❄️ December 15, 2025

The wind at Coldwater Pass was quiet in the way an abandoned church is quiet—solemn, hollow, and expectant. The kind of silence that feels less like the absence of sound and more like the presence of something listening.

Dr. Eleanor Grage stood at the edge of Black Hollow Lake, her parka stiff with frost, goggles reflecting a horizon of unbroken ice. Around her, a ring of sonar sensors blinked a slow rhythm, all trained on the dead center of the lake—drawn by the sound she’d recorded the night before. A deep, irregular frequency. Almost alive.

Behind her, Thomas Ennis trudged through knee-high snow, muttering as he fought the wind.

“You know,” he grumbled, “I’m still having night sweats about those damn witches. And now you want to drill into a frozen lake that hasn’t thawed since before Moses wore sandals? Are you trying to win the Darwin Award?”

Eleanor didn’t flinch. “This lake shouldn’t have any seismic activity at all. But something down there is… resonating.”

Thomas tugged off one glove with his teeth, rubbed the frostburned scar still healing along his throat. “You remember how I lost my voice for three days because of what they did to me? Ice in my lungs. Cold inside my veins. I still get nosebleeds if I dream too hard.”

“You didn’t have to inhale that smoke.”

“I didn’t inhale, it inhaled me! You saw what it did—how it twisted the snow into those… hands.”

Eleanor finally turned to him. “This is science, Thomas.”

“It was science last time too. Then came the part with the whispering snow and your hair turning white for two days.”

She smiled thinly. “Just one core sample. If nothing happens, we go.”

“Right. Famous last words of every doomed arctic expedition ever.”

The auger sliced into the ice slowly. Eleanor watched the sonar pulses update, the screen flickering faint readings… then one large shadow, distant at first—then closer. Wide. Deep. Moving.

Thomas stepped back. “Something’s rising,” he whispered.

“Could be thermal updraft. Or sediment. Or—”

A sound rolled beneath them. Not a crack. Not a growl.

A voice.

It wasn’t speech. More like a long, wet vibration through the bones of the Earth.

Eleanor’s hands froze on the sensor.

The sonar blinked red. Whatever it was, it was beneath them. No longer static. No longer waiting.

Then came a chime—subtle, delicate, like wind brushing icicles strung with sorrow.

And in the borehole water, they both saw it.

A face. Old as grief. Pale as memory. Its eyes opened underwater.

Thomas stepped back too fast, slipped, swore, and scrambled to his feet. “Nope. No. No no no. We are not doing this again.”

The shadow beneath the lake rose nearer, and Eleanor felt her own thoughts begin to shiver. Not from cold.

From recognition.

Whatever it was—it knew her. Her pattern. Her presence.

And it wasn’t a stranger.

They left their gear. The drone. The sensors.

They didn’t speak on the way back to camp.

Hours later, Eleanor sat in the dim light of their tent, sipping hot tea, her fingers trembling slightly. Thomas, wrapped in blankets, stared out into the dark.

“I told you,” he muttered, not angry anymore. Just tired. “They remember us.”

Eleanor didn’t answer right away.

Then softly, she said, “Yes. They do.”

In the sonar archive, the last signal logged before they fled showed a shape—not fully formed, but humanoid. Ancient. And smiling.

Still under the lake.

Still listening.