Whispering Blizzard
The storm came without mercy, a white sieve that smeared the world to marrow and memory. I had meant to cross the pass before noon, but the clouds collapsed in on themselves and turned the valley into a bone-deep drift of silence. Snow muffled the heartbeat of the mountains, and the wind spoke in needles and teeth, slicing through the thin fabric of my resolve.
By luck or fate, I found shelter in a cabin that looked as though it had waited since the first winter. The door groaned shut behind me, an old friend whose loyalty was a creak and a sigh. Inside, the air tasted of ancient flour and something colder—like the taste of a snowflake that forgot to melt. A single candle burned on the table, guttering as if afraid of its own light. On the wall hung a map, edges frost-bitten, lanes drawn in charcoal that didn’t belong to any place I knew. The ink had run in places, as if the map itself had cried and left tears on the paper.
When the storm pressed its white mouth against the shutters, the cabin’s warmth peeled away, revealing a chorus of whispers. They rose from the corners, from the floorboards, from the very breath I drew. “You shouldn’t have come here,” they said, not with voices but with the ache of unspoken memories. A journal lay open on the table, its pages filled with names I recognized and those I did not, as if someone else had already walked my path and left behind a ledger of disasters. The frost on the glass sketched faces that stared back, patient and accusing.
Voice in the wind: “We waited for you.”
What followed was a list of small unnerving occurrences, each more intimate than the last:
- Footsteps that didn’t belong to me, pacing the corridor long after I stopped moving.
- A clock on the mantle that ticked backward, counting down toward a memory I had tried to forget.
- Ice that crawled along the doorframe, creeping toward the hinges as if to seal the cabin from the present.
- Whispers that rearranged the map’s routes, guiding me to places that did not exist on the map but felt necessary to reach.
And then the realization, as sharp as a frosted shard: the blizzard wasn’t merely outside. It pressed inward, turning the cabin into a vessel that carried me toward a door I hadn’t noticed before, a door carved into the wall by frost and breath. The journal’s final line appeared in fresh handwriting, a mirror of my own, though I knew I hadn’t written it:
“If you tell us your secret, we will tell you ours, and the storm will set you free.”
I spoke, not aloud, but into the stillness between heartbeats. A truth unspoken for years slid free—the memory I’d kept hidden like a frozen blade. The room exhaled, the wind stilled, and the door shimmered with a pale light. Outside, the blizzard listened, patient as the oldest guardians of this place. I stepped toward the threshold, feeling the cold fold around me like a shroud and a promise, and walked into the whispering white, where the storm knew my name and I learned to listen in return. The snow closed behind me, and for a moment, the world held its breath.