December 12, 2025

It began with a missing signal beacon.

Dr. Emily Rhodes and her assistant, Carson Bell, had been dispatched by Coldwater University to investigate a weather anomaly near the Arctic Circle—a gap in satellite data just wide enough to raise bureaucratic eyebrows but narrow enough to be ignored by anyone sane.

They chartered a pilot who dropped them fifty miles from the disturbance, then turned the plane south and never looked back. After that, it was snow. Flat. Unending. White, like death wearing a wedding veil. Even the stars looked frostbitten.

For three days they trudged across the permafrost. No birds. No tracks. No sky sounds. Just wind — not howling, not gusting, but hissing, constant and low, like it was whispering secrets across miles of nothing. On the fourth morning, they found bones.

Not fossilized. Fresh. Clean. Laid out in perfect patterns—spirals, triangles, knots.

“Sheep?” Carson guessed.

Dr. Rhodes shook her head. “Too big.”

They found the huts a mile later. If you could call them that. Ice-rimed slabs of stone in a sunken ring, nearly hidden beneath a drift. No firewood. No tracks. No doors. Just openings that led into black.

“This isn’t Inuit,” Rhodes muttered. “It’s older. Pre-contact. Pre-human, maybe.”

They should have left. But they were scientists.

Inside, it was warmer. Too warm. The kind of warmth that felt… borrowed.

And then the voices began.

Three of them. Whispering in unison. Not speaking a language so much as weaving it. The words didn’t echo. They curled. Into your ears. Around your thoughts.

Carson tried to run. His legs wouldn’t move.

The first witch emerged from the ice itself, pulling her body out of a frozen wall as if stepping through gauze. She was tall, wrong-jointed, her skin a deep, translucent blue that pulsed with veins of darker frost. Her eyes were black coins. Her teeth were small, and too many.

The second came in on the wind — not with it, in it — the outline of her forming as the snow swirled into a woman’s shape, her mouth a vertical slash like a torn tent flap.

The third did not arrive.

She had always been there.

Buried under the hut.

Beneath Emily’s boots.

The Polar Witches didn’t scream. They didn’t cackle. They didn’t offer deals. They simply stood in a triangle, and waited.

Because time meant nothing to them.

They remembered when Shakespeare was still trying to decide whether he dared mention Macbeth’s hags. He didn’t. Not really. Not these.

These were not theater witches.

These were the ones even the theater feared.

Dr. Rhodes whispered something, not to Carson, but to herself. A name. It came unbidden.

And they smiled.

They were found days later, staggering through the frost, blind and burned. Carson’s skin was riddled with white spiderweb scars, as though frostbite had traced ancient runes into his body. Emily’s voice was gone. Not hoarse. Taken.

She wrote one thing, over and over, in her notebook:

“The tundra does not forgive. It waits.”

And somewhere, deep in the ice, the witches laughed.