Far North.
Beneath the gray-white sky, wind and snow had howled for countless millennia.
Snow-covered mountain ranges rose and fell, like the backs of slumbering beasts beneath the dim daylight.
Amid this eternally frozen silence, an exceedingly faint light lit up from the deepest reaches of the Far North.
At first, that light was merely the faintest hint of color, like the finest brush tip lightly touching a gray-white canvas. Then, the color began to spread outward from the center, diffusing in every direction like ink dropped into clear water, slowly yet irreversibly permeating every inch of space it touched.
The colors began to grow richer.
Pale cyan, light purple, warm pink, golden orange, silver white...
Countless colors intertwined, blended, separated, then reassembled into entirely new patterns in the next instant.
The light spread faster and faster. From initially covering a radius of a hundred miles, to blanketing an entire mountain range, then the skies above the whole Far North, the entire process was like a painting slowly unfolding.
The wind and snow stopped at that moment.
The frigid winds that had howled across the Far North for countless millennia fell utterly silent at the same time. Even the tiny ice crystals hung motionless in midair, as though heaven and earth themselves were holding their breath and watching that ascending light.
At the center of the light, a figure slowly rose upward.
Snow White floated at the very center of that radiance, her ink-black hair drifting gently in the windless air, her entire body wrapped in a layer of flowing colors.
She could feel the laws of the Aurora condensing, settling, and solidifying in the depths of her soul, like a repeatedly woven net slowly drawing tight.
Snow White slowly straightened within the light, like a sapling growing upward from