??The Girl of Snow and Silence

  “Are you okay, dear?”

  The voice was soft, yet it barely touched the emptiness inside me.

  I turned from the frost-kissed window, my gaze meeting my grandmother's. Her eyes—weathered with time—filled with concern, searched mine for an answer I couldn't give.

  How could I explain the feeling of being nothing? Of being discarded like an unwanted whisper lost in the wind?

  I wrapped my arms around myself as the hollowness settled deeper in my chest. The words still echoed, splintering through my mind like shards of ice.

  “You were never meant to be ours, Irish.”

  My mother's voice had been sharp, final.

  I hadn't begged. I had known better than to waste my breath. They had never listened. Not once. And when they sent me away, they hadn't even looked back.

  Outside, the snow drifted in slow, lazy spirals, vanishing into the earth like ghosts of forgotten dreams. I always watched it from my bedroom window as a child, tracing the tiny flakes as they danced and disappeared. I had felt like one of them—adrift, nameless, dissolving into a world that never noticed me.

  But the snow had always whispered to me. So had the trees. And in the dead of night, when the house was silent, an ethereal melody would slip into my dreams. Haunting. Beckoning. Like something—or someone—was calling me from beyond the veil of this world.

  My parents never knew about the whispers.

  They never knew how the cold slithered against my skin, coiling around me like a living thing. How it left invisible scars that burned in the absence of warmth.

  But they saw the scratches on my arms, the marks on my legs. They saw how I clawed at my own skin just to feel something real.

  They thought I was insane.

  So they locked me away.

  Then, on my twelfth birthday, something changed.

  Overnight, my winter-white hair had grown past my waist, cascading like spun silver. My deep blue eyes turned a haunting shade of silvery gray.

  That was the day my family stopped pretending I was one of them.

  I was a curse, they said. A stain on their perfect lives.

  I had a brother, Theo. He never let me forget how much of a burden I was. He made sure I knew I was beneath him, beneath everyone.

  And my parents? They didn't care. They never tried.

  Not to listen. Not to see me. Not even to acknowledge I was still breathing.

  To them, I was something even worse—an embarrassment.

  They had abandoned me long before today.

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  I don't remember when it started—the numbness, the silence inside my own mind.

  But I remember that day. The day my brother and his friends were home. The day everything changed.

  I hadn't known Theo and Rowen were in his room when I went to clean. I had apologized, tried to leave. But Rowen had pulled me inside and shut the door.

  “What's this trash doing here?” he sneered, his fingers gripping my hair.

  Theo didn't even flinch, barely spared me a glance.

  “Sister?” He spat the word like poison.

  “She's nothing to me.”

  I tried to leave. Begged.

  “Theo... please.”

  He turned away.

  Rowen pushed me to the floor. Crawled on top of me. His breath was hot against my skin.

  “Comply, and I'll let you go,” he purred.

  His hand trailed up my thigh. I thrashed, my heart hammering against my ribs.

  “Theo... tell him to stop... Please...”

  Silence.

  “Theo, I'm still your sister... Don't abandon me like this... Please...”

  He turned his back.

  And that was something inside me had finally shattered.

  And I wasn’t sure it would ever go back.

  A rush of cold had exploded from deep within me, sinking into my bones, curling around my heart. The temperature in the room plunged.

  Theo's hazel eyes finally met mine, and for the first time in his life—he looked afraid.

  Rowen had gone rigid against me, his breath turning to mist in the freezing air. His skin had gone deathly pale. His lips turned blue. His fingers stiffened against my skin.

  I pushed him off. He didn't move.

  I didn't care.

  I felt nothing.

  Theo stumbled backward, horror widening his eyes.

  “What did you do?” he whispered, trembling as he checked Rowen’s pulse.

  “Oh God... you killed him.”

  His hands were shaking as he dialed our parents.

  I walked out of the room in silence. Curled beside my bed, staring into nothingness as voices blurred outside my door.

  I heard my father say the doctors confirmed it. Rowen's body had frozen from exposure to an unnatural cold. He was in a coma.

  Our father had bribed them to keep it quiet. Not because he cared what had happened to me. But because it would ruin our family's name.

  They didn't care that their daughter had nearly been assaulted.

  They didn't care that Theo had done nothing to stop it.

  All they cared about was what I had ruined.

  “You stole our happiness.”

  “You destroyed our perfect life.”

  “Why couldn't you just be normal?”

  I had spent my entire life trying to be what they wanted. Staying quiet. Taking their punishments. Pretending not to exist.

  Hoping—stupidly—that if I was good enough, if I got it all right, chose my words carefully or said nothing at all, maybe then they’d love me. Maybe my parents would finally see me. Hear me. Maybe they’d change their minds, just once, and give me a chance.

  But they never had. And they never would.

  I had spent so long unraveling the silence between their stares, hoping to find why their hearts turned cold—yet the answer stayed just out of reach, like breath on a winter window.

  “Why don't you just kill yourself?”

  Someone at school had said that to me once.

  I think they meant it to be cruel.

  But it was the first time I ever considered it.

  I always wondered how it would happen...

  How I would end my life...

  Would it make my parents happy?

  Maybe they were right. Maybe if I disappeared, my parents would finally be happy.

  Sometimes I think no one would understand my silent battle—something unseen. Something I don’t even understand.

  And maybe... the numbness would never go away.

  That night, I curled beneath my blankets, eyes drifting shut.

  And then, I heard it again.

  The haunting, ethereal melody.

  Only this time, it wasn't coming from outside.

  It was coming from inside me.

  Calling. Whispering. Like something ancient was stirring awake.

  And for the first time in my life, the cold didn't feel lonely.

  A sudden gust of wind howled through my room. My eyes snapped open.

  The window—

  It was open.

  But I hadn't touched it.

  Frost spidered along the glass like silver veins, glinting in moonlight. The wind curled around me, slipping beneath my skin, filling my lungs with sharp, frozen breath.

  And then, I saw it.

  Perched on the window's edge was a snow-white eagle, its feathers shimmering like fallen stars. Its piercing silver eyes locked onto mine—unblinking.

  It watched me with an intensity that sent a strange sensation rippling through my chest.

  Slowly, I stepped forward.

  It wasn't afraid of me.

  It was watching.

  Studying.

  As if it knew something I didn't.

  I moved cautiously, my breath fogging in the icy air, and stretched out a trembling hand. I expected it to fly away, but it didn't.

  It stayed.

  I raised my hand, hesitation curling in my stomach. But something deep inside me whispered that it was okay. That this moment had been waiting for me.

  The moment my fingertips brushed against its feathers, a rush of sensation—raw, electric—shot through me, like a thousand memories I had never lived flooding my mind. Cold and warmth intertwined, wrapping around my soul, sinking into my very bones. My breath caught.

  A vision. A memory. A whisper of something lost.

  The snow blurred around us, and for a split second, I wasn't in my bedroom anymore.

  I was somewhere else.

  Somewhere wild.

  A frozen expanse of endless white stretched before me. The wind howled, carrying voices—distant, yearning, familiar. And in the middle of it all, a figure stood. Cloaked in winter, shrouded in shadow. Watching. Waiting.

  The melody inside me surged, a pulse of energy rushing through my veins.

  Then, just as suddenly as it came, the vision shattered.

  I gasped, stumbling back.

  My heart pounded. I tried to move, but I felt frozen, as if trapped beneath an unseen force.

  The eagle let out a soft, almost knowing cry, tilted its head slightly, its gaze lingering.

  Then, without a sound, it spread its massive wings, sending a flurry of snow swirling through my room. It leaped into the night, disappearing into the falling snow—vanishing as if it had never been there.

  I stumbled toward the window,

  gripping the frozen sill.

  The wind had stopped.

  The room had gone silent.

  But deep inside me, something had changed.

  The melody still echoed in my veins.

  I felt it.

  The cold wasn't just inside me.

  It was me.

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