Faerthryne turns to Gekaryna. “You still have records of that?” She says with a surprised tone, following it with a throaty chuckle. “That was how long ago? the last era?” She watches Gekaryna nod.
“Yes, 4559 to 4560 EotTS.” ?nnywella taps her cigarette on the ashtray to the right of her plate and takes a sip of water.
Pressing the corners of her lips against each other, Faerthryne gives Gekaryna a curious look. Knuckling her forehead, she wonders how this information had stayed preserved for over fifteen hundred years. “On Mother...” She groans, wracking her brain; she cannot even remember the last time The Snowless Winter had even been brought up. “I’m going to ask Morziwayn; she might remember—jog my memory.” She turns to the other end of the table, where Luhnylla sits at the head; a rather bored-looking Morziwayn picks at her food next to her. “Morziwayn, come here for a moment!” She yells.
?nnywella chews a piece of the goose; quite good as always, the priestesses never disappoint. She watches Morziwayn eagerly make her way over, plate in hand. As much as ?nnywella likes Morziwayn, she doubts that she will provide any information on her inquiry.
Placing her plate down on the empty gold charger, Morziwayn pulls the chair out and plops herself down in what should have been Arn’s spot—intent to stay longer than but a mere moment. “Yes?”
“Gekaryna asked me about the Snowless Winter of 4559 EotTS. Do you remember anything about it?” Faerthryne asks.
Morziwayn’s gap-toothed smile fades immediately, morphing into the most menacing glower that she can manage with this body's puffy freckled cheeks and large round eyes. “Unfortunately.”
?nnywella is taken aback, not expecting this reaction at all. “What—”
“You know I got the brunt of the ire from the people... you know that, right, Faerthryne?” Morziwayn had never really had the chance to talk about this with Faerthryne prior to now. The sisters had only really started commonly keeping in contact with each other in 173 EotG when the changing of their reigns became an event. “I remember it clearly, all of it; I couldn’t show my face until the end of the Forty Year War [2] because everyone who still hated me ended up buried in an unmarked mass grave somewhere.” She recalls how furious she was at Faerthryne during and shortly after the Snowless Winter, but she has just pushed it away and let it get buried beneath the leaves and deadfall. She has no reason to be angry with her now; the only record of the Snowless Winter is in her own mind and whatever book Gekaryna read about it in. With no intent of making a scene, she gathers herself, keeping her voice as calm and quiet as she can, and begins recounting what she remembers of the Snowless Winter.
“I’m not exactly sure what caused it; I think the few winters prior were quite bad, and the people took to your door to complain. In response, you didn’t take your reign the following year, and mine lasted until Vesnyrah’s started. Since there was no winter, the people needed someone to blame—so they blamed me, because it was my reign. Some came asking for my help, begging me to do something, and I couldn’t—what can I do? the cold kills the bugs, preserves the food, and freezes the soil of the fields... I can’t do that; that's what I told them—’I can’t do that.’ So things got worse; the people got angrier with me, demanding I do something I couldn’t, and they refused to believe me. The storm my old, old, old, old, old—” She pauses, counting on her fingers, making sure she gets the number of homes she has stayed in since then correct. “cottage, and dragged me out in the middle of the night, r... uh... hung me from a tree, and burnt my home down. Between K?spera of 4559 and Lydelynn of 4660, I was killed in any way you could imagine. I remember in what is now Brachb?sc they gathered every unwed woman under 24 born on the autumn equinox in the kingdom and tied them to stakes in the square and waited until I was reincarnated into one of them; once I was—they burned them all.”
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No longer wishing to think about the Snowless Winter, she decides to wrap the story up.
“Klausynn II [3] eventually gathered, with the use of the army, every woman who met the condition for me in the Kingdom of the Crown Isles [4] and put them under his protection—he found six, and Mother put me in one.” She pauses to take a deep breath and rub her eyes, which had started to get watery.
?nnywella quickly does the math in her head. Deciding that there would have been roughly one thousand unwed women between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four in 4559 EotTS.
Faerthryne stares wide-eyed at Morziwayn, completely slack-jawed—she, for once, is at a loss for words; there is nothing in this situation she can do but apologize, even if she doesn’t remember it. “I’m sorry, Morziwayn.” She doesn’t know what more she could say.
Morziwayn looks to Faerthryne, forcing a smile. “I forgave you long ago. It just feels nice finally talking about it... a catharsis.” She does her best to go back to her usual self, hoping that now, the memories—the frequent nightmares—of what happened during the Snowless Winter will finally go away.
The three sit in silence for a moment, Morziwayn picking at her food trying to find her appetite, Faerthryne feeling utterly terrible, and ?nnywella, who had received more information than she wished for or needed, finding solace in her mortality.
Footnotes
[1] Because of a perceived slight against Faerthryne’s pride—this being peasants angry about the previous winters being extremely harsh—she refused to enter her reign in 4559 EotTS in order to prove to the people that a harsh winter will always be better than no winter at all. Morziwayn’s reign lasted all the way until the start of Vesnyrah’s.
This led to a multitude of issues: horrific infestations of pests destroying grain reserves in the winter and eating what few crops did grow in the spring; the deciduous forests spread across the entirety of the subcontinent, becoming home to swarms of beetles and fungal blights, only to burn down in massive wildfires in the summer because of the weakened coniferous trees; smoked and salted foods kept by peasants and nobles alike spoiled early, leaving nearly all without food, and what could be hunted was typically diseased.
During the Snowless Winter, ~15% of the Ianian population died—about 1.5 million of the estimated population of 10 million at the time. Broken down by cause, it would look like this:
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Starvation: 3%
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Disease caused by malnutrition: 5%
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Livestock population collapse and loss of secondary food sources: 1.5%
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Accidents because of abnormal weather: 3.5% (this drops to 0.5% if forest fires are not counted.)
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Unrest: 1%
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Misc: 1%
[2] The Forty-Year War is the longest war in Iania history, spanning from 4640 EotTS to 4681 EotTS and is defined by the wanton use of sigil magic during the final decade by Elspeth Gekaryna Herst I, a.k.a. the Blood Regnant (b. 26/07/4639 EotTS, d. 07/05/4702 EotTS). During the war's last decade, the war killed an estimated 20% of the Iania population, about 1.8 million people, 97% of whom were civilians.
Outside of the Ianian version of The Seven Guardsmen and the folklore of Wylh?lm Herst—regardless of whether it is fact, fable, or somewhere in between—the Forty-Year War is the only recorded and historically confirmed use of Kaladrae as a weapon.
Iania, specifically the Herst family, is still under constant international scrutiny because of the use of sigil magic by Gekaryna I.
Globally, the Forty-Year War is commonly called the Ianian Unification War and is taught in all institutions associated with the Magistrate, both to show the sheer destructive power of sigil magic if it falls into the wrong hands and to display the barbarism of the Ianian people.
[3] Klausynn Herst II (b. 16/11/4523 EotTS, d. 20/03/4564 EotTS).
[4] Lasting from 4338 EotTS to 4682 EotTS, the Kingdom of the Crown Isles was the original name for the area ruled over by the Hersts. It ended with the Ianian Unification in 4682 EotTS.
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