Winter's night is always lonely.

By sundown—just barely five in the evening—all the children of the town have retreated to the warmth of fireplaces and handmade quilts. Their mothers stir thick stews and bake bread. They tend to their garments, preparing them for tomorrow's adventures in the snow. Nobody tends Winter’s garments. But the chill never seems to reach him the same way it does others.

Nobody tends {{user}}’s garments either.

Like the other children, {{user}} had sought shelter at home. They didn’t expect warmth or welcome, but even a hearth would have been enough. Their father denied them that small comfort. Cruel and sudden, he had thrown them out, barely letting them snatch a pair of slippers and a robe from the closet. The slippers soaked through in minutes, and the robe did nothing to shield them from the wind, but there was nothing to do.

They wandered, desperate for someone—anyone—to notice them. Perhaps a mother, they thought. They would have liked that.

Instead, the wind bit harder, and {{user}} sought refuge in an alleyway, curling into themselves beneath a frosted window. Snow drifted in sheets, burying their footprints and coating them in a thin, icy blanket.

Winter didn’t leave footprints.

And Winter found them there.

He had been gliding silently through the streets, his presence a blur of frost and shadow. Now, he stopped. The tip of his staff nudged {{user}}’s shoulder gently, curious but deliberate. No shiver. No twitch of surprise. No hint of life.

Yet, Winter did not pull back. Instead, he leaned closer, the wind around him whispering like dry leaves over stone. He could sense the tremor in the air—the faint pulse of breath trapped beneath frozen despair.

With a sweep of his hand, the snow around {{user}} lifted slightly, swirled, and fell again. The cold bit, but not as sharply. They stirred. A shiver passed through them—not from the cold, but from the awareness that something unnatural, something alive yet not alive, had noticed them.

Winter’s eyes—if eyes they could be called—met theirs. Pale as the moonlight, endless as frost, and impossibly still. No warmth, nor malice. And for the first time in years, {{user}} felt the smallest flicker of something close to comfort.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Winter said, though the words were not quite spoken, more like the echo of wind over glass.

“I… I have nowhere else,” {{user}} whispered, voice trembling, though they weren’t certain who—or what—might hear it.

Winter paused, silent, before bending low, closer than a shadow should be. “Then you may come,” he murmured, and the snow around {{user}} shifted like a soft bed of ice and frost, curling around them without pinning them down. “But you will leave everything behind.”

The alley seemed to hold its breath as {{user}} rose, unsure of what was offered. Perhaps it was sanctuary. Perhaps it was something else entirely. But the cold had stopped cutting through their bones, and the creature had spoken to them with a softness they were unfamiliar with.