Soultide

As the year draws to a close in the depths of winter, Kyvalore celebrates Soultide, a festival that begins a week before the winter solstice. With snow falling outside, it is a time to share, to make new friends and celebrate the old; winters can be long and difficult, particularly without a community. 

Making full use of their magic bonds—or their magic-bonded friends and family—the inhabitants of Kyvalore decorate their homes with festive flair—in Durmur, where the buried city slumbers in its stone caverns, candles burn day and night, shimmering off of a thousand carefully strung crystals that hang between the columns. In Fayewood and Lanris, garlands of hardy evergreens are interwoven with bright ribbons, iridescent glass baubles from Vitrun giving off their own kind of glow. The coastal cities of Ardglass and Reim, for all they’re divided by the ocean, are both redolent with the rich scents of roasting chestnuts and spiced wines, their street hawker stands festooned with beribboned clusters of bells that jingle in the wind. Even in hot, inhospitable Keldeep, those hardly few make the best of their lot, carving deadwood and stone into fantastical sculptures, embedded with glittering bits of obsidian and quartz. 

On the longest night of the year, in the middle of Soultide, Kyvalorians gather together to tell stories—legends, folklore, anecdotes handed down through generations, and their own. Memories are important, after all. They tell you who you are, where you’ve been, and where you might go someday. 

It is in the quiet moments, the spaces between breaths, where Soultide’s deeper meaning lingers, an undercurrent to the festivities that lingers long after every crumb has been eaten, every dreg sipped, every ribbon undone. The languid flow of mana carries with it a call, gentle and quiet, less a summons and more an invitation. For those who answer in the frozen, deepdark winter nights, there is a heartbeat humming somewhere on the edges of hearing, not a sound but a feeling, deep within their souls. It urges them onward, out into the world, following a thread they only recognize as it unravels in their wake.