Snowbound Serpent (Illustrated by WhiteMantis)
A cold-blooded creature is somehow transported to a world where winter is just beginning in earnest. The potential beginning of a series.
Snowbound Serpent - by Amethystine
The serpent simply could not believe his luck.
His bad luck.
He had heard of snow before. From two different sources.
One had been a rabbit girl who had told him how much fun she and her sisters had had playing in the fluffy, frozen fluid. She made it sound like a beautiful transformation of the natural world.
Actually, she had probably said that it was herself and her whole family, brothers, sisters, mother and father. Rabbits have famously large broods, of course. But the snake had chosen to remember the demure lapine not as a child with her family, but as the nicely developed young woman she was when he had met her. He imagined her playing in the snow, wearing almost nothing but her thick white fur, with a number of similarly scantily clad mammalian maidens, her sisters, all of them as lovely as she.
At that time, he had been a young and hormonally charged enough python to be able to use the logic of the females' fur being enough to keep them warm as they waged whimsical war on one another with what he'd let himself believe was nothing more than harmless, fun foam.. or something like that.
The other source from whom he had heard about snow, some time after hearing the rabbit's recollections was a reptilian relative of his, and they had not spared a single gruesome detail in explaining just how dangerous, unforgiving and lethal that same crystalline liquid could be, to a cold-blooded creature.
He couldn't help himself from re-living that terrifying conversation with his cousin. He shivered even more than the cold was causing him to. He held his arms more tightly around his bare torso and wished he could go back to thinking about bunnies. He couldn't, of course. When death is staring you in the face, it's hard to distract yourself. What he really wished he could do was go back to being that (almost) innocent youngster, who had conjured that fantasy of the freewheeling females. He couldn't do that anymore.
Before today, he would have only been able to imagine them all standing around in thick coats.
And now? Now, all he could think about was a pile of dead, frozen rabbits. If they couldn't survive with their fur and their layers and layers of clothing, what chance did a nearly naked naga have?
The lengthy creature had never cursed his body for being as elongated as it was, his copious loops had always been a positive. But now, more to his coils simply meant more mass within the thick layer of snow on the ground, and more scaly, uncovered back for snow to land on and melt into frigid, tiny puddles upon.
Or, they had been tiny puddles. They had gotten bigger and bigger, letting more and more of the damnable flakes flutter onto and adhere to him. He actually had a layer of snow on his backside as he slithered through the accursed forest.
Where had his home gone? Where had the wretched winter come from?
He didn't know, but he was thankful for two things:
One: the strange, somewhat flat, wide round hat he had found not long after becoming lost, which kept his head and some of his long neck clear of the evil snow.
And two: he was glad the weather wasn't worse.
Of course, the gentle drifting flakes were almost more contemptible, to him. He would have understood dying in a freak blizzard. Something furious and fierce and fearsome, a worthy adversary, in a way.
As it was, he was going to be killed by what he had to admit was some of the most tranquil and beautiful weather he had ever seen.
He sighed, puffing out thick wisps of steam from his nostrils. His head down, he trudged a little farther, into deeper snow, his coils hardly able to force their way through the heavy, hellish material. White death.
A beautiful, serene way to perish. It was little comfort. One might think it would be no comfort at all, but when one begins to think about a rapidly approaching fatal finale, something like having a pleasant view for the end becomes more important.
The serpent stopped. He was ready to stop. Altogether. Head still down, he decided to look up and assess his area for an appropriate panorama to accompany his arrival at whatever afterlife he had earned for himself.
One should always be mindful of their surroundings, but we can forgive this unfortunate reptile for not being as aware as he should have been, given his predicament.
Shocked into utter stillness and silence, the snake saw a grand house before him when he looked up. He realized that he was on the edge of a forest that surrounded the back of the sizable structure. To the naga, it was nirvana, it was shangri-la, it was heaven. It could have been hell, for all he cared, as long as it was warm.
And, by some miracle, that's exactly what this place in front of him seemed to radiate. Not only could he detect it in what few heatpits along his snout that weren't stuffed with frost, it was also plain to the eye that the building beamed with warmth. Anyone could look at it and see how the comforting yellow-orange hue seeped from the white panels that made up a number of areas along its ornate wooden perimeter.
*(Above art by WhiteMantis. To visit (and praise) her posting of this picture (and to see it full-size), go here: http://www.furaffinity.net/view/6476280/ Thanks, WM!)*
A pool of light splashed out onto the field of frozen, snowy ground when someone opened a sliding door near one corner of the blessed sanctuary. It took this movement for the nearly torpor-addled ophidian to realize someone had been outside and was going back in.
It was a beautiful woman in a silken gown. She appeared perfectly suited to the wintry weather, at least aesthetically. Pure white skin with a mane of black hair, tied back at the rear of her head. She had an oddly short, thick tail of some kind. Was she some kind of snow-lizard-woman? While the question occurred to the snake, he had already dismissed it as inconsequential before it had even fully formed in his mind.
He was headed toward the house before he had even fully made up his mind that that was what he wanted to do.
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Bonus content: Here's a(n alliterative) haiku I composed upon first seeing the art included with this tale
Fighting the Freezing
Serpentine Spine Slithers Slow
Reptile's Reached Rescue?
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