Chapter Text
They like their ghosts in Faerghus.
It’s a sort of joke among the other nations of Fódlan, that the people of the Holy Kingdom are uniquely grim folk. Death and famine and the bitter winds of winter hang over them like a shroud.
So, they say, who can blame them for a few more ghost stories?
As a country so well acquainted with the long nights of the north, the longest night of all is like kin to them. Many cultures associate the cold and the dark with death, so the people of Faerghus often wonder why it is so surprising that they hold death close when they wear both the cold and the dark as second skins.
They spin tales of it around hearths and campfires, with more intimacy given to the horror than their neighbours dare. Stories of drowned mothers seeking children along riverbanks, dogs with glowing eyes cooing songs of ill portent at crossroads, wandering soldiers stalking battlefields for their missing heads, and strange women weeping tuneless ballads in the moors—tales of lingering woe are rooted in their consciousness as a nation, for better or worse. They know that the dead see and hear and walk, with the same certainty that the sky is blue and rivers flow to sea.
Faerghus knows the dead like it knows the cold—like it knows winter and like it knows plague and famine and bloodshed; intimately, and without surprise. Faerghus knows stories of all these things, woven into their bones like the tight threads of their bearskin cloaks. Faerghus tells stories like it fights wars; well, and with fervour.
There is a war now, like and so much unlike the wars of the past. But the thing about war that is ever constant is that, no matter how much it may feel like it to those in charge, it rarely manages to stop the world in its tracks completely. Life goes on in all corners of a war-torn nation, changed perhaps irreparably but not stalled.
So, when winter falls on the lands of the north, no number of occupying Imperial summer-children, whose lands reek of sunshine and fertility, can dissuade the tales of new dead from taking root, nor can they stop the festival banners from being flown.
The northern festivals are older than Faerghus itself, so it is no wonder the Holy Kingdom’s war has no bearing on them; Pyrenatt, the festival of winter’s beginning, owes nothing to the cold ashes of the Blaiddyd-Kings, nor to the slow-rotting corpses of southern Emperors and eastern traitor-kin—only a place at the table for their souls if they wish to take it.
Pyrenatt is the night the dead walk the frosted moors of Faerghus, beckoned by revelry to the settlements of the living, where bonfires burn the claws of winter back for one more night. When the veils between living and dead are thinnest, the horrors of stories come to life. A night of revelry and trickery, community and story, a night of the dead.
But in the towns of Blaiddyd territory, the rumour among the people is that the dead, as of late, haven’t been quite so dead at all. They say a highwayman comes riding through country roads in the night, disappearing into the shadows before dawn. They say he rides for revenge. They say he has the strength of ten men and a wicked blade. They say when the moon is full, his icy blue eye burns for the blood of imperials.
They like their ghosts in Faerghus.
It is as much a threat as it is a promise.