It started with a snowman.

A perfectly ordinary snowman — three balls, two sticks, one slightly lopsided carrot. Klaus stepped back to look at it and felt that it needed something. A hat, perhaps. Ole arrived, studied it for a moment, and said “what if we built him a house?” which is the kind of suggestion that seems reasonable at the time and is not.

By sunset they had a fort.

By the end of the week they had four towers, three tunnels, a throne room, a decorative arch, and a sign that said SNOW KINGDOM — OFFICIAL, which Ole had insisted on, for legal reasons he declined to explain.

Other cats came to look. One of them called it “genuinely impressive.” Klaus added a fifth tower.

---

The fifth tower fell down overnight.

Klaus rebuilt it. It fell down again. He rebuilt it with structural improvements. It fell down sideways, which it hadn’t done before, which felt personal.

Ole, meanwhile, had discovered that the tunnels required clearing every morning or they filled with snow and became simply holes, which were considerably less interesting than tunnels. He was clearing them for the fourth time on the fourth day when he stopped, sat down inside tunnel number two, and stared at the wall.

The wall stared back.

“Klaus,” he called.

“Yes,” said Klaus, from somewhere inside the fifth tower, which was leaning again.

“When did this become a job?”

A long silence.

“I think,” said Klaus slowly, “it was around the third tunnel.”

“We have four tunnels.”

“Yes.”

Ole looked at the wall for a while longer. “I didn’t want a job,” he said. “I wanted to throw snowballs.”

“Me too,” said Klaus. There was a soft crump from above. “The tower’s down again.”

“Leave it.”

”…Yes, alright.”

---

They demolished tunnel number four, which had never worked properly anyway and had at one point tried to collapse on Ole, which neither of them had forgiven it for. Then tunnel three. Then the throne room, which had been impressive but cold, and which had mostly been used by a passing crow who had not asked permission.

The fifth tower they left as a pile. It seemed happiest that way.

What remained: two towers, the connecting wall, and the arch, which was still very good and had never once tried to fall on anyone.

Klaus packed a snowball and threw it at nothing. Ole chased a drifting snowflake across the clearing and lost it, which had been inevitable, and didn’t matter at all.

The snow kingdom was smaller now. Quieter. It asked nothing of them.

Klaus looked at it for a moment, then looked away, then looked back.

“I think I like it better,” he said.

“Don’t make it bigger again,” said Ole.

“I won’t,” said Klaus.

He made it slightly bigger again three days later, but that is a different story.