Introducing: Rime.
Ronan Drebber is just a teen from Homer, Alaska...

Rime ice isn’t just frost, it’s a force that waits for the right moment to take hold. In the long, wind-bitten winters of Homer, Alaska, where ocean fog drifts in like a living thing, it forms without warning. Each supercooled droplet striking, freezing, and building into jagged white armor that twists the world into something colder, sharper, and more dangerous.

The snowmachine hit the ridgeline at full throttle and I let it go light. That's the feeling. That half-second of suspension, skis off the snow, engine screaming at nothing, the whole machine weightless in a way machines have no business being. I'd been chasing that feeling for eight days. You learn things about yourself at seventeen that they don't put in brochures. One of them is this: you can not-think about anything if you go fast enough and don't stop. The brain has a governor on it. Physics overrides grief. Physics doesn't care who died.​

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Nobody who hasn't lived here understands the aurora. It doesn't make it into documentaries or postcards, the actual thing of it. The way it moves. The way it snaps. There's a violence to it, like the sky is tearing open along a seam and hasn't decided what's on the other side.

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The curtains were gathering at the top of the arc, forming a shape that had no business being in a sky. Some kind of dragon thing looking down at the ridge, on the eighth night after my best friend died from a heroin overdose.