The trees bow. Not in reverence, not in surrender—but under a burden too crystalline, too cruel to bear. Their boughs, once proud and reaching, now arch like the backs of elders worn thin by winters too long. Ice creeps along their limbs like a thief in the night—silent, insidious, claiming what was never offered. It wraps each branch in glass, turning wood to wire, strength to brittleness. The storm moved west to east, a creeping invasion, and left behind not snow, but a kind of armor—cold,...