The Fissure in the Frost: Beneath the Snowline

They had not escaped Brumewood at all.

They were sleeping inside its family photo.

Mara stared at the frame on the wall until the edges of the picture blurred. Clara, Michael, little Jonas. The same woman she had seen on the train, unchanged by ten years. The same child who’d sat on that empty lap. The same knitted hat. The same winter-blue eyes.

Behind her, Emilia let out a shaky laugh that wasn’t really a laugh at all.

“Tell me I’m not mad,” Emilia whispered. “Tell me that is not the woman from Carriage 4.”

Mara forced herself to look away from the inscription. To Aunt Elise, with love… Brumewood, 2013.

“It’s her,” Mara said. “And that child is the one we’ve been seeing.”

Emilia’s hand flew to her mouth. “Mara… if this photo is from 2013, he’d be—what—sixteen now? Seventeen? That boy on the train was six. Maybe seven.”

“Yes.”

“And the woman… she hasn’t aged. At all.”

“I know.”

Silence settled over the little room. It felt thick, almost physical, pressing at their ears.

A floorboard creaked in the corridor.

Both women flinched.

Mara moved first. She crossed to her bag, unzipped the side pocket, and took out the canvas pouch. Even before she opened it, she could feel it pulsing with wrongness, like a small, stubborn heartbeat that didn’t belong to the room.

Emilia watched her, arms wrapped around herself.

“We should give them back,” Emilia said quietly. “We should throw them in the nearest river, or dig a hole, or—”

“And if that’s not good enough?” Mara said. “The man in the street said we picked up something that belongs to them. That suggests rules. Rules mean terms. Terms mean we might have leverage.”

Emilia stared at the pouch as if it were a venomous snake. “You’re talking like this is a contract dispute, not a haunting.”

“In my experience,” Mara said, “those are often the same thing.”

Another creak from the corridor. Not the sharp, heavy sound of an adult’s step this time. Lighter. A quick scuttle, then silence.

Emilia’s gaze shot to the door. “If that kid appears at the foot of my bed, I swear to God…”

Mara slipped the pouch back into her bag.

“We need answers before night,” she said. “And there’s only one person in this house who has any.”

Emilia looked at the photograph one more time, then stood, knees wobbling.

“Let’s go and talk to Aunt Elise.”

The House That Listens

The landing felt different now that they knew whose faces looked down from the walls.

Old portraits, faded landscapes, framed school photos. A lifetime of Haldenridge pinned in place with brass hooks. Mara scanned each one as they passed, suddenly alert for a glimpse of Clara again, or Jonas, or the stationmaster standing too far back in a crowd.

The house creaked and settled around them. Somewhere, the grandfather clock ticked with patient, unbothered rhythm.

At the bottom of the stairs, lamplight spilt from the drawing room. The smell of the fire—woodsmoke and something resinous—curled towards them like an invitation.

Elise was already there, as if she’d been expecting them.

She sat on the same sofa, hands folded around a fresh cup of tea, eyes reflecting the fire. Those eyes went first to their faces, then—briefly, sharply—to Mara’s bag.

“You found the photograph,” she said, not unkindly.

“Yes,” Mara replied. “Your niece. Clara. Michael and Jonas.”

Elise’s mouth pulled into something that was not quite a smile, not quite a grimace.

“I told you,” she said softly. “Brumewood is one stop away. But sometimes it feels like another world entirely.”

Emilia dropped into the armchair nearest the fire, as if she needed all the warmth she could steal. Mara stayed standing for a moment, then sat opposite Elise, bag on her lap.

“You said the last time you saw your niece was over ten years ago,” Mara began. “But we saw her today. On the train. She looks exactly like she does in that photograph. Your great-nephew, too. Same age. Same hat. Same… everything.”

Elise’s fingers tightened around her cup.

“I know,” she said quietly.

Emilia blinked. “You… know?”

Elise sighed and set her tea down, the porcelain clinking faintly against the saucer.

“I don’t always know when people leave Brumewood,” she said. “But I often know when Brumewood sends someone out. There’s a difference.”

Mara leaned forward. “What is Clara now? What is Jonas?”

Elise took a moment before she answered. When she finally spoke, her voice was calm, but there was an old ache buried in it.

“People in the valley talk about ghosts,” she said. “But Brumewood doesn’t like that word. It prefers… arrangements.”

Mara exchanged a quick glance with Emilia.

“Thirty years ago, when that young man found the first new stones, the town panicked,” Elise went on. “Not because of the wealth. Because of what wealth does. Brumewood has always been greedy, but it’s not stupid. The council—the ones who run everything up there—knew that if word got out about the diamonds, outsiders would come. Investors. Prospectors. Journalists. People who ask questions. People who don’t play by Brumewood’s rules.”

“So they made a deal,” Mara said quietly.

“Yes,” Elise replied. “With the line.”

“The… railway line?” Emilia asked.

Elise nodded. “Tracks cut through old land. Old stories. The builders carved a path right across things they did not understand. For a long time, nothing happened. Then the mine, the first diamonds, the wealth. And when that was gone, all that remained was the scar. The fissure.”

“The fissure in the frost,” Emilia murmured.

Mara thought of the little hollow in the forest, the frozen puddle, the way the ground had cracked when she stamped down.

“The town council asked the valley for protection,” Elise said. “Protection from outsiders. From people who dig where they shouldn’t, and from those who take what Brumewood still believes is its own. In return, they promised a tithe.”

Emilia swallowed. “A tithe of what?”

Elise’s gaze dropped to her hands.

“Of lives,” she said. “Of years. Of families.”

The fire snapped loudly. Emilia jumped.

“Elise,” Mara said, voice steady, “how does that involve your niece?”

Elise looked up. Her eyes were bright with unshed tears, but her expression was strangely composed, like someone telling a story she had rehearsed too many times.

“Clara married into one of the old Brumewood families,” she said. “Respectable people. Deep roots. Her husband’s father sat on the council. When the new rumours of diamonds started again—little pouches, little finds—Clara and Michael were expected to help keep the peace. To keep the outsiders away. To ‘manage’ the curious.”

Her mouth thinned.

“But the line… it never gives anything for free. It wanted more than promises. It wanted anchors. People who belonged to both places at once. People who could move along the track, watching, nudging, making sure the debt was paid.”

“Anchors,” Mara repeated softly. “Like Clara. Like Michael.”

“And Jonas,” Elise whispered. “My Jonas. My little great-nephew, who should be taller than me by now. Who should be sulking about exams and girlfriends and wanting to move to the city.”

Her voice cracked, just once. She cleared her throat.

“Instead, they are what you saw,” she said. “Bound to the line. To the places between stations. They don’t live as we live, but they don’t leave either. They watch for people who pick up what doesn’t belong to them. They make sure it finds its way back.”

Emilia’s fingers dug into the arms of her chair. “They tried to kill me.”

“They tried to stop you,” Elise said quietly. “Brumewood kills. The line… redirects.”

“That’s a hell of a distinction,” Emilia muttered.

Mara exhaled slowly. “And the diamonds?”

Elise’s gaze flickered to Mara’s bag again.

“You still have them,” she said. Not a question. “You shouldn’t have brought them here, but I suppose there was no choice. Once you took them from the fissure, they were never going to stay behind.”

Mara unzipped the side pocket and drew out the pouch. She didn’t open it. The fabric itself seemed to hum.

“What happens if we give them back?” she asked.

Elise considered the question with the weary seriousness of someone answering on behalf of something else.

“If you place them where you found them before the next dawn,” she said, “the line will consider the debt settled.”

“Settled how?” Mara pressed.

“You will leave the valley alive,” Elise replied. “You will be allowed to go home. Your families will not be touched. There will be… distance. Cold spots in your memory, perhaps. Gaps. But you will live.”

Emilia’s eyes filled. “And if we don’t?”

“Then Brumewood will collect,” Elise said simply. “It always does. Sometimes slowly—illness, accidents, a call to ‘come and visit’ that you never return from. Sometimes quickly. A shove on a platform. A slip on the ice that no one quite saw.”

The fire hissed softly in the grate. Outside, the wind shifted, rattling the windowpanes.

“You said ‘the next dawn’,” Mara said. “That’s… what? Twelve hours? Less?”

“Less,” Elise said. “You woke something when you broke that ice. It’s already following you. Jonas does not like his things being moved.”

Emilia’s voice came out as a whisper. “He’s just a child.”

Elise’s expression turned old and sad. “Children can be crueller than anyone when they are frightened. And Jonas is very frightened. He has been for a long time.”

Mara looked down at the pouch. Her mind, as always, began sorting through the pieces.

The fissure. The line. The family trapped in the photo. The town that pretended not to see. The man in the street, warning them. The stationmaster, staring just a little too long.

“This tithe,” she said slowly. “Brumewood gives lives to the line. In return, the line keeps outsiders from taking the diamonds.”

“Yes,” Elise said.

“Then what are we?” Mara asked. “We’re not from here. We’re not part of the original bargain. We stumbled into it.”

Elise met her eyes.

“That,” she said quietly, “is why you might have one chance they didn’t.”

The Walk Back to Where It Started

The snow outside had thickened into a fine, steady fall that blurred the edges of Haldenridge. Streetlights cast small halos on the ground. The main road was mostly empty now; the town had folded itself in for the night.

“You can’t go alone,” Elise said, fastening the top button of her coat with fingers that trembled only slightly. “The forest doesn’t recognise you yet. That’s an advantage. But it also means you’ll lose your way if you step off the path.”

“You’re not coming,” Mara said firmly.

Elise lifted her chin. “I have lived my entire life in the shadow of that damned town,” she said. “My brother moved there. My niece was taken by it. My great-nephew is now its watchful little echo. If there is even the smallest chance that helping you might loosen its hold on them, do you think I’m going to sit by the fire and knit? Besides, there are only a select few who know the hidden trail up to that godforsaken town, and I am one of them.”

“Why not the train as we did when we arrived here” Emilia says pulling her coat on.

“The train is shorter but the object of this exercise is not to attract attention” Elise said looking at both Mara and Emila knowingly.

Emilia, wrapped in a borrowed scarf, managed a weak smile. “I like her.”

Mara did too, though she’d never admit it out loud.

“Fine,” she said. “But we do this quickly. We leave the stones. We walk away. No detours. No heroics.”

“And if they appear?” Emilia asked. “Clara. Jonas. Whoever else is on this invisible payroll.”

“Then we remember what Elise said,” Mara replied. “The line redirects. Brumewood kills. We’re not on Brumewood’s ground yet.”

Elise led them down a side passage that spat them out near the little station. The tracks gleamed faintly, twin lines of dark metal vanishing into the trees.

“The path to the cabin runs parallel to the line for a while,” Elise said. “Then it curves up into the forest. You’ll recognise it. The land remembers footsteps like yours.”

They walked.

The cold bit into any patch of exposed skin. Snow crunched underfoot, a steady, rhythmical sound that was almost soothing. The further they moved from Haldenridge, the quieter it became, as if the town itself were reluctant to follow.

The line sat to their right, a constant, straight companion. Every now and then, Mara thought she heard something—distant wheels, a breath of metal on metal—but when she looked, the track lay empty.

“Do you ever see them?” Emilia asked Elise quietly, as they walked. “Clara and Jonas?”

Elise kept her eyes on the path.

“Sometimes,” she said. “In reflections. In train windows. In the corner of my eye when a carriage passes and doesn’t stop. Never clearly. Never long enough to reach out and touch. That’s the line’s cruelty. It lets you see just enough to break your heart, but not enough to change anything.”

Emilia swallowed hard. “I’m sorry.”

“So am I,” Elise said. “But being sorry doesn’t change the rules.”

The trees thickened, swallowing some of the sky. Mara recognised the curve of the path, the faint slope, the way the snow looked here—less disturbed, less travelled. The air felt heavier, as if they’d stepped into a held breath.

“We’re close,” she said.

Her boots crunched to a halt when she saw it.

The hollow in the ground. The same small depression where the puddle had frozen, where she’d stamped down and cracked the ice.

Now, the fissure was wider.

The snow around it had sunk slightly, forming a pale ring. The centre was a thin disc of grey ice, veined with tiny fractures. It looked like a frozen eye.

Emilia moved closer, then stopped as if she’d hit an invisible wall.

“I don’t like this,” she whispered.

“The feeling is mutual,” Mara said.

She crouched, untying the stiff string of the pouch. The rough diamonds dropped into her palm like dull stars, catching what little light filtered through the branches.

For a heartbeat, she hesitated.

Five stones. Heavy. Wrong.

“How do we know this will work?” Emilia whispered. “What if we’re just giving them back and still end up… owned?”

“We don’t,” Mara said. “But keeping them clearly isn’t improving our chances.”

She held the stones over the centre of the fissure.

The air shifted.

It was small at first—a change in pressure, a tightening in her ears. Then the temperature dropped several degrees at once.

Emilia’s breath fogged heavily. Elise shuddered, clutching her coat tighter.

“Don’t turn around,” Elise said suddenly. “Whatever you do, Mara, don’t turn around until it’s done.”

“Why?” Emilia said, voice high.

“Because Jonas likes to see people’s faces when they decide,” Elise whispered. “Don’t give him that.”

Mara’s heart pounded so hard she could feel it in her throat. Something inside her—the same stubborn streak that made her solve puzzles other people left alone—wanted to turn. To look. To see the thing stalking them, to understand it.

She forced it down.

“You wanted rules,” she murmured, more to herself than to anyone else. “Here’s mine.”

She opened her hand.

The stones dropped onto the ice.

For a second, nothing happened. They sat there, little grey lumps against the frost.

Then the fissure opened.

It didn’t crack with noise or drama. It simply… parted. The ice sank silently, swallowing the diamonds without a splash. The snow-ring around it trembled, then settled, as if it had let out a long-held sigh.

The air eased.

Mara realised she’d been holding her breath and let it out slowly.

Elise spoke again, voice small and strained.

“You can turn around now.”

Mara did.

They were not alone.

The Ones Who Watch the Forest

They stood at the edge of the clearing, just inside the tree line.

Clara. Michael. Jonas.

Their outlines were slightly blurred, as if the forest hadn’t quite decided whether to keep them or send them back. Snow didn’t seem to settle on them properly; flakes melted before they touched. Jonas’s knitted hat was pulled low, his eyes that same impossible winter-pool blue.

Clara looked exactly as she had on the train. Calm. Composed. Sad.

Michael’s face was harder to read—tired, worn, the face of someone who had made too many compromises.

Neither of them moved closer.

“Thank you,” Clara said.

Her voice was clear and ordinary, which somehow made it worse.

Mara swallowed. “For returning what we never meant to take.”

Clara’s gaze dropped to the fissure. “Brumewood is greedy,” she said. “But the line is not. It only keeps what it is owed. When you broke the ice, you stepped into an old argument. You weren’t meant to pay for it.”

“Could’ve fooled me,” Emilia muttered.

Jonas tilted his head at her, studying her with the intense, unblinking focus of a child observing a new insect.

“You weren’t supposed to fall,” he said. His voice was soft, younger than his eyes. “I only meant to scare you back. You didn’t listen.”

Emilia’s throat worked. “You pushed me.”

He scuffed the snow with one boot. “You were going to take all of them,” he said. “You can’t. They call if they’re too far away. It hurts.”

Mara found her voice. “Who does it hurt?”

Jonas looked up at her. For a heartbeat, his face seemed to flicker—six and sixteen at once.

“Us,” he said simply. “And them.”

He nodded past her, towards the tracks.

Mara didn’t look. She didn’t need to. She could feel it now—the low, constant hum of the line, like blood in the earth. The sense of something vast and indifferent, stretching beyond these trees, beyond this valley, connecting other deals, other debts.

“Can we go home now?” Emilia asked. The question came out more childlike than she intended. “Properly home. Not just one stop.”

Michael’s gaze shifted to Elise. For the first time, something like human sorrow crossed his features.

“You shouldn’t have come,” he said to her. “It’s not your bargain.”

“I’ve been paying for your bargain for ten years,” Elise snapped, surprising even herself. “You think sitting in that house listening for trains isn’t a kind of tithe?”

Clara’s expression softened. “Aunt Elise…”

“No,” Elise said. “I will not be grateful for crumbs. I will not thank the line for deciding not to snatch these girls because they did what it wanted. They are leaving. Both of them. You owe me that much.”

The forest seemed to lean in, listening.

Mara felt the pressure shift again, but it wasn’t as sharp as before. More like a consideration.

Clara spoke carefully, as if choosing each word.

“You may leave the valley,” she said. “Both of you. The line will not follow you beyond the last station. Brumewood will not call you back.”

Emilia sagged with relief. “Thank God.”

“But there is a price,” Clara added.

“Of course there is,” Mara said under her breath. “What is it?”

Clara looked at her.

“You keep the story,” she said.

Mara blinked. “I don’t understand.”

“Most people who see what you’ve seen forget,” Clara said. “The line blurs their memories. Brumewood rewrites their timelines. They go home and remember a nice holiday, a bit of snow, a friendly town. They never pick at the edges.”

Emilia shivered. “That sounds… nice.”

“It sounds like sleep,” Elise said quietly.

Clara’s gaze stayed on Mara. “You don’t sleep well, do you?”

Mara didn’t answer.

“The line wants silence,” Clara said. “Brumewood wants control. But there are cracks. Places where things slip through. People who notice patterns. People who collect the wrong details in little boxes.”

Mara’s stomach tightened. “How do you know about my box?”

Jonas smiled, small and eerie. “You carry it with you,” he said. “Even when it’s not there.”

“You see things,” Clara said. “You already carry stories that don’t belong to you. So here is the price: you keep this one. You remember it. All of it. The cabin. The town. The diamonds. Us. You don’t let it fade, even when it starts to hurt.”

“And in exchange?” Mara asked.

“You walk away,” Clara said simply. “Unaffected. Unclaimed. The line doesn’t touch your family. Brumewood doesn’t pull at your dreams. You go back to your life and pretend you took a different train that day.”

Emilia frowned. “That sounds like the opposite of what they want. I thought they liked secrets.”

“They do,” Michael said. “But secrets rot in the dark. Stories… travel. Quietly. Sideways. A story told in the right way is harder to kill than a person. Harder to control than a town.”

Mara understood it then, with a clarity that made her skin prickle.

They wanted her to be an infection.

An unnoticed fracture in the smooth surface of Brumewood’s myth. A fissure in the frost.

“You want me to talk about you,” she said slowly.

“We want you to remember,” Clara corrected. “What you do with that is your choice. But memory is a kind of rebellion. Even the line can’t erase what you hold onto on purpose.”

Jonas stepped forward, just one small pace. Snow didn’t crunch under his boots.

“Do we have a deal?” he asked.

Emilia grabbed Mara’s hand.

“We’re not seriously negotiating with a ghost six-year-old,” she hissed.

Mara squeezed her fingers back.

“We already are,” she said. “We have been since I stamped on that puddle.”

She looked at Elise. “If I agree… does it free them?”

Elise’s face crumpled, but her answer was honest.

“No,” she said. “Deals like this don’t run backwards. But it might stop another family ending up like ours.”

She thought of Mia and Kaden, safe at home, oblivious to the way a winter town almost stole their mother’s best friend.

She thought of all the cases she’d solved because she refused to look away from the odd detail, the wrong weight, the thing that “didn’t matter.”

“Fine,” she said. “You want me to remember? I will. I’ll keep Brumewood in my head like a splinter. But the moment any of you touch my family, I go from remembering to exposing. I will drag your pretty little town into daylight and let the world tear at it until there’s nothing left but empty tracks. That is my rule.”

For the first time, something like amusement flickered across Michael’s face.

Clara’s mouth curved in the smallest nod.

“Then we understand each other,” she said.

Jonas lifted his hand.

For a split second, Mara thought he was going to reach for her, or for Emilia. Instead, he waved.

“Goodbye,” he said. “Don’t come back.”

Mara believed him.

The three of them blurred, edges smearing like breath on glass. The trees behind them showed through. Then they were gone, leaving only a faint hollow in the snow where they’d stood.

The forest exhaled.

Somewhere distant, a train horn sounded—low, mournful, moving away.

One Stop Further

They walked back to Haldenridge in silence.

By the time the station lights came into view, the snow had eased. The night sky was a deep, sharp blue, pricked with stars.

Elise stopped at the entrance to the platform.

“This is as far as I go,” she said. “The rest is yours.”

Emilia hugged her without hesitation. Elise stiffened in surprise, then patted her back.

“Thank you,” Emilia whispered. “For… everything.”

“Bring me a postcard someday,” Elise said gruffly. “From somewhere with sun.”

Mara held out her hand. Elise took it, then pulled her into a brief, fierce embrace.

“Write it down while it’s still sharp,” Elise murmured into her ear. “Before the line changes its mind.”

“I will,” Mara said.

She meant it.

The train slid into the station with the clean inevitability of something that had always been coming. They boarded without drama, finding two seats facing each other. The carriage was almost empty.

As the train pulled away, Haldenridge fell behind them. Trees took its place. Then open land. Then darkness cut by the faint reflection of their faces in the glass.

Emilia stared out of the window for a long time.

“Do you think it’s really over?” she asked eventually.

“No,” Mara said. “But I think this chapter is.”

Emilia huffed out a breath that might, on a kinder day, have been a laugh.

“You’re going to write it down, aren’t you?” she said. “All of it. Every creepy detail.”

“Yes.”

“And then what? Publish it? Lock it in your little box of weird things?”

Mara watched their reflections blur and sharpen with the movement of the train.

“Maybe both,” she said.

Outside, a small handprint appeared, briefly, in the condensation on the glass. Fingers splayed, palm small. It lingered for three heartbeats, then smeared away as if wiped clean from the other side.

Mara saw it.

She did not look away.

The fissure in the frost had closed—for now. The town that pretended not to see had one more person who refused to play along.

And somewhere along a cold line of track, a story about Brumewood began to take shape—sharp, insistent, and impossible to bury forever.