A Shelter For Winter

20260111

Written for Luna Asli Kolcu’s “Myths of Winter - Week 6” event.

Charles was very fond of his family’s summer home. So many nostalgic memories. The mere fact they owned a vacation home had secured him a pleasantly high spot in the social hierarchy from the time he started school up until his friends were young adults more interested in holidaying abroad or taking adventure packages.
Which was fair enough. Some of the photos they posted were amazing. But Charles preferred to holiday somewhere familiar and comfy. Where he knew the bed had the right kind of mattress, and there’d be no surprise fees, and he wouldn’t need to worry about it getting too hot.
He wandered out onto the porch, tea in hand, to admire the sunlight glinting off the ice and savour the cool breeze. That was the best part about the cottage - it being right next to the lake. The eternally frozen lake.
Made it miserable when the weather was cold, of course. That’s why it’d been the summer home; school whisked the family back to the city long before the chill became a problem. But for the holidays it was a magical place. Especially as a child.
That was a thought - he hadn’t checked on the middle yet. Normally it was one of the first things he did, but he’d ended up arriving late last night and had headed straight to bed.
No time like the present.
So Charles walked down the old wooden steps to the lake. Technically you weren’t allowed to build this close to a large body of water, but apparently the original owner had gotten away with it. Probably because the lake was never liquid.
Either way he could step off the porch right onto the ice. Carefully; while a few layers down he could see rough uneven lake ice, there was about three centimetres of frozen rainwater sitting on top of it. Slick as a winter sidewalk. That’s why all the shoes by the cottage door were chosen for their grippy soles.
These used to be his father’s, way back when. They’d need replacing at some point, but… they had some life in them yet.
After a few steps Charles’s body remembered how to walk so’s to minimise slipping, and he was able to fairly confidently make his way to the middle of the lake. Where a dark circle, roughly eight paces across, showed a thinner spot in the ice.
When Charles was a boy all you could make out was a white rectangle down in the deep, pressed against the bottom of the ice. Everyone assumed it was a piece of paper, and the children invented all sorts of stories about what was written on it.
Over the years the ice had gotten thinner, little by little. From the bottom rather than the top. And only in this circle, around the paper. Like it was pushing its way to the surface.
Charles shivered and took a comforting sip of his tea. Funny. The local radio station kept warning people about the heat wave, and giving all sorts of advice for keeping cool, and here he was thinking he ought to have put a proper coat on over his hoodie.
Well, he’d go right back inside. Just wanted to look first.
While the paper wasn’t noticeably closer than last year, he was sure he could make a few more words than before. He squinted and moved his head back and forth, peering around the distortions in the ice.
It’d be easier if it wasn’t such an old-fashioned - or rather, old - script. But he was certain it was a contract. Bunch of dense text followed by three signatures spaced far enough apart that they clearly didn’t want to be associated.
Given where (and how) the contract had been stored, Charles felt safe assuming it was magical in nature. Probably to do with the lake? Though he supposed it was possible someone had enchanted an entire lake to stay frozen just to keep a contract on (or rather, under) ice.
What would happen when it reached the surface? That was the main question. If there was going to be a column of icy water here, well, that was fine. He put some safety fencing up and try that cold dipping fad. But if the whole lake reverted to water that’d be sad indeed.
Hmm… pretty sure that part near the beginning was ‘shelter to winter’. What, had this originally been a cold weather retreat? That didn’t make sense. Or… maybe it did? The family often rented the cottage out to winter sport enthusiasts. The enchanter could’ve been really into ice skating and wanted to make sure they could do it at any time, with no fear of falling through.
Seemed a whole lot of hassle though.
Hm.
He could almost swear that second name, the top-right one, was a ‘Collins’. Probably his mind projecting. While his parents had inherited the cottage from his grandparents, they’d bought it cheap off someone who was moving abroad.
Could be an unrelated (or very distantly related) Collins, of course. It was hardly an unusual surname.
It did add to the intrigue, though.
That word there looked like ‘pact’. ‘For’… ‘stand’… ‘For as long as this pact stands’? Something like that. Then the next bit was ‘winter’… something something.
Charles sighed and puffed on his hands and gave up. Maybe next year.
He straightened up - then paused and crouched down again for a last, pensive look.
No. No, while that might be a ‘Collins’, it definitely wasn’t a ‘Charles’ in front of it. Looked like an ‘M’.
Good, good. Not that it would’ve made any sense that - in fact it would be very worrying if - well. It probably was someone of no relation to him whatever, and that was fine.
Maybe he’d have another look to see if he could find anything on the people who’d owned the cottage before his family bought it. Contact the local history people again.
And see what he could make out next year.

Prompt was “Deep in a frozen lake, there’s a contract visible through the ice. No one knows who signed it or what it promises. But every winter, the ice gets thinner. This year, you can almost read the names.”