The Blizzard Memory

The wind was a thief, stealing the heat from my blood and the words from my mouth before I could speak them.

The world had been bleached of everything but white and the howling gray of the wind. It was a physical thing, the wind, a bully shoving me from behind, a thief stealing the heat from my blood and the words from my mouth before I could properly scream them. Each breath was a shard of glass in my lungs. My face was a mask of frozen tears and numb skin, a stranger’s face I could no longer feel. Beside me, a shadow in a parka struggled, his own breath a plume of white snatched away into the chaos. Tom. His name was a single, solid thing in the maelstrom of my thoughts.

"Still with me, Penny-Pincher?" His voice was shredded by the gale, the words torn to static, but I caught the shape of them. A question that was also a plea.

I tried to answer, but my jaw was a hinge rusted shut. I managed a nod, a jerky, painful movement that sent a fresh ache through my neck. My feet were gone. I knew they were there, somewhere at the ends of my legs, moving through the impossible drag of the snow, but I couldn't feel them. They were just abstract concepts, memories of feet. The snow was a sea of frozen sugar, thigh-deep, each step a Herculean effort to pull a leaden weight from its grip only to plunge it back in again.

We weren't just running from the cold. The cold was a symptom. We were running from the silence that rode on its back, a silence that wasn't an absence of sound but a presence of its own. It had started hours ago, or maybe days—time had frayed at the edges, becoming a meaningless loop of struggle—as a quiet hum at the edge of hearing. A stillness that fell after a shared laugh, a cold spot in a warm room. Now, it was chasing us. The storm was its hunting dog, and we were the rabbits, our hearts thumping a frantic, fading drumbeat against our ribs.

"Eyes up!" Tom’s mittened hand grabbed my arm, yanking me sideways just as my phantom feet caught on something buried. I stumbled, crashing against his side. He was a wall of shivering muscle and frozen canvas. "Can't have you taking a nap just yet. The accommodations are terrible."

"Service is worse," I gasped, the words cracking out of my throat, raw and brittle. My own attempt at the shield we always used. Banter. The flimsy wooden shield against the dragon of terror. It was all we had.

He grunted, a sound that might have been a laugh in a warmer world. "Look."

I followed his gaze, squinting against the needle-prick assault of the snow. For a moment, there was nothing. Just the endless, churning vortex of white. Then, a shift. A smudge of darkness against the pale, a shape that was too angular to be a rock, too solid to be a drift. A rectangle. A roofline.

Hope is a dangerous, fragile thing. It’s a tiny bird in the belly, and my belly was a frozen cavern. But the bird fluttered. Just once. It was enough. We didn’t speak. There were no words for this. We just lowered our heads and pushed, pouring the last dregs of our will into the final, desperate stretch. The cabin grew, resolving out of the blizzard's haze like a ghost ship emerging from the fog. It was small, listing to one side as if tired of standing, its wood the color of old bones. A single window, a dark, vacant eye, stared out at us. Snow was piled against its door, a barricade thrown up by the storm.

Reaching it was like breaking the surface of the water after holding your breath for too long. We collapsed against the lee side of the wall, the wind's roar mercifully muffled to a dull moan. I slid down the rough planks, my body a sack of loose bones, and pressed my frozen cheek against the wood. It was just as cold as the air, but it was solid. It was real.

Tom was already digging at the door with his hands, his movements clumsy in his thick gloves. "Give me a hand," he panted, his breath clouding thickly in front of his face. "Or don't. Just sit there and look decorative. Your call."

"I am a master of decorative despair," I mumbled into my scarf. "It's a niche market, but I excel." I pushed myself up, my legs screaming in protest. Every joint was a grinding of rusty parts. We dug together, scooping away the packed snow with numb, useless fingers. It was like trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon. The cold was seeping deeper now that we’d stopped moving, a creeping paralysis that started in the extremities and worked its way inward, toward the heart.

The door was old, the wood swollen tight in its frame. A primitive latch, a simple bar of wood, was frozen solid. Tom threw his shoulder against it. Once. Twice. The cabin groaned in protest, a weary sound from its very timbers. On the third try, something cracked with the sharp report of a gunshot. The door shuddered inward a few inches, releasing a gust of air that smelled of dust, decay, and a deep, profound stillness.

We squeezed through the opening into a darkness that was somehow deeper than the whiteout outside. The world went silent. The wind’s howl was gone, replaced by the frantic, ragged sound of our own breathing and the frantic drumming of blood in my ears. Tom shouldered the door closed, and the sliver of gray light vanished. We were entombed.

A fumbling, clicking sound, and then a tiny, wavering flame bloomed near Tom's face, illuminating his chapped lips and the ice clinging to his eyebrows. His old Zippo. He held it up, the small light pushing back the oppressive dark. We were in a single room. A stone hearth stood against the far wall, a gaping, soot-blackened mouth. A rickety table and two chairs were huddled in the center, coated in a thick blanket of dust. A narrow cot with a moldy mattress was shoved into a corner. And everywhere, cobwebs hung like funeral shrouds.

"Home sweet home," Tom whispered, his voice echoing unnaturally in the confined space. "A little rustic. Lacks that certain... je ne sais quoi."

"I think the 'je ne sais quoi' it lacks is a central heating system and a distinct absence of ghost vibes," I replied, my own voice a croak. My body was shaking uncontrollably, a violent, rattling tremor that had nothing to do with my will. It was the first stage of the thaw, the painful return of feeling.

He moved toward the hearth, the little flame dancing ahead of him. "Let's work on the heating system first. We can exorcise the poltergeists after we're sure we won't lose a toe." He knelt, peering up the chimney. "Well, good news. I don't see a family of raccoons or the corpse of Santa Claus. Should draw."

While he searched for anything to burn—a broken chair leg, loose floorboards—I did a slow, shuffling circuit of the room. My legs were stiff, my muscles knotted with cold and exhaustion. I ran a gloved hand over the dusty table. The dust was thick, undisturbed for years. Decades, maybe. Who lived here? Why did they leave? The place felt suspended in time, a forgotten sentence in a long-dead story. In the corner, I found a small stack of books, their covers warped and swollen by damp. I picked one up. The title was gone, the leather cover peeling away from the pulp like sunburnt skin. The pages were a solid block of mold. Not much good for reading, but it would burn.

"Jackpot," Tom said, his voice holding a note of genuine triumph. He’d managed to pry a few loose boards from the floor near the wall. They were dry, seasoned by years of disuse. He began breaking them into smaller pieces, the sharp cracks echoing in the silence. I brought him the ruined books, and he arranged it all in the hearth with a surprising delicacy: a small pile of my book's brittle pages for tinder, smaller splinters of wood, then the larger chunks on top.

He struck the Zippo again. The flame caught the edge of a page. A flicker of orange, a curl of black smoke. For a heart-stopping second, it seemed like it would die. Then, a tiny tendril of fire licked up a splinter, hesitated, and embraced it. The flame grew, tentative at first, then with more confidence, casting a warm, flickering light across the floor. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

We huddled before it, not too close, stripping off our frozen outer layers. Steam rose from our clothes. The feeling was returning to my fingers and toes, a pins-and-needles agony that was almost welcome. We were alive. We were out of the wind. We had fire.

Tom sat back on his heels, his face painted in the warm glow, shadows dancing in the hollows of his cheeks. He looked exhausted, but he managed a crooked smile. "So. On a scale of one to 'apocalyptic nightmare blizzard trying to personally murder us,' how's your day going?"

"I'm hovering around a 'mildly inconvenient Tuesday,'" I said, my teeth still chattering. I pulled a crumpled energy bar from my pocket, my fingers still too clumsy to open it properly. "This would be the perfect time for you to tell me you secretly packed a thermos of hot chocolate."

"Alas, my secret thermos is full of lukewarm despair and bad decisions," he quipped, taking the bar from me and tearing it open with his teeth. He broke it in half and handed me a piece. "But I did pack this exquisite, if slightly squashed, brick of questionable nutrients."

We ate in silence for a moment, the only sounds the crackle of the fire and our own chewing. The engineered sweetness of the bar tasted like salvation. The fire grew stronger, pushing the oppressive cold back into the corners of the room. The shadows danced and writhed. It was easy to imagine they were alive.

"It feels like it's watching us," I whispered, not sure why I said it aloud.

Tom didn't ask what. He knew. "It's just the place," he said, his voice low and steady. "Old places have memories. They creak. They settle. We're tired, we're spooked. Perfectly normal."

"Since when has any part of this been normal?" I countered, pulling my knees to my chest and wrapping my arms around them. The warmth was still only skin-deep. A deeper, more profound cold remained lodged in my bones.

"Normal is overrated," he said, poking the fire with a stick. Sparks flew up the chimney like a brief constellation of fireflies. "Normal is boring. Normal is TPS reports and traffic jams. This... this is character-building."

"I think my character is built enough, thanks. It's a veritable skyscraper of neuroses and poor coping mechanisms. Any more character and I'll collapse under the weight of my own fascinating personality."

He chuckled, a real, warm sound that filled the small space and, for a moment, made the shadows retreat. "Remember that time we tried to go camping in the Poconos? The 'glamping' trip?"

I groaned, a smile tugging at my stiff lips despite myself. "Don't remind me. The tent that was supposed to pop up in thirty seconds but took us three hours and a near divorce to assemble?"

"And then it rained," he added, his eyes sparkling in the firelight. "And the 'waterproof' tent turned out to be about as waterproof as a teabag. We spent the whole night huddled in the car listening to a podcast about the history of cement."

"It was surprisingly interesting!" I defended. "I learned a lot about aggregate."

We both laughed then, a genuine, shared burst of mirth. It felt good. It felt human. The fire seemed to brighten with the sound, its flames leaping higher, casting a stronger, warmer glow. The cabin felt less like a tomb and more like a shelter.

But as our laughter died down, a strange thing happened. A sudden chill swept through the room, a draft from nowhere that made the fire sputter and shrink for a second. The hairs on my arms stood on end. It felt... deliberate. The warmth of the moment was just... gone. Snatched away. The smile on my face felt stiff, a memory of an expression rather than the expression itself.

Tom must have felt it too. He stopped poking the fire and looked around the room, his easy grin gone, replaced by a tense, listening posture. "Did you feel that?"

"The cold spot? Yeah." I rubbed my arms. "Window must have a crack."

But we both knew it wasn't that. It was the same feeling from outside. The presence. The listening silence. Here, in the cabin with us.

I tried to shake it off, to dismiss it as exhaustion playing tricks on my mind. I focused on the memory of the camping trip, trying to hold onto the warmth of the shared joke. I remembered us in the car, the rain drumming on the roof, Tom doing a dramatic reading of the cement podcast host's biography from his phone. It had been funny. Hilarious, even. But as I tried to summon the feeling of that moment, I found that I couldn't. The facts were there: the car, the rain, the podcast. I could list them like items on a grocery list. But the emotion was gone. The memory was a photograph that had been left out in the sun, all its colors bleached away to a flat, meaningless gray. It was just a thing that had happened. It held no warmth, no joy. It was just... data.

A cold dread, entirely separate from the physical chill of the room, began to creep up my spine. "Tom," I said, my voice barely a whisper. "The Poconos. It's not funny anymore."

He looked at me, his brow furrowed in confusion. "What?"

"The story. The memory. I can remember it, but I can't... feel it." I struggled to find the words. "It's like looking at a picture of food when you're starving. You know it's supposed to be satisfying, but it's just paper."

His expression shifted from confusion to a dawning, horrified understanding. He was quiet for a long moment, his eyes distant. "My grandmother," he said slowly. "She used to make these... oatmeal cookies. With raisins. I hated raisins in anything else, but these cookies were... they smelled like cinnamon and safety. Like coming home." He stared into the fire, his face a mask of concentration. "I can remember the recipe. Flour, butter, brown sugar, a pinch of nutmeg. I can remember the look of the jar she kept them in, the one with the chipped ceramic duck on the lid."

He paused, and his voice was hollow when he spoke again. "But I can't remember what they tasted like. I can't remember the feeling of sitting at her kitchen table, dunking one in milk. It's just... gone."

We looked at each other across the flickering firelight. The same cold dread I felt was reflected in his eyes. The entity, the silence, whatever it was... it wasn't just chasing us. It hadn't been trying to freeze our bodies. It was hungry. And we had just given it a meal. Our laughter, our shared joy, our warm memory. It had eaten it. And in its place, it had left this... hollow ache. This cold, empty space where a feeling used to be.

The implications crashed down on me with the force of a physical blow. The cabin wasn't a shelter; it was a cage. A feeding pen. The fire we had built to keep us warm was a dinner bell. Every happy thought, every fond memory, every spark of joy was bait. And we were the bait.

"It feeds on warmth," I said, the words tasting like ash. "Not just... not just fire. On us. Our... happiness."

Tom nodded slowly, his gaze sweeping the darkened corners of the room as if he could see the thing lurking there, digesting its meal. "So what do we do?" he asked, his voice stripped of its usual sarcastic armor. He just sounded young, and scared. "We can't just... stop feeling. We'll freeze to death. Literally."

"And if we don't, we'll freeze to death figuratively," I finished. "It will hollow us out until there's nothing left but a collection of facts."

A terrible choice presented itself, stark and brutal. We could let the fire die, huddle in the cold and darkness, try to make our minds a blank, gray slate, and hope we survived the night without succumbing to hypothermia. Or we could keep the fire going, keep our spirits up, talk, remember, laugh... and feed the parasite that was sharing our shelter, letting it strip-mine our souls for every last scrap of warmth.

The fire crackled, oblivious. It cast our shadows long and distorted on the wall behind us. They danced and writhed, and for a terrifying moment, it looked like there were three of them.

"We have to be smart about this," I said, forcing my mind to work, to push past the panic. My wit, my stupid, snarky shield. It wasn't just for comfort anymore. It had to be a weapon. "Okay. It feeds on positive emotions. Joy, happiness, nostalgia. So, what if we only talk about terrible things?"

Tom looked at me, a flicker of his old self returning to his eyes. "An entire conversation of my exes? Darling, we'll be here all night, and we'll probably bore the ghost to death. It's a brilliant plan."

"I'm serious. What if we stick to neutral topics? Or bad ones? My disastrous ninth-grade haircut. The time you tried to cook a paella and set off three smoke alarms."

"Hey! That paella had character. And a certain... smoky charm," he protested, but the corner of his mouth twitched. I saw it. And I felt a faint answering twitch in my own face. A spark. A tiny, dangerous spark of amusement.

Instantly, the room grew colder. A visible puff of condensation left my lips. The fire sank, its flames pulling back into the logs like a frightened turtle. It was listening. Waiting. Luring us into feeling something, anything, it could consume.

We fell silent. The new rule was clear. No jokes. No warmth. The silence we had been running from was now our only strategy for survival.

The minutes stretched into an eternity. The only sound was the fire, and even it seemed to have a sullen, defeated crackle. The silence in the room was different now. It wasn't the peaceful quiet of companionship. It was a tense, strained void, a tightrope we were both walking. I found myself policing my own thoughts, pushing away any flicker of a happy memory that threatened to surface. A sunny day at the beach with my family. The smell of my mother's perfume. The taste of the first coffee of the day. Each one was a potential threat, a betrayal.

I focused instead on the dust on the floor, on the grain of the wood in the wall, on the throbbing ache in my toes. I tried to make my mind a landscape of gray, boring details. It was exhausting. It felt like holding my breath. My entire life, my personality, it was all built on a scaffolding of memories, of stories, of shared jokes. To deny them felt like denying myself. But the alternative was to be eaten from the inside out.

Tom was doing the same. He sat staring into the flames, his expression carefully blank. The witty, vibrant man I knew was gone, replaced by this grim, silent statue. I missed him. The ache of that missing was a feeling, too, wasn't it? A sad, cold one. I wondered if the ghost could eat that. Sadness. Grief. Or did it only crave the high-calorie stuff? The joy.

Hours passed. Or maybe it was just minutes. Without conversation, without the markers of shared experience, time lost its shape again. We added wood to the fire mechanically, our movements slow and deliberate. The goal was simple: produce enough literal heat to keep our cells from crystallizing, but not enough emotional heat to attract our predator.

But the human mind isn't built for emptiness. It abhors a vacuum. And memories, especially the powerful ones, have a life of their own. They don't wait to be summoned. They bubble up unbidden.

It started with a smell. A particular note in the burning wood, a resinous, piney scent. It cut through the dust and the damp, and it was the exact smell of my father’s workshop. The memory ambushed me. I was seven years old. I was standing in a pool of late afternoon sunlight, dust motes dancing in the golden air. My father was showing me how to sand a piece of pine, his big, calloused hand over mine, guiding my movements. He was humming a tuneless, happy song. The feeling of the memory was overwhelming. The rough texture of the sandpaper, the warmth of the sun on my face, the rumbling vibration of his humming in his chest, and an unconditional, towering feeling of safety and love. It was a perfect, crystalline moment of pure happiness.

It was the warmest I had felt all night. A deep, soulful warmth that spread from my chest through my entire body.

And the creature, the silence, the cold, it descended like a starving wolf. The change in the room was instantaneous and violent. The temperature plummeted. It wasn't a draft; it was a physical subtraction of heat. The fire didn't just sputter; it shrank, the flames cowering deep within the logs, their light turning a sickly, anemic blue. A frost pattern, intricate and horrifying as a spider's web, bloomed on the single windowpane, spreading inward from the edges. The very air grew thick, heavy, compressing in on us. It felt like being at the bottom of a frozen ocean.

I gasped, clutching my chest. The warmth of the memory was being ripped out of me. It was a physical violation, a psychic surgery performed with an icicle. I could feel the joy being siphoned away, the love curdling into mere observation. The golden light of the memory dimmed, the colors faded, the sound of my father's humming became a flat, distant buzz. The feeling of his hand on mine became just pressure. The towering sense of love and safety became a simple, factual statement: he was my father; he was keeping me from injury. The memory was being hollowed out, its soul devoured, leaving behind only a dry, rattling husk.

When it was over, the cold receded slightly. The fire flickered back to a grudging orange. But the room felt darker. Colder. And I was left with a gaping, ragged hole in my heart where my father's workshop used to be. I could still remember the facts of it. But the magic, the life, the love—it was gone. And I knew, with a certainty that was colder than any blizzard, that I could never get it back. I had been robbed of something irreplaceable.

Tears welled in my eyes, hot against my cold skin, and they froze on my cheeks. Tom was looking at me, his face pale with horror. He had seen it. He had felt it. He reached a hand out toward me, then let it drop. What comfort could he offer? Any word of solace, any gesture of sympathy, would just be more fuel for the fire. More food for the beast.

"Penny..." he whispered, his voice cracking.

"Don't," I choked out. "Don't say anything."

We sat in the renewed, deeper silence. The thing was stronger now. Sated. It felt like it was sleeping in the corners of the room, a great, cold beast, digesting my past. And I knew it would wake up hungry again. The night was far from over.

Another thought, cold and sharp as a surgeon's scalpel, cut through my grief. The entity was drawn to the strongest emotions. The most vivid memories. The purest joy. My memory of my father had been a feast. A beacon. What if... what if that was the key? It was a hunter. And you can bait a hunter. You can lead it. You can trap it.

I had other memories. A whole library of them. Most were small, simple things. A good book, a shared joke, a perfect cup of tea. Snacks for the creature. But I had one more. One that was locked away in the deepest, most fiercely guarded vault of my heart. The last good day. The last day before the world changed forever.

It was an autumn afternoon with my brother, Leo, a year before the accident. We had driven to the coast, the sky a painful, impossible blue. We'd eaten fish and chips out of greasy paper, the salt and vinegar sharp on our tongues, fighting off seagulls who Tom would have called 'sky-rats with an entitlement problem.' We had walked on the beach, the sand cold under our bare feet, the sun warm on our faces. Leo, my vibrant, infuriating, brilliant brother, had told me his stupid, convoluted jokes, and I had laughed until my stomach hurt. He'd talked about his plans, the future stretching out before him like a sunlit road. We had sat on the sea wall and watched the sunset, the sky bleeding from orange to pink to a deep, bruised purple. He had thrown an arm around my shoulder, and we had just watched in comfortable silence. It wasn't just a memory of joy. It was a memory of hope. Of a future that never happened. It was the warmest, brightest, most painful thing I owned.

The thought of feeding that to the monster made me feel physically ill. It was a desecration. It was the one part of Leo I had left that was truly mine, pristine and whole. To give it up would be a second death for him, an erasure.

But the alternative was to sit here, waiting for it to nibble away at all the smaller joys until we were nothing but empty shells. Or to let the fire die and let the physical cold take us. We were trapped. There were no good choices here. Only different kinds of loss.

I looked at Tom. He was shivering again, his face gaunt in the firelight. He was trying so hard to be blank, to be empty, but I could see the terror in his eyes. He was thinking of his own grandmother, of his own lost warmth. We were going to die here. Slowly. One way or another. Unless I did something.

If I gave it the memory of Leo... it would be the biggest meal it had ever had. A feast fit for a king. Would it be enough? Could I offer it a single, massive sacrifice, so rich and so potent that it would sate the beast completely? Buy us enough time for the storm to break, for the sun to rise? It was a gamble. I would be sacrificing the most important part of my past for a chance at a future. A future where I couldn't remember my brother's laugh.

The thought was unbearable. And yet... the thought of Tom freezing to death beside me, of my own life ending in this dusty, forgotten room, hollowed out and empty... that was unbearable, too.

I had to choose.

My hands were trembling. I clenched them into fists, my nails digging into my palms. I could feel the ghost of Leo's arm around my shoulder, the memory of his warmth. I had to do it now, before I lost my nerve.

"Tom," I said. My voice was steady. Frighteningly steady. "I have an idea. But you have to trust me. And you have to get ready."

He looked at me, his eyes wide. "Ready for what?"

"To run," I said. "When I tell you to."

I closed my eyes. I didn't want to see the cabin. I didn't want to see the fear on Tom's face. I needed to go somewhere else. I needed to go back to that beach. I forced myself to walk back into the memory, not as a passive observer, but as an active participant. I built it up in my mind, piece by piece, with agonizing detail. The screech of the seagulls. The gritty texture of the sand. The smell of the salt and the fried batter. I focused on Leo's face, the way his eyes crinkled at the corners when he smiled, the stray lock of dark hair that always fell over his forehead.

I let myself feel it. All of it. The uncomplicated joy. The bone-deep love for my brother. The poignant, bittersweet perfection of the moment. I let the warmth of it flood me, pushing back the cold of the cabin. I held onto the feeling of his arm around my shoulder, the solid, living weight of him. I let the grief I kept so carefully locked away merge with the joy, creating an emotional inferno, a supernova of feeling. It was agony and ecstasy, a feeling so intense it was almost unbearable. I was offering myself up, my heart, my soul, on a silver platter.

The cabin answered. The cold wasn't a creeping thing anymore. It was a solid wall, a physical presence that slammed into us. The temperature dropped so fast it was like being plunged into arctic water. The fire was extinguished in a single, audible hiss, leaving only a pile of faintly glowing embers. The darkness was absolute. I could hear Tom's sharp intake of breath, a sound of pure terror. I felt the entity's focus on me, a vast, hungry, ancient attention. It was here. It was ready to feed.

I held the memory up like a shield, like a torch, like a sacrifice. I relived the sunset, the bleeding colors, the feeling of peace, of love, of infinite possibility. I poured every ounce of my will into making it as bright, as real, as potent as possible.

*Take it,* I thought, a silent scream in the frozen darkness. *Take it and leave us alone.*

The feeding began. It was not a gentle siphoning this time. It was a ravenous, tearing, brutal assault. It ripped the memory from me, and it took chunks of me with it. The pain was indescribable, a feeling of being flayed alive from the inside out. I felt the warmth, the color, the life being torn from me, leaving a raw, bleeding void. I felt Leo's face dissolve in my mind's eye, his laughter turning to static, his presence evaporating into nothing. I was losing him. I was losing him all over again, and this time, it was by my own hand.

The cold was a solid thing now, a block of ice encasing my heart. The darkness in the room was pressing in, a physical weight. I could feel my own consciousness starting to fray at the edges, the cold leaching the strength from my body, the life from my mind.

"Now, Tom!" I forced the word through frozen lips. "Run!"

I opened my eyes. The room was not completely dark. A faint, phosphorescent blue light, cold and sterile, emanated from the corners of the room, coalescing around me. I couldn't see the entity, but I could feel it, a vortex of absolute cold and bottomless hunger, and it was focused entirely on me, on the last, fading embers of the memory it was consuming.

Tom was already at the door, pulling it open. The storm raged outside, a wall of white and sound. He hesitated, his face a pale oval of terror in the doorway.

"Penny!" he yelled.

I couldn't answer. I was frozen, pinned in place by the thing's attention. The last vestiges of the memory were stripped away. The beach was gone. The sunset was gone. Leo... his name was a word. Just a word. The warmth, the love, the brother... was a blank space. An ache of forgotten sunlight.

The entity, sated and bloated on my soul, released me. The pressure vanished. The intense cold receded to the ambient, deadly chill of the cabin. I crumpled to the floor, a puppet with its strings cut. I was empty. I was so, so cold.

Tom was by my side in an instant, hauling me to my feet. My legs wouldn't work. He half-dragged, half-carried me toward the door, out of the suffocating darkness and back into the screaming, cleansing chaos of the storm.

We stood on the threshold for a moment, the wind tearing at us. I looked back into the cabin. It was just a dark, empty room. The presence was gone. It had taken what it wanted and left. We had survived. I had won.

We stumbled out into the snow, the door slamming shut behind us. The wind howled. The snow fell. We were back where we started, in the heart of the storm. But something had changed. The silence, the hunting presence, was gone. The storm was just a storm now. The cold was just the cold.

I leaned against Tom, my body shaking with a deep, wracking tremor that had nothing to do with the temperature. He held me up, his own body shivering. We stood there for a long time, two small, broken things in a vast, indifferent wilderness.

I survived. But as the snow melted on my face, I couldn't tell if it was snow, or if I was crying for a brother I could no longer remember.