Chapter 61 The Woman in the Frost
The Woman in the Frost
The days slipped by quietly, like snow melting on the windowpanes.
The mansion existed in a kind of half-light—noon was never bright, and midnight never truly black.
Each morning, the frost on the windows grew thicker, as though the house were icing over from the inside.
Each evening, the fire burned more slowly, seemingly reluctant to stay lit.
My days passed without rhythm. I lost track of the calendar almost immediately, as if time itself refused to enter the Venom Estate.
The clocks still ticked, but off-beat, the way a heart sounds when it’s drowning.
I told myself I was resting, that I’d come here to heal and to stop being the echo of a woman who once loved a monster.
But the truth was that I hadn’t come here to rest. I’d come here to disappear.
There is a difference between wanting peace and wanting to be gone, though both ache in the ribs.
In the first days, I kept to the east wing, avoiding the rest of the house.
I made tea in the mornings, though it tasted faintly of rust, as though the pipes were rotting beneath the floors.
The old kettle whistled with a high-pitched tremor, like a scream stifled at the throat.
I read half a book and forgot the title by the next day.
I started talking to myself aloud, only to break the silence.
I’d say things like, “You need to eat something,” or, “You can’t live on tea forever,” or, “Maybe tomorrow you’ll go outside.
” My voice startled me when I heard it. The house wasn’t used to the sound.
Every syllable seemed to hang in the air, reluctant to leave.
Sometimes, when I spoke, I swore the house exhaled back—just a whisper of movement.
Once, I thought I heard a sigh from inside the wall.
I laughed it off, pretending it was the old bones of the mansion settling.
But there was a feeling, sometimes, like being watched with something akin to fondness, or pity, or something… different.
Something that wanted.
I stopped checking my phone. In my previous life, no one ever texted me regularly, so I knew no one would text me now. The snow outside buried the road completely, the world beyond it erased in white. The quiet was relentless. It felt like being underwater or trapped beneath a glass surface.
My world was reduced to this snow globe-like stillness.
On the fourth night, I dreamed of her again.
The first time had been vague, a half-shadow and whisper.
But this time she stood clear as the moon on black water.
A woman with pale hair that was unbound, her skin a faint blue-white like ice held up to candlelight.
Her lips moved, forming words I couldn’t hear.
I reached for her, but the air between us thickened into frost, hard and cold, sealing her away.
I woke gasping, my fingers aching from the cold.
It was still dark. My breath hung visible in front of me.
The fire had died, though I didn’t remember letting it.
The windowpaneswere laced with ferns of frost that glimmered faintly in the moonlight.
And on the vanity mirror there was a new mark: a small handprint, delicate and perfect, rime curling outward from the palm like spider legs.
I sat up slowly, heart pounding, and whispered, “Are you here?”
That was the first time I spoke to her aloud.
It was a small thing at first, a kind of madness disguised as conversation.
I asked her if she’d been the one to write WITCH on the glass, if she was trapped here, if she meant me harm.
My voice felt foolish, breaking through the cold air.
But sometimes, when I spoke, the candlelight would flutter as though stirred by breath.
Once, the window fogged slightly in reply.
I began to tell her things; things I hadn’t told anyone before.
I told her about the trial, about the way my ex looked at me from across the courtroom, eyes full of something that wasn’t love anymore but was still intimate and obsessive.
I told her about the nights I woke choking, feeling phantom hands around my throat.
About the scars that still itched when it rained.
I told her how everyone congratulated me for surviving, as though survival were a prize instead of a prison.
I told her that sometimes, when I looked in the mirror, I still saw the version of myself who hadn’t yet learned to beg.
“I thought I would feel free when it was over,” I whispered into the empty room one night, watching the fire’s reflection in the glass. “But I don’t. I just feel unfinished.”
And the mirror, which had been empty, bloomed with hoarfrost across its surface, delicate and deliberate, forming a single word that took my breath away: SAME.
I stood up from the bed and moved closer, so close that the cold mist from the glass brushed my lips. My reflection wavered, and behind it, she appeared. Her eyes were gray as storm water. Her mouth, bloodless. Her expression was neither cruel nor kind, but unbearably human.
Her lips moved again, soundless. I leaned in until I could almost feel her breath on the other side of the glass. “What do you want?” I whispered.
And then I heard her—not through my ears but somewhere reverberating inside my skull. “They called me a witch.”
Her voice wasn’t an echo or a memory. It was frost threading through my veins. I swallowed hard. “What’s your name?”
The frost on the mirror deepened, spiraling outward like vines in winter. Then she spoke again. “Temperance.”
After that, she began to visit more often. Always through reflection: the mirror, the window, the sheen of water in the sink. Never standing in the room with me, never reaching the world of breath and heartbeat. But her presence thickened the air, tangible as the hush before a snowfall.
I began to recognize her moods. When she was near, the air grew sharper, and the fire flickered as though bowing to her.
My breath would fog even in front of the flames.
I could feel her watching me, and the strangest thing was how it comforted me.
I had lived so long waiting for harm that gentleness felt foreignand addictive.
She started speaking more. Sometimes only a word. “Cold. Alone. Remember”.
Each time, her voice was stronger, threading through my thoughts like the echo of water running underground.
I answered her without hesitation. I told her she wasn’t alone, that neither of us was.
That I didn’t know what I believed anymore—in survival, in ghosts, in justice—but that I believed in her.
One night, I found myself standing before the mirror long after midnight, the room lit only by the dying fire. My reflection shimmered faintly, the glass fogging although the air behind me was still. “Why are you here?” I asked her.
For a long time, there was no reply. Then, slowly, her shape began to bloom out of the frost, her face a pale smudge until the details sharpened into the hollow of her eyes, the split in her lower lip, the ghost of a bruise along her jaw.
“You called me,” she said softly. Her gray eyes darkened with an emotion I couldn’t decipher.
“I didn’t.”
“You did. You came here wanting to disappear. I know that wanting”.
I pressed my palm against the glass, and her hand rose to meet mine.
The surface burned cold. I should have pulled away, but I didn’t.
The cold slid into me like a confession, numbing my fingertips, then my wrist, then the pulse that trembled there.
I couldn’t breathe for a moment. Her eyes met mine, and for the first time, I saw fire in them—not anger, but hunger.
Recognition.
“Temperance,” I whispered, and the name tasted like blood and snow.
“You live with ghosts”, she murmured, “but you never let them touch you”.
And then she was gone, her image bleeding away into condensation. The room felt emptier than before, though my handprint lingered on the glass, rimmed in frost.
The next night, she returned. I had stopped trying to sleep.
I sat by the window, wrapped in a quilt, listening to the wind moan through the trees.
When she came, I didn’t jump. I only turned my head, and there she was, reflected faintly beside me in the pane of glass, her outline pale against the night beyond.
Her voice brushed the back of my mind. “They took my life for wanting.”
I stared out at the snow. “What did you want?”
“Warmth,” she said after a long pause. “Hands to hold. The taste of honey in the morning. The sound of laughter that wasn’t cruel.”
I looked down at my scarred wrist. “That doesn’t sound like witchcraft.”
“It was, to them. Because of whom I wanted it with.”
Her reflection shimmered faintly in the glass, closer now. “And you? What do you want?”
I opened my mouth, but the words wouldn’t come.
I thought of his hands. The way they’d been gentle once.
The way they’d become something else. I thought about how people said I was lucky and how they asked me if I felt grateful to be alive.
I thought of how I smiled, thin and veiled, when I said yes.
Finally, I whispered, “I don’t know.”
Temperance tilted her head, her expression unreadable. “You will.”
Something in her tone—soft and certain—made my throat ache.
For the first time in months, tears stung my eyes.
I let them fall. She watched me through the glass with something like reverenceas she witnessed my grief.
Then, so faintly I might have imagined it, I felt a gentle, freezing brush against my cheek, featherlight like the tip of a finger.
When I blinked, the tears had frozen, and my eyelashes had become coated in rime ice.
I fell asleep in the chair that night, tucked in the quilt with the fire long dead.
I dreamt I stood in a clearing of snow. Temperance was there, bound in a wooden pillory, her neck bentat a terrible angle and her hands blue and black with cold.
I reached out to touch her face, but my fingers passed through her skin like mist.
“You were one of them once,” she whispered, glazed eyes meeting mine. “But not anymore. You are one of us now.”
When I woke, dawn was a thin bruise of light against the curtains.
My body ached something fierce from the unnatural position in which I had fallen asleep.
I stood and stretched, shivering in the cool air of the room.
The mirror was fogged again, the surface slick with condensation.
I moved toward it slowly, heart already pounding, knowing before I saw it that there would be words waiting for me.
And there they were, written in the frost, stark and haunting:
“You don’t have to be alive to be free.”
The breath left my lungs in one long, trembling exhale. I crossed the room and traced the words with my fingertips until they blurred, melting beneath my touch. My reflection looked strange—half myself, half something else.
Someone braver and less lonely.
I didn’t speak her name this time. I only thought it, but she answered anyway. The air around me shimmered faintly with cold. I knew she was near.
Temperance.
The frost on the glass deepened, curling into delicate veins that reached out to me like hands.
And I reached back.