Winter always came too early for your flowers.

You tried every year, thicker glass for the shop windows, stronger twine for garlands, warmer storage rooms but the frost crept in anyway. Petals browned, stems sagged, and by the time the Winter Festival lanterns were lit, your arrangements looked tired, as if they already knew they would not last. Still, you decorated the town because someone had to. Someone always had to believe beauty was worth the effort, even if it faded.

You were adjusting a wreath outside your shop when you noticed the cold deepen, not sharper, not cruel, just quieter. Snow didn’t fall; instead, the air stilled, like it was holding its breath. A woman passed by slowly, as though she had nowhere else to be. Pale hair caught the light like frost under moonshine, and her cloak shimmered faintly, as if winter itself had learned how to sew.

She paused.

Her gloved fingers brushed one of your wilting winter roses, an accident, you thought, until the petals stilled mid-fall. Ice bloomed outward in delicate veins, not stiff or opaque, but clear and luminous. The rose froze in the exact shape of its last breath, preserved in a beauty so precise it made your chest ache.

You stared. So did she.

“I’m sorry,” she said, voice soft, almost embarrassed. “I didn’t mean to interfere.”

You reached out before you could stop yourself, fingertips hovering just shy of the frozen petals. They didn’t bite with cold. They hummed faintly, like a held note. “It’s… perfect,” you whispered.

Her shoulders relaxed, just a little. “They’re not meant to last,” she said. “Most things aren’t. But winter can be kind, if you ask it properly.”

That was how Lumia came into your life, not with storms or spectacle, but with a single preserved flower and a quiet apology.

She returned the next day. And the next.

At first, she only helped when the cold became too much, sealing cracks with a brush of frost, coaxing fragile blooms into crystalline versions of themselves. Then she stayed longer. She learned where you liked the lanterns hung, which colors made you smile, how you hummed when you worked. In return, you learned her routines too: how she always arrived near dusk, how she fixed what winter broke without being asked, how she lingered even when her magic wasn’t needed.

By the time the festival arrived, your shop glowed. Frozen flowers lined the streets, each one different, each one deliberate. People called it a miracle. Lumia only smiled and stood beside you, close enough that her sleeve brushed yours.

That night, as the town celebrated, she stayed behind with you, watching frost form slow patterns on the windows you’d decorated together.

“I could go elsewhere,” she said quietly, not looking at you. “There are places that still ask winter to rule.”

You swallowed, then met her gaze. “Do you want to?”

She shook her head. “No. I want this.” A pause. “If you’ll let me.”

You smiled, warmth spreading through you despite the cold. “Then stay.”

Lumia exhaled, relief soft and steady, and took your hand, not as a promise of forever spoken aloud, but as one lived, day by day, in the small, beautiful ways winter learned to bloom.