Since the Howler had arrived from her uncle Benevolence hadn’t been sleeping well. She was tired, exhausted was perhaps a better word and feeling generally run down. When the carriage clock on the mantle of her bedroom chimed to wake for another days work she groaned into the pillow. The room felt cold, colder than normal, she wondered why her fireside spell, that normally kept her room pleasantly warm, had dissipated in the night.

With an effort she pushed herself up to seating, as her breath misted in front of her face. The room was dazzling, but for all the wrong reasons. The window was clouded over, and pale tendrils of ice, spiderwebbed across the glass, icicles hung from the corners of the ceiling, and around the window and frame. It must have been a remarkably cold night! Unseasonably so, for the start of November! She glanced at the fireplace and her fireside charm was still burning brightly, but the ‘flame’ effect that accompanied it had turned blue rather than its usual rosie pink orange hues.

Benevolence swung her feet out from under the blanket, dragging a throw around her shoulders, to try and stave off the chill but the moment her feet hit the floor the wood was covered in a thick layer of ice. This was odd.

Something was very wrong here. She tried to stand, and her feet struggled to get a grip on the now icy wood. She launched herself to the door, and when she grabbed the brass door knob of the rimlock it immediately iced over and she half expected her hand to stick with the cold but it didn’t. There was a crack of icy and a shower of dislodged icicles as the door as she managed to pull the door open.

Benevolence made it down the stairs to the ground floor and into the back room of the shop, her bare feet turning the ground to an ice rink behind her. She needed to find Lucy, the shop girl, she needed some help. She never made it through the hot house, which connected the front of the shop to the back, as soon as the excessive heat of the room hit her very chilled face, she fainted.