December 27, 2025

It came with the hush of a windless snow—the kind of cold that muffled sound and stilled the breath in your lungs. The village of Hallowmere had buried Elias Hartwell exactly one year ago. A bitter man. Unloved. Unmourned.

But on the coldest night of winter, when the mercury froze in its glass, something clawed free of his grave.

They said he rose to collect what was owed—favors, debts, unspoken sins. One by one, those who had scorned him vanished. No blood. No struggle. Just an open door and a trail of frost leading into the woods.

By dawn, the village bell rang on its own. And the snow… the snow was warm where the last soul had vanished.

Dr. Eleanor Grage, newly arrived in Hallowmere, examined the tracks—barefoot, sunken deep. “Not animal. Not man. Something in between,” she muttered.

Her assistant, still shaking, leaned close. “Do you hear it? Like… breathing in the snow?”

She nodded. “The revenant’s cold… but it wants warmth. And tonight’s not over.”

Later, after the last torch had flickered out and the assistant had fled screaming into the night, Dr. Grage sat alone by the fire in the village inn. The wind howled outside like a living thing, but inside, a fragile warmth pulsed from the cracked mug of coffee in her hands.

She stared into the dark, swirling with the steam, and allowed herself to wonder—what was the true meaning of all this? The revenant, the vanishings, the frozen breath of the dead stirring in the snow.

“Is it punishment?” she asked the empty room. “Retribution for the bitterness of a life unlived? Or is it… something deeper? A yearning. A desperate, unquenchable hunger for connection in a world that lets souls slip away too easily?”

The assistant’s terrified face flashed in her mind—fear of what had been seen, of what could never be explained.

She took a slow sip, then whispered to herself, “Perhaps the revenant is a mirror. Not just of a man’s sins, but of all our own. The cold that creeps inside when we lose hope, when we forget how to reach for warmth.”

Outside, the snow drifted silently, covering the world in white. Inside, the clock ticked toward a new year.

Dr. Grage closed her eyes and let the silence fill her. Whatever the revenant sought, whatever it took, she knew one thing—

The night was long, and so was the year.