For a long moment after the last sound faded, nothing moved.
The courtroom no longer resembled a chamber of law. It lay open and broken, beams split like bone, benches overturned, the gallery collapsed in a tangled slope of wood and bodies. Dust hung in the air, slow and pale, caught in shafts of dim light that filtered through fractured ceiling boards.
The cold remained.
Not the morning damp.
Not river fog.
A deeper cold.
Breath lifted from the mouths of the living in thin white plumes.
And from some who were not.
A constable stirred beneath debris near the aisle. His leg was pinned, his coat soaked dark beneath him. He opened his mouth to scream, but what came out instead was a whisper.
"I falsified a report," he said.
His teeth chattered. Frost clung to his mustache.
Nearby, a woman trapped beneath a fallen railing gasped shallowly. Her hands were slick with blood that had already begun to darken at the edges.
"I told him it was someone else," she murmured. "It was me."
She was not speaking to anyone.
She was speaking because she could not stop.
Across the wreckage, voices emerged in low fragments.
"I struck him first."
"I lied in testimony."
"I meant to harm him."
They overlapped, not shouted, not coordinated. Quiet admissions drifting across the broken chamber like smoke.
A man whose chest no longer rose continued to move his lips.
No sound came.
But the shape of confession remained.
Frost traced along the length of a shattered beam and crept across the judge's bench. Thin veins of ice threaded through cracks in the wood, spreading outward over splintered surfaces. Where blood had pooled, the edges stiffened and dulled beneath a glassy sheen.
The rope still hung from the fractured staging behind the bench.
Harrow's body remained suspended at an angle, boots grazing debris. His head tilted unnaturally to one side, jaw slack. The rope creaked softly in the settling air.
His eyes were open.
Unseeing.
Unyielding.
A low groan rose from beneath the collapsed balcony. A man pushed weakly against timber that would not move.
"I killed him," he breathed.
No one had asked.
No one answered.
The cold deepened.
One of the surviving clerks staggered to his knees and stared at his ink-stained hands.
"I altered the record," he whispered. "Twice."
He pressed his palms to his face as if to force the words back in. They continued anyway.
In the far corner of the chamber, where the shadows lay thickest beneath fallen boards, something shifted.
Not wood.
Not a body.
A distortion in the air, as though heat had risen from the floor — except the air was freezing.
The frost advanced toward that corner and then stopped.
The confessions changed.
They no longer matched what had occurred.
"I drowned a man in the canal," said a dockworker whose face was crushed beyond recognition.
The dockworker had never stood near a canal.
"I poisoned a child," whispered a seamstress pinned beneath a beam.
There had been no child.
The words detached from memory.
They emerged as if pulled from somewhere deeper than recollection.
Breath fog thickened into a faint, swirling mist that lingered low over the floorboards. It did not disperse.
It gathered.
The rope above the bench swayed once, though there was no draft.
A surviving constable lifted his head slowly and stared toward the darkness behind the judge's seat.
He opened his mouth.
"I—"
The word died in his throat.
The cold pressed harder.
The mist drew inward.
For an instant — only an instant — the shape of something upright seemed to occupy the space where frost had halted.
Broad.
Still.
Immovable.
Not formed of flesh.
Not fully visible.
The outline of a presence suggested by absence — where mist refused to settle.
The confessions stopped all at once.
Silence fell with a weight heavier than the collapse itself.
Outside, distant shouts broke through the stillness as men rushed toward the building. Boots pounded the courtyard. Orders were barked.
Inside, the frost held.
Harrow's body hung motionless.
The mist thinned gradually, dispersing into ordinary air.
Breath from the wounded faded back to vaporless exhale.
The cold retreated.
Leaving behind only wreckage.
When the first rescuers entered the chamber, they did not remark on the frost.
They did not remark on the unnatural silence that had preceded them.
They saw only broken timber.
Crushed bodies.
Blood.
And the magistrate suspended by rope above the ruin.
They cut him down.
His body struck the floor with a dull finality.
His eyes remained open.
And though the rescuers would speak later of structural failure, of overcrowding, of negligence and weight beyond design—
None would agree on how cold the room had felt.
None would agree on why so many of the dying had spoken the same way.
And none would look long at the space behind the bench where the frost had first gathered.
By nightfall, the dead would be counted.
By morning, the newspapers would speak of tragedy.
But something had remained.
Not in the timber.
Not in the blood.