figures of grown women, even if they were slim as willows.

As he watched, he heard music. It wasn't traditional Chinese music, so it sounded harsh and weird to him, but then, one of the girls started dancing on the ice, despite the knives. No, she was dancing on the knives! Not in the way that a person who had achieved such a high level of cultivation that they could summon spirit weapons would, either. These were simple and ordinary girls, and there was nothing supernatural about the boot knives.

Fascinating! He watched for a while. By balancing on the knives, the girl could glide over the surface of the ice with long, smooth strokes, sometimes darting and wheeling, other times leaping and spinning. She reminded him of a bird—yes, a swallow, zigzagging around to catch insects on the wing. She fell twice, but got right back up again. Then he noticed the long table to the side, where several people watched intently. Was this some sort of competition, to see who was best at the ice dancing?

It might have gotten repetitive, except that each girl used different music and did different dances. Some were better than others, some went away triumphant, while others went away weeping. He was about to move along, when…

She appeared. Her shiny black hair was cut short and bound back from her face by a red hairband, and her figure was that of a slim woman. Were her breasts bound down by some restrictive band? Anyway, she had them, and hips as well. It was her face, though, that he stared at. She had peach blossom eyes, a straight little nose, and a small but well-shaped mouth. It wasn't a perfect face, any more than she was a perfect human—he could tell she bit her nails and there was a pimple on one side of her nose—yet he couldn't stop staring at her.

"Ren Fenlan will perform her routine to 'The Waltz of the Snowflake Fairy'," he heard, as she gracefully went to one knee, pretending to scoop up a handful of snow, which she then pretended to throw in the air. Then she got up and began to dance, at first slowly and lazily. There was something about the music which really was like snow falling, so how could he resist? Xueshan called up snow to fall in big, soft flakes like swan's-down. He smiled as he heard people exclaim at the coincidence.

The young woman danced—she went in turn from reminding him of a little bird darting here and there, to a flower blooming in accelerated speed, a fish leaping out of water, a maple seed spinning to earth, a flag snapping in the wind, a rock skipped over the surface of a creek, a swan landing on the surface of a lake—it wasn't what Ren Fenlan was doing that was so different than the others, it was the feeling she brought to it. Where they were doing a routine in time to the music, she was—he didn't have words.

There was a lot of applause when she was done, more, he thought, than for any of the others. She left the pond to be greeted and congratulated by several people, and while that was going on, he saw a large man who had been sitting with another dancer go over to the judges table.

The large man gestured toward Fenlan, and toward the other girl, and he and the judges talked. Then the large man put a paper wrapped around some red envelopes on the table, and there was more talking. The girl who was with the large man had a pinched, closed up sort of face, and her hair was scraped back so tightly it probably made her head sore. She looked peevish and spoiled, and several years younger than Ren Fenlan. It went without saying that she wasn't nearly as good a dancer.

It wasn't hard to figure out what was going on. The large man was probably the other girl's father, and his overcoat looked thick and luxurious, so he was rich. He was bribing the judges to make sure his daughter got the prize, whatever it was. However, the judges weren't going to let him off cheaply. A second piece of paper concealing some red envelopes joined the first.

This was rather painful to witness. Xueshan temporarily left the immediate area to spread some more snow around, but he came back to witness the aftermath. Most of the people had left, but Ren Fenlan was sitting off by a cluster of trees, crying bitterly.

This was his chance to introduce himself. He took on corporeal form and came up behind her.

"What do you call what you and the others were doing out there on the ice?," he asked.

He did not know, however, that the young goddess who was reading poetry when he left so suddenly had followed him. She was Shaonu, the Dark Maiden, a goddess of rain and snow. Just as he could transform himself into wind or clouds or snow, so could she, and now she watched, invisible and imperceptible, as he paid more attention to a human girl than he ever had to her. It was more painful than icicles piercing her flesh, but it would get more painful yet.