The snowcapped mountain peaks glittered like gigantic diamonds in the sunlight. Although it was already July, the snow in the high mountains still refused to disappear. Blanchefeur was not a bit bothered by it. The fée alpestre strode overjoyed through the colorful bloom of the blossoming mountain meadow just beneath the snowline. She looked majestically how she ambulated there. A slim, gorgeous young woman clad in a long snow-white dress that glistened like finest silk. Ice-blue were the eyes in her spotless face as white as the edelweiss, her long loose hair so lightly colored that the blonde nearly became silvery. The young woman was the youngest of seven sisters who lived together in a crystal cave hidden in the slopes of Mont Neigeur. The favorite activity of the sisters was nourishing and cherishing the flowers and animals of the mountain. For the fées alpestres the blossomy mountain meadows were their spacious garden and the ibexes and chamois their herds.

Today Blanchefleur had to care for the fairy garden. But that could only be alright with the tall mountain fairy because she loved to wander around out there in the open air, outside of the crystal cave with its coolly glistening splendor. In the extensive, blueish glistening corridors and spacious chambers in the inside of the mountain whereto no ray of sunshine could make its way she often felt downright captive, a sensation her sisters couldn’t comprehend. As long as she could remember Blanchefleur had lived there with her six sisters. She couldn’t nearly remember her father and mother like the majority of her sisters too, and Lucrèce, the oldest sister, stayed strangely tight-lipped concerning the topic of their parents. But Lucrèce, who was almost like as a mother to her younger sisters, never forgot to remind her siblings that they should keep away from humans though. Blanchefleur then only nodded and let the matter rest, for she didn’t even know what those humans the sister cautioned them so insistently against actually were.

Suddenly the young mountain fairy spotted a being like she never had seen before further down the mountain slope. It looked like her kind but also somewhat different. It was a young man with curly brown hair who dared the arduous ascent supported on a hiking pole. He carried a crossbow on his back. His grey eyes too widened in surprise when he saw a gorgeous young woman instead of the chamois he originally had hoped to find. He understood at first glance that the beauty was in no way human but that scared him not a bit.

“Greetings!” he hailed with his hand raised in salute.

Surprised the fée alpestre blushed and hastily signaled the stranger, who was quite the handsome lad himself, to be quiet. She didn’t know what her sister would possibly do to him should she detect his presence. Lucrèce in particular hated trespassers to the core.

The young man made “Oh.” in surprise and then he nodded as a sign that he had understood. After that he continued his ascent silently until he reached the meadow where the celestially beautiful mountain fairy stayed.

“Greetings.” he repeated again, this time with a lower voice.

“G-greetings.” Blanchefeur shyly replied “My name is Blanchefleur.”

“Why are you up here so high in the mountains, Mademoiselle Blanchefleur?” the man who introduced himself as Odon, a resident of the village Fontaineclaire at the foot of the mountain, asked.

“I… I live here.” the young fairy answered.

“You don’t say!” Odon exclaimed with contrived surprise. “I have never ever heard about it that there are human beings up here.”

“You are a human?” enquired Blanchefeur astonished.

The young man nodded.

“I’m no human but a fée alpestre.” the beauty freely admitted. It was the first time for the mountain fairy that she encountered a human being. Admittedly she had had no clear idea of humans before but Odon didn’t appear nearly as dreadful as she had thought, rather he was similar to her and her sisters.

“Oh really?” said the villager from the foot of the mountain and laughed joyously. This smile had appealed to the fairy.

It didn’t stop with only one meeting. After they knew about each other, Blanchefleur and Odon oftentimes met in the dizzy heights of the high mountains. The mountain fairy always signaled him with certain cloud formations around the mountain peak when it was safe to come and when her sisters, who he better shouldn’t encounter, were out and about. Thus the young man often ascended the mountain and when he descended again, he brought back no hunted chamois but rare and beneficial herbs that he could sell in the village and the nearby town for some serious money instead. The routinely contact between the fairy woman and the human man lasted two years already before they knew it, although the young man stayed in his village in winter. Only during the warm seasons which admittedly didn’t last very long in the mountain heights he visited Blanchefleur. As such, a sporadic contact gradually became friendship and friendship became love.

At the moment the two sat again in the blossomy mountain meadow where there appeared to be no living creature except for butterflies and bumblebees flying from blossom to blossom.

“Voila! It’s finished.” Odon declared and held up a wreath of flowers that he had made from alpine flowers.

Blanchefleur applauded excitedly. “So beautiful!” she spoke out.

“You are much more beautiful.” The brown-haired man asserted without a trace of prudency while he let his hand slide through her silky silver hair.

Bashfully the fée alpestre blushed.

Suddenly her companion put the freshly twined floral wreath on her head. “It suits you.” he said.

“Really?” she inquired, half bashfully, half excitedly.

“Yes, really.” Odon replied and leaned with his shoulder against his beloved “But you are still the most beautiful flower of all.”

Towards evening when the young man had returned home already, Blanchefleur too returned home to the crystal cave. Humming happily, she skipped over the sparkling floor and overjoyed she pressed the flower wreath against her chest.

“Blanchefleur, is it you?” a clear voice rang out.

“It’s me, Sister.” she answered.

Shortly afterwards she encountered another fée alpestre, quite alike in face and stature, although with a somewhat sterner countenance. This was Lucrèce, the eldest of the mountain fairy sisters.

“What do you have there?” the elder sister wanted to know, her tone of voice gradually becoming stricter.

“A flower wreath. I have twined it today.” the youngest got by with a white lie. Nobody was allowed to know about Odon, especially not the human-hater Lucrèce.

“Useless kitsch!” the family head adjudged and wanted to wrest the wreath from her sister. The girl resisted though so that the fancy object eventually teared and the blossoms helplessly swirled through the air.

“There you have it for what something like that is good for!” Lucrèce asserted “The flowers have short enough to live anyway and you rob them of this life for short-lived stuff like this!”

Blanchefleur looked at her sister defiantly and with tears in her eyes. Then without saying another word she ran deeper into the cave to her own rock chamber where she would have a good cry for starters.

“And therefore I no longer have your beautiful flower wreath.” the young fairy told her human lover.

“Don’t worry, Blanchefeur.” he replied “I can make you a new one again anytime.”

“My big sister is in the wrong anyway.” the beauty pouted.

Odon shrugged, for he didn’t know how he could have helped with the matter any further.

“Oh, now it occurs to me that you shouldn’t come here during the next three weeks from end of May to early June.” the fée alpestre declared “My sisters and I will be out and about on the whole mountain to assist the chamois and ibexes during childbirth”

“Thanks for the warning.” the young man responded “I will abide to it without fail.”

Two weeks later Blanchefleur and her sisters were out and about, exactly as she had said. Even if she had claimed they would help the animals with birth, the fées alpestres performed midwifery only in exceptional cases. It would be more exact to say that they watched the female ibexes and chamois during birth and only stepped in when it became necessary. Although it was a splendid sunny day, unnoticed by the mountain fairies a tempest began to loom at the foot of the mountain, albeit none in the meteorological sense.

Suddenly the high cry of a fée alpestre rang out. Blanchefleur stood up with a start. She knew the voice, no doubt about it.

“Mireille, is it you? What happened?” the youngest of the sisters asked anxiously. Then she set off. Lucrèce, Mireille, Arlette, Élodie, Aveline, Bérengère. None of her six sisters could be found anywhere. Instead she frequently spotted signs of a fight. With ever-growing sorrow and fear she further looked for her family.

At last she found her sisters on the big flower meadow, the bloom of it distorted by fights and the blood of mother animals slain during childbirth. The eyes of five of the fées alpestres draped in filthy snow-white dresses were opened widely in terror but there was no life left in them. Heavily built men fumbled around with them and cut their silver hair that was very popular for wigs with the nobility. One of her sisters, Lucrèce, still struggled desperately against the attackers but she was subdued when she was surprised by Blanchefleur’s arrival. Shortly afterwards the men had broken her neck too.

“What… what is this here?” the youngest of the fairies asked horrified.

“Don’t fret, Blanchefleur. You will soon be able to follow your sisters.” A voice known to her rang out but in such a cold tone like she never had heard before. To her dismay the mountain fairy had to find that Odon was among the attackers too. He smiled at her but his otherwise gentle smile was full of scorn and the otherwise affectionate eyes were full of disdain.

“Why, Odon? Why?” Blanchefleur asked in despair while tears streamed over her pure white cheeks. It felt as if somebody had torn out her heart from her chest with brute strength.

“Why?” the young man burst into coldhearted laughter. “You love me, Blanchefleur, don’t you? You surely want to make me happy, don’t you? That’s why, Blanchefleur, please die for me. With the money that I will get for your and your sisters’ hair I can finally marry my fiancée who waits five years for this already, you see. But before you die for me please show me the legendary treasures beforehand that you fées alpestres are said to keep in the interior of the mountain. Wouldn’t you please do that for me?”

It is said there is only a thin line between love and hatred. When it dawned upon the fairy that she only had been used by the man she loved in all the years, the hot love in her heart turned into flames of wrath. While tears still gushed out of her eyes, she burst into a joyless laughter that proclaimed all her pain to the world with the echo. Then she looked at Odon with hate-filled eyes when a suddenly arising wind caused her white dress and her silver-blonde hair to flutter wildly.

“You want that I give you everything?” she asked with a hard voice “Then I will give you everything! As much as I can possibly give you!”

The wind grew into a full-grown gale. But that was not all. From one moment to the other the previously still clear sky was covered with gloomy storm clouds from which hail and snow fell onto the earth. The men were completely at a loss how to deal with the snowstorm in springtime. In the meantime Blanchefleur rose into the air, her ice-blue eyes solely eyeing the traitorous lover. Like a vengeful ghost she came over him, gripping him with snow-white hands at his neck. While the young man struggled and gasped because he couldn’t breathe, the hailstones belabored him and the snowflakes made him freeze, she carried him higher, up and up. In doing so she whispered into his ear with a voice as bitter as the frosty winter wind: “You want to have everything I can offer you. You shall get it. I gift you the most spectacular death you could ever imagine.”

When he heard this Odon trembled with dread. He felt that he should never have gotten himself involved with the fée alpestre but now it was too late for regret. Meanwhile they had risen so high into the air that they were at eye level with the eternally white mountain top. The bluff rocky slopes spread out deep beneath them. With a last loving smile Blanchefleur looked at the young man who struggled more and more desperately although his limbs were already partly frostbitten. “Farewell.” she whispered – and then she just let him go. Odon fell without stopping or any footing into the dizzying depth beneath him and split somewhere on the mountainsides. His bloody scattered remains but also the carcasses of the butchered animals, the bodies of the ruffians frozen to death, the maltreated corpses of the mountain fairy sisters, and not at last the gorgeous bloom disappeared forever beneath a constant white mantle of snow that should cover Mont Neigeur for centuries. The village Fontaineclaire at the foot of the mountain was destroyed by an avalanche soon afterwards and was never rebuilt. And according to the legend somewhere in the eternal snowstorm up to this very day there dwells a lonely fée alpestre who lives in a large and magnificent but desolate crystal cave, consistently shedding tears for her first love and her sisters.