The Authority That Keeps Silverwick Alive
The Guild of Frost Authority is Silverwick's official governing body—the administrative power that manages resources, maintains magical defenses, enforces regulations, and makes decisions that determine whether the town survives each winter. They are pragmatists, planners, and record-keepers. Without them, Silverwick would descend into chaos.
Their authority is absolute in matters of survival. When the Guild declares rationing, you ration. When they call for wall maintenance, you contribute your Glimmers. When they regulate trade, you obey. This isn't tyranny—it's necessity.
Their symbol is a snowflake within a shield—protection through careful structure, beauty in mathematical precision, strength in unity. It appears on official documents, storage facilities, and the blue robes worn by Guild administrators.
Structure and Leadership
The Guildmaster: At the top sits the Guildmaster—currently Aldric Thorne, serving his sixth year. The Guildmaster has final authority on resource allocation, emergency measures, town regulations, and conflict resolution. They chair the Council, represent Silverwick in negotiations with other settlements, and bear ultimate responsibility for the town's survival.
Being Guildmaster is exhausting, thankless work. Every death from starvation, every failed harvest, every Frost-Walker breach—all fall on your shoulders. Thorne looks ten years older than his forty-seven years.
The Council: The Guildmaster leads a council of seven senior administrators, each overseeing specific areas:
Master of Stores - Food storage, rations, consumption tracking
Master of Walls - Wall maintenance, Glimmer-user coordination, ore supplies
Master of Trade - Negotiations with other settlements, merchant regulations, import/export
Master of Records - Town census, birth/death records, Glimmer registry, historical documents
Master of Works - Infrastructure—buildings, roads, bridges, public facilities
Master of Harvest - Planting and harvesting coordination, White Quilts management
Master of Justice - Disputes, regulation enforcement, coordination with the Watch
Each Master has staff—clerks, assessors, inspectors. The Guild Hall employs perhaps thirty full-time, with dozens more for seasonal work.
Appointment: Guildmaster is appointed by Council vote when the previous Guildmaster dies, retires, or is removed. Council members are appointed by the Guildmaster with Council approval. Anyone can petition for consideration, but Masters typically come from families with administrative experience, literacy, and numerical skill.
Primary Responsibilities
Food Storage and Rationing:
The Guild's most critical function. They manage all communal food stores—grain from harvests, preserved meat from hunts, traded goods, emergency reserves. They calculate current population, available stores, expected winter length, safety margins, and rationing schedules.
Based on calculations, they declare rationing levels:
Normal Rationing: Comfortable amounts. Bellies full. Rare—maybe one winter in ten.
Careful Rationing: Adequate portions. No one starves but no one's satisfied. Most common—seven winters in ten.
Strict Rationing: Sparse portions. Perpetual hunger. People lose weight. Happens every few years.
Emergency Rationing: Survival minimums. Children and essential workers get priority. Desperation sets in. Rare—once per generation.
The Guild enforces rationing through distribution centers. You present your household token, receive your allotment. Taking more than your share is theft punishable by reduced rations or exile.
This makes the Guild unpopular. When you're hungry and they control food, you resent them—even though rationing prevents mass starvation. Thorne loses sleep over these calculations. Too strict and people suffer unnecessarily. Too lenient and stores run out before spring.
Magical Ward Maintenance:
The walls protecting Silverwick require constant Glimmer charging. The Guild manages this through:
The Registry: All Glimmer-users are recorded—name, Glimmers, strength, reliability. Practical necessity, not oppressive surveillance.
Scheduling: The Master of Walls creates rotation schedules. Glimmer-users with Heat-Sense, Hearth-Warding, or protective abilities are assigned specific wall sections and times. It's civic duty, not optional.
Ore Management: The Guild controls all warding ore extraction and distribution. This rare resource cannot be wasted. New ore goes to critical wall repairs first.
Assessment: Guild inspectors regularly check wall sections—measuring charge levels, identifying weak points, prioritizing maintenance.
Without Guild coordination, wall maintenance would be haphazard. The town would fall.
Regulations and Governance:
The Guild creates and enforces regulations covering:
Trade practices (fair weights, honest goods, pricing limits)
Building codes (fire safety, structural soundness)
Resource use (firewood allocation, water rights, ore access)
Public behavior (violence, theft, property disputes)
Health measures (quarantine, waste disposal, water quality)
They work with the Watch on enforcement. Regulations are pragmatic, not ideological—they exist because rules are necessary for survival.
Census and Records:
The Guild maintains comprehensive records: population census (updated annually), birth and death records, marriage records, property ownership, Glimmer registry, criminal records, trade agreements, historical documents.
This isn't nosiness—it's survival data. You need accurate counts to calculate rations, Glimmer records to maintain walls, property records to resolve disputes fairly.
The Guild Hall
The Guild's headquarters sits in the North Quarter—a large stone building with blue banners bearing the snowflake-shield symbol.
Ground Floor: Public offices. Citizens register births, resolve disputes, apply for trade permits, request emergency assistance.
Second Floor: Administrative offices. Masters' private rooms. Council chambers. Records library with centuries of documents.
Third Floor: Guildmaster's quarters. Thorne lives here—convenient but isolating.
Cellars: Major food storage. Grain, preserved meat, emergency supplies. Heavily guarded. Temperature-controlled using Glimmers when possible.
The building is functional, not beautiful. Thick stone walls, small windows, efficient layout. A working building for necessary work.
Relationships with Other Factions
The Craft Guild: Complicated. Both essential, both compete for authority. The Craft Guild controls labor, goods, services. The Guild of Frost Authority controls resources and regulations. Constant tension.
Recent example: Craft Guild wants relaxed firewood regulations. Guild of Frost Authority worries about depleting forest resources. They compromise: increased cutting in designated areas only, with monitors.
Both sides resent negotiations but recognize necessity. Complete conflict would destroy Silverwick.
Ice-Singers Guild: Respectful distance. The Ice-Singers guard independence fiercely. The Guild requests cooperation for river management and festivals. Usually the Ice-Singers comply—on their terms, their schedule, their conditions.
Maren and Thorne have professional relationship, not friendship.
Solstice Faithful: Allied but separate. Father Solace handles spiritual matters; the Guild handles civic ones. Clear division prevents conflict.
The Guild funds Chapel maintenance, ensures Solace receives adequate rations, respects religious authority. Solace supports Guild decisions publicly, provides moral authority for unpopular regulations.
The Watch: The Guild's enforcement arm. Watch Captain Frost reports to Guildmaster Thorne officially, though Frost has significant autonomy.
The Guild sets policy; the Watch implements it. This relationship is crucial and generally functional. Both are pragmatists focused on survival.
Current Challenges
The New Thinkers: Corwin Blackwood and followers question Guild authority, particularly regarding the Midwinter Tithe. They argue resources are wasted on superstitious traditions.
The Guild is caught between maintaining tradition (which has kept Silverwick alive for centuries) and addressing legitimate questions. Thorne tries to balance respect for tradition with openness to scrutiny.
Resource Scarcity: Recent harvests adequate but not abundant. Stores are tighter than ideal. If next harvest fails or winter runs long, Emergency Rationing becomes possible. This terrifies Thorne—he's read the records. Emergency Rationing leads to desperation, theft, violence.
Glimmer-User Shortage: Fewer people manifesting relevant Glimmers means wall maintenance is harder. Those with applicable abilities are overworked, resentful, burning out. The Guild has no solution—you can't force Glimmers to manifest.
Legitimacy Questions: As New Thinkers grow vocal, some question whether the Guild's authority is justified. By what right do seven people control everyone's resources?
The answer: because someone must, and they've done it competently for centuries. But "we've always done it this way" is less convincing to younger generations.
Why They Matter
The Guild of Frost Authority is simultaneously essential and resented—the eternal fate of administrators.
They make decisions no one wants to make. They enforce rules people hate. They calculate probabilities of death and adjust accordingly. They bear responsibility for thousands of lives with insufficient resources and impossible choices.
Without them, Silverwick collapses. With them, it survives—uncomfortable, frustrated, hungry sometimes, but alive.
That's the bargain. And for three centuries, it's worked.
The Guild of Frost Authority keeps Silverwick alive. Not happy. Not comfortable. But alive.
In endless winter, that's enough.