It was a fortunate time after all...

"This youngest of seasons had been one harsher and more resentful than the siblings of its kind that had visited the years before.
It had started as all smaller sisters had, hysterically thrashing, calling attention to itself. To this end the weathers of springtime had been wielded to disasters at her infantile hands.

Throughfuls of water had showered from the greyed skyward carpet, had dampened the place and had soaked the floors. Firm clay had lost its healthy constitution, becoming more akin to sponge-like moss. Further rain had punched pans and then potholes in the softened, weakened grounds. Day by day, two times seven-times, the clouds had given to drink.

Sickly had swelled the thirteen-times gulping earth; it had vomited at the last pouring.
Light sediments, humus and its growths had been thrown up to an ugly grey-brown broth that had flooded over everything. Sands and heavy things coming within the barf had punched away anything in their way, leaving fields with scars and houses as pathetic bumps. Rocks and detritus had stayed on as a painful blanket after the floods end.
The living earths had been washed away.

The season had matured over the forthnight and its violence had grown derisive.
For seven days it had bored the wicked winds from the bare mountains. Bare they had been apart from the high and wide quartz monuments decorating their inanimate ridges and their testaments of lives bygone; the wilted corpses and bleached and dried bones of strangers and therebetween those of comrades had lain scattered.
They had blown the tarnished remainders of the grounds they crossed away as dust, but Sand and small things had become hurting missiles. The homes that had yet survived became a trapping for the poor environmental refugees when the wild air had punctured their shelter's openings, ripping them open and ripping them, those inside, apart.

At last she had denied the consecrated grounds and their sorry people sustenance. The sunlight had not touched their skin, skies smothered by a thick bloated blanket. In a show of spite restraint no showers yet had graced their place in the last week. Merely the spittle of vocal mockery thrown with verve and viciousness had wetted the dust and stone that had sat in place of missing earth for precious few ethereal moments. Apart from their incidental gift the shouting and storming and rolling clouds and thunders alike had taken great care to deprive deeply.

So.
She, the season, had been called 'a cruel mistress'.
'A torture' , 'a punishment', 'a thorn', 'a crock of deuces' and 'a harlot' had been her deigned titles. The names, all, had been wails thrown to the winds in hopes that the suffering that spawned them would depart alongside with them. It was for naught but for misery.

Be it that the mistress may had heard and replied.
Be it that it may had been a cruelty unrelated.

The cold that had invaded that night was malice.

It tread soundlessly. Discarnate tendrils of clear crystal had swayed in snaken paths in brush that had not moved with them. No breath and no wind betrayed their hidden passing, yet their passing-on had been proven by carcasses still as stone and then the dust that sat in their place; white, crystalline powder of life inanimate that had been before - before the cold crossed it. That life had perished.

Ill-luck met the chosen few who had not crumbled and become as snow.
It had gripped their bones afore it had taken to the flesh. It had pained then numbed then stung and scourged and pierced and pained again - and then the cruelty had taken them; their iced memorial had been taken by the cold with no reservation.

At its center in the darkest night had been an icy glare. As blue and as clear as the frozen nighttime air above the moonlight covering clouds the eye had laid its gaze towards the consecrated ground where a miserable thing had been resting. The infant of seven weeks had been recumbent in the cold lifeless dirt. Its thin, meagre and dry body had not squirmed while drawing haggard, shallow breath. It had been yet alive - still alive.
On it had transfixed the watchet eye... and had seen. What had it seen?"

[-] That at the deathly chills cradling the newborn had slept still.
[-] That at the icy nails clawing the newborn had been roused awake.