Jayme Lawson was, by all accounts, a perfectly ordinary woman. She lived in a small, perfectly organized apartment, worked a perfectly quiet job as a library cataloger, and took her perfectly bland lunch at precisely 12:17 PM each day.
And so, Jayme Lawson, the perfectly ordinary librarian, became the Guardian of Winter. She still works at the library, but now her lunch break is spent freezing the local pond for skating lessons. And Popsicle? He sits on her shoulder, the most loyal, pea-stealing familiar a winter soul could ever ask for. jayme lawson the penguin
She’d seen doctors. Specialists. A man who claimed to read auras and suggested she was “emotionally allergic to summer.” Nothing worked. So Jayme simply adapted. She wore snow boots in July, slept with a small fan pointed at her feet (the heat they generated was, paradoxically, unbearable to the rest of her), and avoided carpeted areas. Jayme Lawson was, by all accounts, a perfectly
“Jayme Lawson,” the man whispered, his voice the crackle of a glacier. “The last of the Winter Souls. You have been dormant long enough.” She still works at the library, but now
The trouble began on a Tuesday. She was walking home from the bus stop when she saw it: a puddle. Not a rain puddle, but a long, glistening smear of meltwater on the sidewalk. And at the end of the smear, waddling with purpose toward a storm drain, was a small, disgruntled-looking penguin.
Inside was not a derelict warehouse. It was a cathedral of ice. Frozen waterfalls cascaded from the ceiling. The floor was polished mirror-smooth. And in the center of it all, rising from a throne of crystalline frost, was a man made entirely of frozen starlight.