MISSING

[RiverNotch]

The hearth sat 
crooked. It's pitted Grammar edit: Apostrophe not needed.
stony face rested heavily Heavily not needed: a stone anything, unless it's small, always rests heavy, and I'm pretty sure a hearth is never so small.
on grimy soot covering Soot is always grimy, or is never really grimy at all, since it is the very definition of grime: use a better adjective. 
rotted wooden planking. So the heavy stone hearth sat on a dusty floor of wood? That's terrible architecture there.
The last surviving ember
surrendered to cold ash.

Opposite the hearth, Grammar edit: Comma not needed.
sat a splintered rocker.
Utilitarian but well built, Utilitarian things are always well-built: otherwise, they wouldn't be of much use, now, would they? Or are you being a Hebrew poet here, with all your redundancies?
it stood firm against the dead
weight, while it's knotted Grammar edit: Apostrophe not needed. Gets kinda bothersome, but if you're not a native English speaker, I can sympathize, and only pray you get better, as my fellows did. Aside: ironically, though I should be a non-native English speaker, my constant exposure to English anything seems to have made me much worse with my native tongue than with English, but that, of course, is both irreverent and irrelevant.
creaking feet sheltered the floor
from decay and drops of crimson. The chair's legs block the dripping blood's way? That isn't the least bit plausible, so it isn't the least bit vivid: blood can find its way all too easily down such surfaces.

A wooden door defending
breathless freinds from icy Spelling edit: Friends.
swirling fog that surrounded
the cabin had just recently
lost the war. One long woozy of a sentence that definitely says something, but not in a satisfying way. I think I get what you're trying to say here -- in fact, I think I got the whole story, especially with that title, but this stanza just isn't as breathless as it should be. Do we need to know the door is wooden? Why the luxury in the description of the fog? And "had just recently" is just so damn passive. Here's a shot:

"A door defending
breathless friends
from the fog 
just lost the war."

But that is a tad too rhythmic to be perfect, at least in my opinion. 

Footsteps and screams faded into the black. I agree with the earlier comments: this has no tension, no real punch. Has potential, but it's all sort of unrealized, partly because it's lacking in detail, partly because it's lacking in insight, and partly because its voice is too decadent. Little detail would be nice if the voice was just as scared, just as sparse; little insight would be nice if the horror really filled the senses; and decadence would be great if the details were what made the reader breathless: otherwise, you've got a flop.

And here, a few responses on your earlier defense:

The fire dying is not a vivid image, precisely because it's either lacking in detail, or its description is too fluffy. If this is reminiscent of the way bodies turn cold after death, then best to either show it, or tell it in a good way: I think such an insight would be fair here, and you shouldn't expect the readers to get that without a bit of nudging (I mean, implication is key, sure, but there's no such thing here).

Utilitarian is no thrills, and could be cheap, but all in all, it means sturdy and usable: a utilitarian anything won't be much use as a utilitarian anything if it weren't well-built. Something like "simple" would not have that description, but still perhaps describe what you're looking for.

You wrote footsteps, but it's the same point. Would be a good ending, I think, if all was so well. But do remove the "the": it sounds kinda wrong ("the black"? don't you mean "the darkness" or "the night"?), and it would be much sharper that way (a scene fades into black, not into the black, in scripts, if I remember that bit of info right).