The sword she carried no longer felt quite so heavy, its weight shared by shoulders strong enough to help her bear it. Through the glass walls, holiday music drifted across from the neighboring high-rise’s pedestrian walk, the crystalline notes floating through the balcony’s barriers like gllimmers of hope. The familiar carol felt different now, transformed by context just as she was being transformed by his presence.

Maybe mom was right about overthinking things, she mused, watching snowflakes dance past the windows. Some circuits complete themselves whether we plan them or not.

The storm intensified, turning the cityscape into a canvas of white, each flake caught in the glow of the farms that lined the buildings’ edges. The usual sharp angles of their modernist architecture softened under nature’s patient sculpting, while inside, another kind of transformation was taking place - equally gradual, equally inevitable, the laws of accumulation in action.