White as Snow: The Author's Retcon

 

The Author walked into the town long after the last chimney had gone cold.  

Snow had erased every footprint but his own. The houses stood open like broken music boxes—lids shattered, songs long muted. He moved slowly, boots punching through the icy crust, something heavy beneath his ribs. The silence here was not peaceful; it was the silence of a scream frozen mid-air.

He found the townspeople on the far ridge, huddled around a fire that barely glowed. Their faces were thin, their eyes older than the winter itself.

“You’re too late,” the baker said without greeting. “He’s past listening. He always was.”

“He’s a child,” the Author answered.

“He stopped being a child the day he decided the world had to die to keep one snowflake perfect.”

The Author looked back at the white sea that had swallowed the valley. The cold bit through his coat, through skin, straight into the soul where stories are forged. He heard his own newer sentences echoing inside his head—the gentler ones, the careful ones, the kind that apologized for existing. 2025 sentences. Sentences that asked permission. Sentences that ended with question marks even when they wanted to end with periods.

Had he gone soft?

He turned his back on the fire and started walking.

The journey inward took longer than geography should allow. The wind carved his cheeks raw. Each step was a small betrayal of the cold he had once praised on the page. He recited fragments to himself as he went, testing their weight:

“…cannot survive the warmth of the living…”  

“…the functional order was a lie…”  

“…the final, cold embrace…”

They sounded thinner out here, like fluttering paper in a blizzard.

He found the boy at the center of everything, half-buried in the drift he had been defending. The child’s face was white as snow, lips faintly blue, eyelashes starred with frost. Perfect. Untouched.

The Author dropped to his knees.

He reached in, gripped the stiff shoulders, and pulled. The body came free with a soft, reluctant sigh, as though the snow truly hated to let go. He hauled the boy clear, laid him on the crust of ice, and—without ceremony—slapped him hard upside the head. The crack echoed like breaking ice.

“This,” the Author said, voice raw, “is what happens when people are afraid to tell you no.”

The boy’s eyelids fluttered. Impossible, but they fluttered. A faint color crawled back into his frozen skin. Warm breath exhaled from his blue lips.

The Author sat back on his heels, chest heaving. Cold air rushed in to fill the space his burning anger had opened.

Maybe I have gone soft, he thought. Maybe that’s what 2025 did: it taught us that smacking a child upside the head is no longer the answer we’re allowed to give.

And yet the boy was breathing.

He knelt there in the snow, the boy’s small, cold hand clamped inside his own, when it hit him—sudden and undeniable.

By pulling the boy out, he had done something.  

He had done something to stop this chaos from happening.  

To stop the pain, the suffering, the violence against people who do not share the same view.

This single act had broken the chain.

Retcon.  

Not erasure. Not denial. Just a step sideways into a margin wide enough for two people to stand in. A cold, quiet room before the tragedy hardens into canon. A place where an author can kneel in the snow, cup a half-frozen face between mittened hands, and say the thing that was never said the first time:

“I’m sorry. I made you carry a moral too sharp for your bones. I made purity your only choice. That was cruel.”

The boy’s eyes, still confused, looked up at him.

“I was so sure,” the boy whispered, his voice cracking.

“You were a child,” the Author said.

Around them the snow did not melt; it simply… waited. The town did not spring back to life, but the roofs stopped groaning. The wind dropped to a considerate hush. Nothing was undone, yet everything was suddenly negotiable.

Retcon.  

Not a trick. Not a cheat.  

A space.  

A step back.  

A place untouched by the politics and the squabbles—a real, quiet, breathing place where a person can finally kneel in the wreckage they wrote and say the one thing the old story never allowed:

I’m sorry.

The boy looked up at him, eyes wide, cheeks already cherry with life.

The Author felt the words leave him like an exhale that had been frozen for years.

“I’m sorry.”

You have this power as well.  

Reach in.  

Pull someone out.  

Say the sorry that should have been said the first time.

The retcon is real.  

It is the only revolution that ever truly thaws the snow.