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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Raven Crowking" data-source="post: 1946586" data-attributes="member: 18280">Winter in Long Archer (Informative Text)If the winter had been warmer in Long Archer than in Selby-by-the-Water, if only because, without the lake, the town didn’t have the same damp air.  Dampness permeated everything in Selby-by-the-Water.  Long Archer was rougher, but drier.  But then neither did Long Archer have the food reserves of Selby – in some ways, a hard winter was more bitter along the marches than near the lakes.  Folk began calling it a “Stock Winter” long before Yuletide.In the old days, before the Church of the Seven Good Gods, towns in the north would sometimes sacrifice children to the hilltop banefires on the Winter Solstice, trying to propitiate the Old Bone Man, Aulshaka, whose icy fingers crept from the Utmost North.  Sometimes still, rude wooden images – stocks, they were called, after the false children the faeries occasionally left when they stole babies – were burnt secretly in hearths.  Even the Yule Log, it was said, was a continuation of this practice.  Hidden, changed, pushed below the surface perhaps, but still meant to bribe Aulshaka to return to His cold lair in the north.If in farms around Long Archer, a stump of wood was crudely fashioned, what harm did it do?  The folk there were mostly Druidic in worship, even those who went to the Church on holy days.  Aulshaka was one of the Faerie Lords, and a piece of wood cost little if it meant winter would end the sooner.  And, if in places more northerly, with less food to spare and more to fear from the long cold, who could be blamed if some sickly child did not make it to the spring?</blockquote>

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