[POV: The Student]

  The radiator stayed cold.

  Not lukewarm. Not struggling. Cold, like the thing had died sometime during dinner and nobody bothered to tell her.

  Outside her fifth-floor window, the campus had vanished under a fresh dump of snow. Thanksgiving had already drained the dorms, and Christmas break finished the job. Most students had gone home. She’d stayed behind to save money.

  It had felt smart two weeks ago.

  Tonight, it felt like a slow, stupid way to die.

  This Appalachian college town didn’t do “cute winter.” When the temperature dropped, it didn’t flirt with freezing. It dropped like a hammer—down to minus thirty Celsius on nights like this. The air pressed through old window frames and cracked caulk, finding every gap in the building like it owned the place.

  She’d filed the request. She’d called. She’d even cornered the Residence Director in the lobby, breath fogging up her scarf while he hid behind the front desk like it was a shield.

  “I’m sorry,” he’d said, voice already on autopilot. “Maintenance is out. I can put in an emergency ticket, but nobody’s coming until morning.”

  “Tonight,” she’d insisted. “Someone’s coming tonight, right?”

  He spread his hands—helpless in the way people got when it wasn’t their problem. “Tomorrow. First thing. I’m sorry.”

  Tomorrow. Like tomorrow was guaranteed.

  Back in her room, the steam heater sat quiet as a coffin. The pipes didn’t rattle. No hiss. No warmth creeping into the walls. Just the thin whine of wind outside and the slow, steady leak of heat out of everything she owned.

  She layered up—sweats, a hoodie, a thick coat meant for walking across campus. She shoved towels along the window sill like that would do anything. Then she built a nest on her bed: three blankets, two spare comforters, and every sweatshirt she’d ever stolen from a thrift store.

  She crawled under it and tried to pretend she’d won.

  The cold didn’t care.

  It slid through seams in the bedding, crawled across her skin, and settled in her bones like it planned to stay. Her nose went numb first. Then her cheeks. Her fingers turned clumsy and heavy, like someone had poured lead into the joints.

  She tried to sleep anyway. Closed her eyes. Counted breaths.

  The mind did what it always did when you were trapped in a room with nothing but time and fear. It found stories.

  People froze to death around here every winter. It wasn’t an urban legend; it was the kind of local headline you glanced at and forgot because it happened to strangers. Some idiot got stuck on a back road. Somebody’s car slid into a ditch and the phone died. They didn’t even look panicked in the photo—just a name under a grainy picture, a quote from a grieving cousin.

  She kept seeing those headlines with her own name.

  She opened her eyes.

  The hallway beyond her door stayed silent. No laughter, no doors slamming, no distant music leaking from someone else’s speakers. Even the building had given up making noise. The snow outside swallowed the world’s sound so completely it felt like the campus had been put under glass.

  She couldn’t take it.

  She got out of bed.

  Bare feet hit the floor and the shock of it made her suck in a breath through her teeth. The carpet felt like ice. She shoved her feet into slippers, yanked her coat tighter, and stepped into the hallway.

  Her breath hung white in front of her face.

  The lights in the corridor were on, but that only made the emptiness worse. The dorm smelled like old paint, detergent, and the damp rot of decades of winter. She walked past closed doors, past a bulletin board with flyers nobody was reading, and down to the common area.

  There was a water cooler there. She filled the electric kettle, carried it back to her room, and plugged it in.

  The kettle clicked. A small red light came on.

  A stupid thing, a plastic appliance, and it still felt like company.

  As the water warmed, it made a soft, patient noise—almost a whisper. In the quiet room, it sounded loud. Alive. Like a heartbeat in the dark.

  She sat on the edge of her bed and rubbed her hands together until the skin burned.

  A memory tried to wedge its way in: a junior from another dorm, smaller than her, brown hair that always looked like he’d woken up ten minutes ago. He’d grinned at her in the dining hall two days back.

  “Senpai,” he’d said—his pet honorific for any upperclassman, half-joke and half-flirt—“if you’re stuck, come to my room. I’ve got a space heater. A real one.”

  He was the sort of guy people whispered about. Nothing concrete. Just little stories that stuck to him: he watched girls too long, he got too friendly when drunk, he collected rumors the way some people collected keychains. Besides, his dorm sat on the far side of campus. Crossing that in a storm was a gamble.

  She’d laughed him off.

  Tonight, the offer didn’t feel funny.

  The kettle began to rumble harder. She poured the hot water into a mug with a tea bag she didn’t even want and wrapped her hands around it.

  For a few minutes, warmth existed.

  Then it faded, and the room kept getting colder.

  She crawled back under her pile of blankets. Curled into a tight ball, like her body could shrink away from the weather. She held her mug until her fingers went numb again, then set it on the bedside table and pulled the blankets over her head.

  She squeezed her eyes shut.

  Sleep didn’t come. The cold kept her brain awake, gnawing at the edges of thought. Every time she drifted, the fear yanked her back.

  She started thinking about old stories. Not the fun ones. The ones that sat in the back of her childhood and waited for nights like this.

  A folktale about a family that pawned off their futon to pay a debt, only for the bedding to come back with voices trapped inside it, whispering in the dark—cold, cold, cold. Another about someone piling chairs on a bed to trap heat, surviving a winter night like a desperate animal. She pictured the match girl, fingertips blue, seeing warm visions in the street while the world stepped around her.

  She told herself she was being dramatic.

  Then something outside the window pulled at her attention like a hook in the ribs.

  She sat up.

  Her room was dark except for the orange smear of streetlight leaking through the shade. The window blinds were down, but through the slats she saw a faint shape moving.

  Not a shadow of a tree. There were no branches up here.

  Not wind. Wind didn’t pause like that. Wind didn’t feel… deliberate.

  Her heart beat once, hard. She stared until her eyes watered.

  The shape shifted again.

  She threw off the blankets.

  Even with slippers on, the floor stole heat from her feet. Gooseflesh climbed her arms. She checked the clock on her phone: 11:07 p.m. Past curfew. Past the point where a security patrol might catch her wandering.

  She didn’t care.

  She crossed the room and set her hand on the blind’s cord. Her fingers were stiff. She fumbled the pull once, twice.

  The blinds rose.

  A little girl stood outside her fifth-floor window, smiling like this was normal.

  Blonde hair, pale skin, eyes too bright in the moonlight. She wore a thin dress that belonged in spring, not in this kind of cold. Snowflakes drifted between them, and none of them landed on her.

  The girl’s lips moved. The glass muffled the sound. The student couldn’t hear a word, but the meaning arrived anyway, clean and sharp.

  Come out.

  Her throat tightened. She stared at the girl’s face, trying to find the trick. A prank. A hallucination. Anything that fit inside the laws of physics.

  The girl lifted a hand and pressed it to the glass.

  The student’s hand rose before she decided to move. Palm against the cold pane, matching the girl on the other side.

  This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

  The glass didn’t feel as cold under her fingers as it should have.

  The girl tilted her head, smiling wider.

  The student slid the window latch open.

  Cold air punched her in the face. It should have been agony. Instead, it felt like stepping into a pool you’d already accepted.

  She swung the window up.

  The snow and wind screamed through the gap, but the girl didn’t wobble. She leaned forward as if there was a ledge there, as if gravity was a polite suggestion.

  The student climbed.

  She didn’t remember deciding to. One moment she stood inside her room, hands on the sill. The next, she was halfway out, hips over the frame, and the world flipped.

  Her stomach lurched.

  Then she wasn’t falling.

  She hovered.

  The dorm building hung behind her like a gray cliff. Below, the parking lot lay buried in snow. Sodium streetlights painted everything a dirty orange. Snow blew sideways in sheets, turning the air into a white blur.

  The little girl floated in front of her, laughing, and reached for her hand.

  “Please,” the girl said, and this time the words cut through the storm as clear as if she’d spoken into the student’s ear. “Play with me. Mom hasn’t come back. I’m lonely.”

  Lonely.

  That word hit harder than the cold.

  The student swallowed. Her breath came out in ragged clouds. She should have been terrified. She should have slammed herself back through the window. Instead, she nodded.

  The girl’s fingers slipped into hers—small, cold, and somehow solid. When the student squeezed back, the girl grinned like she’d won something.

  “Higher,” Jane said. “Let’s go higher.”

  Jane. The name dropped into the student’s mind like a stone in water. She didn’t remember learning it, but she knew it.

  Jane kicked off the air and rose.

  The student rose with her.

  They shot upward over the dorm’s roofline. The campus spread beneath them: blanketed buildings, frozen sidewalks, a few lonely lampposts throwing halos onto untouched snow. No cars moved. No people walked. The storm had erased every sign of life.

  Up here, the wind didn’t just bite. It slapped. It tore at the student’s coat, found gaps at her wrists and collar, and tried to peel her apart. Her cheeks stung so hard her eyes watered.

  Jane didn’t flinch.

  The student focused on the girl’s hand in hers. On the laugh in her voice. On the fact that she was moving at all instead of lying in bed waiting for her body to shut down.

  They streaked toward Main Street.

  Houses crouched under snowdrifts, roofs rounded like buried graves. Some yards still had Christmas decorations up: plastic reindeer half-submerged, a frozen Santa locked in a permanent grin. A string of lights blinked weakly behind a curtain.

  The student pointed. “Look. Santa.”

  Jane giggled, and for a heartbeat the sound warmed the air.

  “Higher,” Jane insisted.

  They climbed into the clouds.

  The world turned white.

  Wind roared. Snow slapped the student’s face. She couldn’t see her own feet. Her lungs burned, pulling in air so cold it felt like knives.

  Then the noise thinned.

  Inside the cloud, the darkness held a soft glow, like the sky had swallowed moonlight and didn’t know what to do with it. Shapes moved around them—shadows that weren’t birds, weren’t planes, weren’t anything from her world.

  They looked like wind given bodies. Long, thin, twisting forms that bent and folded like cloth in a storm.

  They worked.

  The student stared as one of the shapes reached into the air and pulled out water—impossible, but there it was, gathered into a bead. The shape pressed it between invisible hands. The bead split, flattened, and grew arms. Six points. Sharp angles.

  A snowflake.

  Another shape built another. And another. Hundreds of them, thousands, assembled in silence and pushed downward into the storm.

  A factory. Not metal and smoke. A factory made of air and patience.

  The student’s mouth fell open. “This is where snow comes from.”

  Jane smiled like that was obvious. “Yeah.”

  The wind-shapes didn’t look at them. They kept working, indifferent to the two intruders drifting through their workshop.

  Jane tugged the student forward.

  They burst out above the cloud layer.

  The sky opened into brutal, clear cold. Stars hung overhead like nails in black wood. Below, clouds rolled like a dead sea.

  Ahead, a white expanse spread out in midair—too flat, too deliberate to be weather.

  “Here,” Jane said. “Let’s play.”

  The student’s boots touched down on something solid. Smooth as a frozen lake, hard as stone.

  Frost geometry rose from it in hexagons and spires. Ice-flowers bloomed—petals thin as paper, drinking starlight.

  She brushed one.

  It shivered, came apart, and lifted as a swarm of tiny white butterflies.

  Jane clapped. “Catch them!”

  They ran. The student laughed once—short and startled, like her body had forgotten it could.

  She grabbed at a butterfly; it burst into light and left a single snow crystal on her palm.

  The crystal hummed when she held it to her ear. Not noise. A melody, fine as glass.

  Jane stuck an ice-flower into her hair. “Pretty.”

  “This is the Snow Country,” Jane said, matter-of-fact. “Time’s stuck here.”

  Before the student could ask what that meant, Jane tugged her forward. “Come on. There’s more.”

  They walked deeper into the garden.

  At the far end, walls rose from the snow—transparent, tall, made of ice so clear it could’ve been glass. Snow swirled inside the walls as if trapped in the structure.

  A maze.

  Jane darted in without hesitation.

  The student followed, shoulder brushing the slick wall. Cold shot up her arm. Inside the ice, tiny flakes popped and cracked, like static.

  Light burst across the wall’s surface in small sparks, and in those sparks she saw images—brief, sharp, like clips from an old film.

  A winter living room. A kotatsu. Warmth under a table. A mother’s hands setting tea down. A child’s laughter. Her own childhood, half a world away.

  Her throat tightened. She didn’t know why this place picked that memory. She didn’t want it.

  Jane’s laugh echoed ahead. “This way!”

  The student forced her feet to move. The maze twisted. Walls turned. The air smelled clean and empty. Every time she touched the ice, it crackled and threw another sliver of memory back at her.

  A bowl of oranges in winter. Her father’s hands red from cold. Her own voice saying she’d be fine on her own.

  Fine.

  Sure.

  They burst out of the maze into open space.

  A lake spread in front of them, its surface perfectly smooth. Not a single ripple. Not a single crack. The stars reflected in it so clearly it looked like a second sky laid flat.

  Jane stepped onto the ice and held out her hand like a dancer inviting a partner.

  The student took it and stepped out too.

  The ice didn’t feel cold. It felt like polished stone. Their footsteps made no sound. They ran, and it felt like skating without blades—gliding, weightless.

  Jane spun. “Faster!”

  The student ran harder, lungs pulling in air that tasted like snow and metal. Her heart hammered. Her cheeks burned. The fear that had kept her awake in the dorm peeled away, replaced by something dangerous and bright.

  At the far end of the lake, a glow rose above the horizon.

  A gate.

  It wasn’t built from anything physical. It was a shape in the air—an arch of light, yellow-white and steady, like a doorway carved out of moonshine.

  Jane slowed, staring at it like it was home.

  The student’s stomach tightened again. “What is that?”

  “The Moon,” Jane whispered. “It calls.”

  They drifted upward, pulled by the gate’s gravity. The lake fell away. The garden shrank beneath them. Clouds rolled far below like dirty wool.

  The Moon hung ahead, huge and close, a yellow disk with scars and shadows. The light-gate sat in front of it, a tear in the night.

  The student couldn’t stop looking.

  A new figure appeared beside Jane.

  A boy—small, scarf wrapped around his neck, cheeks red from cold. His eyes were serious in a way kids shouldn’t manage.

  He didn’t look at the student. He looked at Jane.

  “Jane,” he said. “We have to go. We have to go to the Moon.”

  Jane’s face lit up. “Bye! Big brother!”

  She released the student’s hand.

  The sudden loss of contact made the student’s whole body jolt, as if the air itself had been holding her up by Jane’s grip.

  “Wait,” the student said, voice raw. “Jane—”

  Jane smiled at her once, quick and bright. Then she took the boy’s hand and shot forward.

  They vanished into the light-gate.

  The student pushed after them.

  The air turned thick, like she’d tried to run through wet concrete. Her coat weighed a hundred kilos. Her arms wouldn’t lift. Her legs kicked uselessly.

  The gate pulled away.

  No. Not the gate.

  Her. She was dropping.

  The world flipped again. The Moon slid out of sight. The clouds rushed up, dark and heavy. Wind screamed around her, ripping at her coat and hair.

  She fell.

  She shut her eyes and tried to scream, but the sound tore out of her throat and disappeared into the storm.

  Somewhere far above, children laughed.

  Morning light slipped through the edge of the window shade.

  The student lay under her pile of blankets, shaking so hard her teeth clicked. Her hands didn’t want to move. Her feet felt like they belonged to someone else. Numbness wrapped her fingers, her toes, her lips.

  She forced herself upright.

  The room was dim and gray. The kettle sat on the table, cold, the red light dead. Her mug was tipped over. Tea had spilled and dried into a sticky stain.

  She stumbled to the window and yanked the shade up.

  Ice covered the glass—thick, branching patterns layered over each other like fractals. The crystals looked like the snowflakes she’d watched being built in the cloud. Same angles. Same sharp geometry.

  Her breath caught.

  She traced a finger along the inside of the glass. The cold bit her skin, immediate and mean.

  She turned away, shaking, and slapped the kettle’s switch down again. Click. Red light.

  The small sound echoed in the room, too loud.

  She sank into the corner by her bed, wrapped a blanket around her shoulders, and stared at nothing.

  The dorm stayed silent. Even in daylight, the snow outside had muted the world. No cars. No distant voices. Just the building and her breathing and the slow hiss of cold through old walls.

  By afternoon, a repairman finally showed up.

  He was lanky, face half-hidden under a cap, grin a little too casual for someone who’d left a student freezing overnight. He didn’t say much. He crouched by the heater, swapped out a section of steam pipe, and banged on it until it clanked like an angry animal.

  “Holiday week,” he muttered, as if that explained everything. “These old pipes always throw tantrums when it gets nasty.”

  Then—finally—heat.

  The radiator coughed. It hissed. Warmth crept out into the room like a reluctant apology.

  The student should have felt relief.

  Instead she felt sick.

  A cold had dug in overnight. Her head throbbed. Her throat burned. Her body felt heavy, like the fall had never ended.

  Later, the junior from the other dorm showed up. The one with the rumors.

  He stood in her doorway with a worried look that didn’t quite fit his grin. “Hey, senpai. You alive?”

  She kept her answer short. “I’m fine.”

  “Want some soup? I can—”

  “No.” She pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders. “Go back.”

  His grin faded. For a second, something irritated flashed behind his eyes.

  Then he shrugged. “Alright. If you need anything…”

  He left.

  Three days later, she stood in the dorm lobby and watched the local news on an old TV bolted to the wall.

  A reporter stood in front of a small house wrapped in police tape. Snow piled high on the porch steps. The caption at the bottom of the screen mentioned a missing mother.

  Two children had been found inside.

  Frozen.

  The camera cut to photos. A blonde girl. A boy in a scarf.

  Jane.

  Her brother.

  The student’s stomach turned to water. She gripped the back of a lobby chair to keep from sliding to the floor.

  The reporter kept talking. Neighbors. Time of death. Hypothermia. The kind of calm language people used to describe a horror they weren’t living.

  She couldn’t hear most of it.

  Her mind kept replaying Jane’s voice in the storm: Mom hasn’t come back.

  Lonely.

  She stumbled away from the TV before anyone noticed her face.

  That night, she sat in her room with the heater running and still felt cold.

  Not in her skin. Somewhere deeper.

  Around eleven, she noticed the shadow again.

  On the window shade. A faint outline moving against the orange spill of streetlight.

  Not wind.

  She stood.

  Her hands didn’t shake this time. She crossed the room and raised the shade.

  The window glass had frost on the corners, but the center was clear enough to see outside. Snow drifted down. The campus lay silent under it.

  In the air beyond the glass, a shape hovered—an absence that pulled at her attention the way a name pulled at a memory.

  She opened the window.

  Cold air hit her face, sharp and clean.

  She climbed out.

  The fall didn’t come.

  She rose.

  Up past the dorm roof. Through the clouds. The wind-shapes worked below, still assembling their endless crystals, indifferent.

  She pushed higher.

  The Moon waited above the weather, huge and close, and the light-gate hung in front of it like an open door.

  This time, the weight didn’t grab her ankles. Nothing slowed her.

  She crossed the threshold.

  On the other side, there was no dorm, no campus, no storm.

  Just light—an ocean of it, cold and endless. Stars hung around her like ice fragments, each one humming its own thin note. The sound wove together into music that didn’t care if anyone listened.

  The student drifted in that brightness, coat fluttering, breath turning to mist.

  She didn’t know if she was alive.

  She didn’t know if she cared.

  But she kept floating, deeper into the song, until the world she’d left behind became too small to matter.

  Far ahead, a darker seam cut through the light—an outline of a door. And from beyond it came a child’s laugh, close enough to make her turn.

  (Fin)