Juno didn’t mean to get snowed in.

She just wanted quiet. A short break from the endless scroll of messages, meetings, and neon city buzz. The cabin—an old rental in the middle of the northern ridge—seemed perfect. No Wi-Fi. Wood-burning stove. A kettle that whistled when it boiled.

She arrived just before the storm.

At first, it was beautiful. Snow fell in slow motion, coating the pines in sugar-dusted stillness. She wrapped herself in a thick blanket, sipping hot cocoa by the window, watching the sky turn gray, then white, then gone. The world vanished. Only the fire crackled, and the wind whispered like an old song.

On the second night, she realized there was no cell signal anymore.

On the third, the road out disappeared entirely.

By the fourth, she stopped caring.

She began walking the woods. At first just near the cabin, then further. Her boots made soft crump sounds in the powder. There were rabbit tracks. Once, deer. Once, something bigger. She felt small, and somehow, right-sized.

One morning, while brushing snow off the porch, she saw them: someone else’s footprints leading to her cabin.

They hadn’t been there the day before.

She stared at them, heart pounding—not out of fear, exactly. But something colder. Sharper. She followed them. Around the side of the cabin. Past the tree with the split trunk. Into the trees.

They led to a clearing she hadn’t noticed before.

At the center stood a figure in red. Not a jacket—robes. Long, layered fabric that moved like the wind. The figure didn’t look at her, but it spoke.

“You hear it now,” it said.

Juno didn’t answer.

“The silence between snowflakes,” it continued. “That’s where the old things live.”

Then the figure vanished.

Not walked away. Just… gone. Like melting frost.

Juno walked back slowly, no longer feeling the cold. That night, she wrote for the first time in years. She didn’t try to explain what she saw—only what she felt. The hush of white. The weight of stillness. The line between alone and aware.

When the snow finally melted and she hiked back to the main road, she left her phone behind in the cabin.

She never spoke of the red figure.

But every year, in the first snow, she returns to the mountain—hoping, maybe, to hear the silence again.