Ice and fire and in-between
Ice. Ice cold, the Ice Queen, ice, ice, ice. They threw the word around so much when talking about her it had lost its meaning. Even she had fallen to it, once. And the truth is, Lyra is ice, shining and beautiful and brittle, too, though of course Cally didn’t know that yet. When you are a child and you have never touched ice, you are shocked by the sudden cold and don’t know what to make of it, but you want to know what it really is, so you keep coming back.
And in the end, ice is just water.
Ice is just water and fire can melt it, warm it, even evaporate it if it is strong enough. And that is just the problem: the fire is not strong enough, and Cally fears the water might just put it out entirely.
Grayson is harder to describe. He is not fire and he is not ice and he is not any of those simple, pretty words that say he means this much to me. She does not love him and she does not want him but he is like a chemical burn, maybe, or like that tingling you feel when coolness touches burning flesh, except it comes from within and it burns, too, softly.
Or maybe he is none of those things. Maybe he is just human and isn’t that what she has been needing all along?