The Bride of Winter’s End * A Raven Noir Interlude *

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“When winter drew its final breath, the bride returned for one last vow.”

When the last candle guttered and winter exhaled, the bride rose to claim what the living forgot. Frost clung to the hem of her gown like a memory that refused to melt, and the veil — once white, now ghost‑pale — drifted around her as though stirred by hands no longer here.

She did not belong to the season, nor to the year that had just died. She belonged to the hush that follows it. To the breath between endings. To the cold that remembers.

Tonight was her wedding night — again.

The holly had wilted. The tree lights had dimmed. The world had moved on.

But she had not.

Across the table, her groom waited in the soft glow of dying candles, his smile carved from winter’s bone and memory’s ember. They raised their glasses — red as the last heartbeat of the year — and toasted a vow spoken long after the living stopped listening.

“To love beyond the thaw.”

The blue smoke curled between them, twisting like a forgotten promise. It carried the scent of pine, cold stone, and something older — the echo of a vow made on a night when the world was still warm.

She remembered the first ceremony. The living guests. The music. The warmth of hands that would one day forget her name.

But winter remembers what people do not.

The groom reached across the table, his fingers brushing hers — cold meeting colder. The ornaments rattled softly, as though stirred by an unseen wind. A small doll with a skull‑painted face watched from the table’s edge, its hollow eyes reflecting the candlelight.

“Are you ready?” he asked, though his lips barely moved.

She nodded. The veil trembled. The year shifted.

Outside, the last snowflake of winter drifted past the window — slow, deliberate, ceremonial. As it touched the ground, the world exhaled, and the boundary between the living and the dead thinned like lace.

This was the moment she had returned for.

Not to reclaim her life. Not to haunt the ones who forgot. But to finish the vow that winter had preserved for her.

She lifted her glass once more.

“One last vow,” she whispered. “Before the thaw.”

And somewhere in the dark, the year that had died opened its eyes.

 She speaks:

To those who loved in silence, To those who waited beyond the frost, To those whose vows were buried beneath the holly — I bless you.

May your memory be a lantern. May your longing be a flame. And may your love outlive the thaw.