It was early afternoon when Elsa strolled into camp wearing a preoccupied expression. Honeymaren paused in stacking a pyramid of firewood and watched the slender figure advance. It was remarkable to her the way the snowy-haired woman moved through the bustle and activity of the Northuldra's encampment, unseeing, her gaze turned inward to her own thoughts; yet she avoided all collisions, and eventually found her way to Honeymaren's shelter.

"Elsa." Honeymaren greeted the unearthly beauty as if the visit had been expected all along, and returned to piling up her cord of wood. "How do you find yourself? Care to sit a while?"

"Honeymaren, have you seen the Nokk? He isn't answering my call."

Honeymaren paused. She appeared to meditate on something she was tempted to say. Her eyes even darted right a few times, trying to draw attention to the pail of water near her fire ring, and Elsa's eyes to it, but Elsa didn't follow. Finally, the Northuldra woman gave up; she straightened, and chanced the question: "Isn't he just… in the water?"

She sounded just as foolish as she'd feared, but it was a fair assumption. Elsa's delicate brows drew together thoughtfully. "That's what I assumed. But it seems that, like the other spirits, he can't be everywhere at once."

It hadn't escaped Elsa's notice from the beginning that the Northuldra referred to the Nokk as he. She had adopted the same association, conscious or not, upon their first meeting, when they had clashed amid the cataclysmal waves of the Dark Sea. She had known his name, too; it was a gift that had been given her, without words, at the conclusion of their fight, and the formation of their friendship.

Now, she sat with Honeymaren as the other woman continued about her chores. While the other had no advice to give on the day's particular snarl, she had plenty of encouragement to offer, and Elsa appreciated her steady monologue. She had taken it for granted until now, perhaps, that any of the forest's spirits would be available to commune with her when she willed it—they surely had their own errands to attend to within the realm. Had it been selfishness to assume otherwise?

"I think I'll go for a walk instead of a ride," Elsa concluded eventually. She rose, and embraced Honeymaren, who rose with her. "Thanks for speaking with me."

"Come by my fire tonight?" Honeymaren suggested.

Elsa flexed a shy, appreciative smile. She doubted there would ever be a day in her life when a social invitation didn't take her by pleasant surprise. "I wouldn't miss it," she replied.

"I'm sure you'll find the Nokk before then." Honeymaren grinned.

Thus encouraged, Elsa started off into the woods. For a while as she walked, Gale accompanied her, rifling through her sweeping skirts and braiding ember-red leaves into her hair with indexterous fingers; then, as was their wont, the air spirit bored with their doting and gusted on.

Elsa came upon a stream eventually, and followed its tinkling waters north toward a mightier origin. The distant roar of falling water announced her destination before she saw it, and she picked up her pace, eager to behold one of her favorite waterfalls in the region. Honeymaren had informed her that the tumbling water glassed over in the winter time, but that the falls would still flow steadily on beneath its translucent crust of ice until spring. It wasn't cold enough yet to have frozen, but Elsa thought to visit a last time before winter crystallized its roilingpassage down the tall cliffs.

But when she arrived at the clearing, it was Elsa who froze. There was someone already here; a figure crouched by the shore of the pond amid the smoothed, tumbled stones. The mist rising off the pond obscured the petitioner's identity, but she made out the bent head, and the wide breadth of masculine shoulders. The form was shaped like a man, but it was a form unmistakably held by water; it took the landscape that surrounded it into itself and transformed it, capturing and reshaping the surrounding trees, minimizing and bending the shape of the falls like a ribbon. Elsa saw her own reflection in it from a distance, a tiny white figure undulating at the tree line like a puff of pure smoke. The figure's blue depths were easily, almost intimately, perceived, and moved ceaselessly with an alien life that could not be said to breathe, but lived all the same.

The clouds broke overhead in the same instant that the being moved. The muscles of the man's back rippled, a reflection of the light sliding between them and pooling in each crater. Elsa caught her breath. She was aware then that she had trespassed on a private moment, even if she couldn't as easily define why or how she had reached the conclusion. It simply was. Whatever, or whoever, she had come across in this silent scene had expected to be alone.

And now he was aware of her. She watched as a disturbance purled up the liquid surface of his back; it reminded her of a discomfited cat twitching its awareness of being watched, or a stone disrupting the unbroken surface of a pond.

"My apologies," she offered quickly. "I didn't mean to interrupt you. I—"

Elsa took a half-step back as the being rose. He tossed his head, and his liquid mane cascaded down his back, before falling over one sloped shoulder. As he turned to her, Elsa glimpsed the definitions of a proud profile: the strong forehead, the deep brows, the pronounced, aquiline nose that seemed almost Arendellian in its makeup. A slanted, glowing pair of pools regarded her—pools she recognized now as eyes—and the woman who had surpassed being queen nearly tripped over her own sandaled heels as the power behind that stare threatened to bowl her over.

But she didn't. She stood tall, on what suddenly felt like unsteady ground, as the taller being flowed toward her… each step nearly defined, before the rising water chasing along his calves coalesced into the next graceful stride. Elsa's stricken gaze moved up the apparition's body… then immediately snapped to his face. Her cheeks flamed as if she held the spirit of fire contained within her. With each step the naiad took, that containment threatened to break.

He didn't have a body; not in any corporeal sense. And yet, he was still, quite indisputably, naked.

In that moment, far away in Arendelle, Olaf was interested to find steam rising off him in waves.

A/N: I don't know if this idea has been done yet, but after reading a bit more on the Nøkk from Scandinavian mythology, I knew I had to give it a go.

Let me know if you are interested in reading more of this pairing!