Snow Vein

He woke again because of the cold touch on his neck.

Morning light seeped through the cracks in the warped glass window, fragile and pale, casting a silver shimmer across the sweat glistening on his brow. His name was Samuel Evans, once a celebrated architect of northern libraries and winter sanctuaries, now a quiet recluse in a southern town slowly being devoured by the sun.

Seventeen days.

Seventeen unbroken days of heat, where the sky held no clouds, and the air itself grew dense and slow, as if time had melted and stuck to the earth. The town groaned under it. Pavement cracked like dry skin. Birds stopped singing. Power grids whispered of collapse. People stopped going outside.

They began muttering things—low, half-joking confessions made at dusk:

“The sun’s angry.”

“The heat’s alive.”

“It watches us now.”

Samuel, for all his logic and love of angles, had begun to feel it too.

The heat didn’t just surround; it pressed. It clawed into the spine, blurred thought, warped memory. And then Deborah—his neighbor, eighty-two, fond of iced chamomile—collapsed on her porch without a sound. Her lips cracked like old paint. Her hands trembled in the air as if reaching for something.

Samuel didn’t run. He walked calmly, took her wrist, helped her inside. Her freezer had stopped two days before.

That night, he remembered the parcel.

A small, unmarked box left on his doorstep three months ago. No return address. Inside, a soft, silver-grey neckband unlike anything he had ever seen. Cool to the touch. Elegant in its stitching. A single line printed on aged, pearlescent paper:

“Wear it, and the cold will travel through your veins.”

He had laughed then. Now, he did not.

He placed it in the fridge—there was still power in his home—and hours later wrapped it gently around his neck. It didn’t sting like ice or numb like gel. It calmed. A cool, steady breath across the pulse. Samuel called it Snow Vein.

The first night with it on, he slept like he hadn't in years. Dreamless. Deep.

He woke refreshed, and though the morning sun still boiled the streets outside, inside him was a current of stillness

Soon, he began wearing it outdoors.

People stared.

The town's air had become thick with desperation. Faces shimmered with sweat. Tempers flickered. The pharmacist, hiding behind a fogged window, squinted at Samuel’s neck. “That... thing,” she said. “What is it?”

Samuel only smiled, his breath smooth and slow.

In truth, he was changing. Thoughts came faster now. He could walk two miles without collapse. He could listen again—to the trees, the silent groans of houses, the whisper of cicadas trapped in silence. The Snow Vein didn’t just cool his body; it focused his mind.

And people noticed.

The mayor knocked on his door. A boy followed him, clutching a soaked towel to his head. The mayor asked for one of those “silver scarves.” The boy just looked at Samuel like he was a magician.

He didn’t make excuses. He didn’t lie. He told them he had only one.

But he remembered something. In the box was a card, folded twice. On the back, embossed in pale blue:

“For mass production, contact INTCO.”

He had known the name. Long ago, during a design project in Shanghai, he’d heard of their work—thermal therapy, gel packs, cold science. Efficient. Clean. Reliable.

That night, by candlelight, he wrote a letter.

He enclosed diagrams—his own modifications, notes on breathability, wear duration, phase change material behavior under prolonged use. He told them about Deborah. About the boy. About the silent town that was slowly boiling under a mad sun.

“You won’t just be making a product,” he wrote.

“You’ll be crafting a remedy for a new kind of fever. The fever of this century.”

The letter was mailed. He never knew whether it reached anyone.

But on the twentieth day, something shifted.

A breeze came—not cold, but uncertain. Cicadas sang for the first time in weeks. Deborah, now wearing the Snow Vein herself, watered her withered garden. The boy on the street was seen running again. Somewhere, a dog barked.

And Samuel?

He sat beneath a blackened tree, the band cool against his throat, and whispered to the wind:

“Put it on. You’ll dream of snow.”

And he did. That night, and the ones after.

He dreamed of a river—quiet, silver, winding through frostbitten woods. He dreamed of walking alongside others, all of them wearing quiet crowns of cold. The heat was far away. The world, for a time, was still.