30 Days 30 Stories, Installment 28, Cold

There was once a beautiful queen. Her skin was white as pearls, her eyes the color of the sky, and her hair as dark as a starry winter's night. She was the wife of the most awe-inspiring king; he was from a hot country, his skin was as dark as his wife's was fair, and his eyes the color of honey. His hair, like hers, was dark as the coal when the fire has burned. They lived in his kingdom of plenty, and they prospered. Until the summer came. It was the hot time. And this was when the queen became unwell. She began to get colder. The more intensely shone the sun, the colder she became; while others sweltered and ran to the baths to be wet and cool, she huddled beneath her silks and shivered. The king, large and warm, came to her and held her, but she was as ice in his arms.
He called the best physicians, and the best magicks. He went to far away places himself, to bring her unctions and syrups. But nothing did any good. As the summer deepened, so did her pallor, and her hair, thick and shining, began to fade to almost gray. At night he held her, because he did not know what else to do, and he wept over her freezing form.
They knew her time was close, she could no more recover from her state, and she asked, her voice faltering, to be taken back to her home land, so that she could see and taste the snows once more before she died. He protested the temperatures, but she asked, and the pleading of her blue lips convinced him. That night, without preparation, they left for the snowy lands Northwards.
After many days of travel, they arrived at the lands of snow and ice, and there, clad still lightly as for the heat, she descended her elephant and walked, barefooted on the snow. "Oh how it burns!" she cried, but delightedly, and her cheeks, before so blue, had lost their deathly pale. They shone with warmth and health.
They went to see her father, who lived far up the mountains, on a craggy cliff. And there they stayed for some weeks. But just as the heat did so much bad to the lady, the cold did the same to the gentleman; he was eaten up by fever. He could not be touched, hardly, for fear of heating him yet more. His queen, weeping in desperation, ordered him back to the Southlands, and accompanied him.
The summer was fading, and as winter came, the queen recovered her spirits somewhat. But the cold within her could not help but come out in the temperate climes. And so it was, of course, with her husband and the heat of his lands born within him, too. They looked at each other, but knew the answer lay somewhere neither of them loved. Would the love for each other be enough?
They went to the midlands. Beautiful though they were, where flowers beckoned spring, and summer was swept with delicious breezes, both sighed for their homelands, and the homeland of the other. The sands and the snow were the same, somehow, so different from the lands between them. And though they lived healthily in the grass-covered hills, the hills were very foreign.
But they loved one another, and in that love they realized for love and happiness to be together, so must there be suffering. And so it was. Each winter the lived within the heart of the Southlands, and the Queen suffered; each summer they spent in the North where the King was nursed from his ever-weening fever; and in the spring and fall they kept to the midlands, where their good health bloomed, but their kingdoms and people were not. And in the cycle of the seasons there was balance, and in the marriage there was justice, and in the hearts of the king and queen there was love, and pain, and love again.