Once upon a time, Cleo and I lived in the Arctic together as sisters. The cold didn’t bother us one bit, so we were used to playing in our icy, frozen paradise we called home. Every day, we’d race out of our cave and spend all day playing in the snow. We’d slide down snowy hills and roll about in the snow, and sometimes the occasional snowball fight was added in for good measure. Every day was a splendid day - not too hot or too cold. There was one thing we were forbidden to do by our father Niles, though - we were never to swim under the ice. Legend has it that there were divers who swam under the ice before, and those who couldn’t make it to the surface drowned. We were forbidden to go anywhere in the sea, because it was too dangerous and we could be frozen to death. No matter how hard we tried to ignore it, thoughts of the sea just came back to us like the tide washing up a message in a bottle.
One day, we were out walking when we came across the edge of an ice floe. It leads all the way out across the sea. Cleo and I saw that there was a seal swimming under the ice, so we decided to slide on our tummies towards where the seal was swimming. We learnt from penguins how to slide like that, and to be honest, it was actually quite fun. We slid so fast that we didn’t notice an icy pond just nearby. We slipped off the ice and fell into the water straight under the ice. The water felt quite cold, but it was really quiet under the sea, almost quiet enough for a pin to drop. We had no choice but to explore the ocean ourselves. It was really beautiful. Our eyesight was indeed blurry because we couldn’t see underwater, but wow, it was lovely. Fish swam past us and tickled our toes, and we swam past mighty whales singing ambient whale songs. The ambience reached our ears, and we could hear correctly even though we are underwater. There was water blocking our ears, but we didn’t care. We just swam along until we came to a cave in a giant glacier.
We swam into the magical crystal depths of the glacier and looked all around us - we couldn’t believe what we saw. We could see our own reflections painted like a work of art in the glass ice, and some of the sharp spikes down below were a little dangerous, but we kept on swimming. That is until we reached a huge ice passage leading out of the cave and into another cave, with water up above. We felt like two fish who have reached their landmark and were ready to crawl out into a new world. But when we looked up again, we realised that it wasn’t water, it was ice! And there were so many passageways we didn’t know which one lead out. Desperately, we tried other caves, but they just lead to icy walls which blocked our path, and we had to go back into the cave again.
By that time, we were losing air, and were on the verge of drowning any second. With the last of my air bubbles coming out of my mouth, I took hold of Cleo’s hand just in case I wanted to tell her ‘I love you’ again…but as we sank down to the bottom of the cave, a huge shadow swam in and took us onto has back…
Minutes later, we woke up on the surface again, and found ourselves looking into the eyes of a friendly polar bear. We coughed up water and tried to get back onto our legs in a wobbly kind of manner, but we were helped up by our new friend. “Thanks for saving us, Mr Polar Bear.” I sighed. “We thought we were going to drown, but you saved us.” said Cleo. The polar bear just rumbled out a groan in acceptance. “We promise never to swim under the ice again, I think it really is too dangerous.” I coughed. “I think so too,” said Cleo, “I think the ice is a dangerous swimming ground for us.” The polar bear agreed with one last grumble, then leapt into the water and swam off as we waved goodbye to our friend.
And so we went off back to our icy home, through the wind and the swirling snow, all whilst we disappeared without a trace.
We are nowhere to be seen now.
THE END.
