Every forty years, Winter Lake freezes solid - and the village beneath it rises intact from the ice.

Houses. Streets. A church.

And the dead.

Dr. Erin Vos, a climatologist stationed alone near the lake, witnesses the impossible resurfacing of Hawthorn's Rest - a settlement drowned more than a century ago. The villagers are not ghosts or monsters. They walk, speak, and remember. And as their memories return, so does their hunger.

The village wants its people back.

Descendants of the drowned are drawn toward the lake by a force they cannot resist. Bloodlines become chains. Belonging becomes a sentence. And anyone alive who shares the village's ancestry is marked for return.

As the ice thickens and the boundary closes, Erin is forced to confront an ancient covenant buried beneath the lake - a pact that trades lives for permanence, memory for survival.

Beneath Winter Lake is a chilling work of atmospheric horror about isolation, inheritance, and the terrible cost of belonging - where the past does not stay buried, and the dead are always waiting to come home.