My exposition, or thought process:
Like I said, the images together just screamed cold and ice at me, but unifying them was rather difficult. In the end, I just let the stream of my consciousness take over and that's what you see here, the ramblings of my fevered brain late at night.
I know I was vague and obtuse in many places, but I think part of that flows from the state of the narrator and protagonist - at the beginning he is dying and dreaming, the confused remembrances of a spirit that refuses to leave the mortal coil. At the end he is undead and his brain is working in an entirely different fashion than a living man's would. Svetlana and the masked woman at the end are the same person, although I admit this is not clear at all. The 'vague shapes and lights' signify some sort of fiendish entity attacking the pair and possessing her, so to speak. When the protagonist awakes he is a revenant - the details of what happened are not entirely clear to him, but his task is...
In the end, it appears I was too vague for my own good, which was my fear when submitting the piece. I had fun writing it, though, and fun reading everyone else's work and receiving valuable criticisms.