The Slush — The Meltwater Margin
“Not all who are kept are kept clean; many come still half-warm, and these must be set in the cold a while, until the last of the Thaw is wrung from them.” — Letter to the Caldhavenites 3:13
The Slush is the Frostian “between”: the meltwater margin beneath the Middle Rime where souls who died in the Cold’s keeping but still half-thawed are slowly re-frozen before entering the The White Horizon. It is neither the bliss of the Horizon nor the torment of The Mire, but a painful, hopeful cooling.
The Doctrine
Most souls die neither perfectly cold nor wholly melted: kept, but with Warming Heats (venial fevers) and the soft residue of old sins still clinging. Such souls cannot yet bear the full Clarity of the Horizon (it would be unbearable as bright sun on snow-blind eyes), so they pass into the Slush to be wrung of their last warmth — a process the doctors call the Re-Freezing of the Dead. The Slush’s cold is purifying, not punitive: every soul there is certainly bound for the Horizon; none is lost.
The Experience
The Slush is described as a vast, grey, half-frozen marsh under a low cold sky, where the souls stand in slowly-hardening water. It is cold and hopeful — the cold deepens daily, the water hardens toward clear ice, and each soul knows it is being made ready. The pain is the pain of “the last warmth leaving” — like feeling returning to a frozen limb — and the joy is the certainty of the Horizon ahead.
The Helping of the Dead
A central practice of the The Hoarfrost Communion and The Glacial Orthodoxy: the living may hasten the re-freezing of souls in the Slush through prayer, Cold Communions offered for the dead, almsgiving (the The Works of Keeping), and the great feast of The Vigil of the Slush (the “day of the cold dead”), when the faithful keep all-night stillings for those being re-frozen. The cry is: “May the cold come quickly to them, and the Horizon soon.”
The Reformation Dispute
The Reformed Frostfast Churches (after Eilif Vorne) reject the Slush, holding that Connor’s keeping is complete and instantaneous — the kept soul is “made clean-cold in the moment of death” and goes straight to the Horizon. The selling of thaw-pardons (indulgences promising shortened time in the Slush) was the immediate spark of the The Frostfast Reformation; Vorne’s The Forty Theses of Ice open by denouncing it. The retention or rejection of the Slush remains a chief dividing line between the rites.