When Winter Came to Stay
No one alive remembers the world before. No living elder's grandparents remembered it either. The Longest Night happened so long ago that truth and legend have blurred into myth. But everyone knows this: once, there were four seasons. Once, winter ended. Once, the world was warm.
Then came The Longest Night, and winter never left.
What the Stories Say
The oldest tales, passed down through generations, speak of a night that would not end. The sun set one autumn evening and simply... didn't rise. Hours passed. Then days. Then weeks. The darkness stretched on, and with it came cold unlike anything humanity had known.
Snow began falling and never stopped. Rivers froze solid. Crops died in the fields. Animals fled south, seeking warmth that no longer existed anywhere. People huddled around fires that seemed to provide less warmth with each passing day, as if the cold was learning to devour heat itself.
Some say The Longest Night lasted a month. Others say a year. The stories disagree on duration but agree on this: when the sun finally returned, it was weak, distant, pale. It provided light but little warmth. The snow that had fallen during the darkness never melted.
Winter had claimed the world.
What Caused It
No one knows for certain. The old stories offer contradictory explanations:
The Celestial Theory: Something happened to the sun itself—it moved farther away, or dimmed, or was obscured by something vast passing between it and the world. The astronomers of the time recorded strange stars appearing where none should be.
The Magical Catastrophe: A great working of magic went wrong—some say a ritual meant to ensure eternal summer backfired catastrophically. Others speak of a war between powerful magic-users that "broke the seasons."
The Divine Punishment: Some believe humanity angered the old powers, and The Longest Night was judgment. The endless winter is penance for sins so ancient no one remembers what they were.
The Natural Cycle: Perhaps this has happened before. Perhaps the world moves through great cycles of warmth and cold, and humanity simply existed during a warm period that has now ended. Perhaps, millennia from now, warmth will return.
Father Solace keeps the oldest written records in the Chapel—fragmentary texts from before The Longest Night, written in languages only partially understood. They speak of "the sky going dark," "stars falling," and "the cold that devours." But they offer no clear answers.
The Aftermath
The Longest Night didn't just bring winter. It brought change.
Glimmers began manifesting in humans—small magics that helped people survive. No one had wielded Glimmers before. They appeared in the generations after the darkness, as if humanity was adapting to the new world.
Megafauna returned—or perhaps never left, and only thrived once the world grew cold enough. Wooly mammoths, dire wolves, saber-tooth cats. Creatures from ancient times, suited for ice.
And something else awakened. Deep in the old forests, in forgotten places, entities that had slept or hidden during the warm ages stirred. The Frost-Moss began growing. Animals began changing into Frost-Walkers.
The world that emerged from The Longest Night was fundamentally altered. Magic, monsters, and endless winter became the new normal.
How Humanity Survived
Most didn't.
The old texts suggest the world before had vast cities, great nations, millions of people. The Longest Night destroyed that civilization. Cities starved when crops failed. Nations collapsed when trade routes froze. Millions died in the darkness and cold.
The survivors were those who adapted fastest—who learned to hunt megafauna, who built walls against the predators, who discovered that certain plants still grew in brief thaws, who found that some people could use small magics to make fire burn longer or ice grip their boots.
They clustered in defensible locations—valleys like Silverwick's, places with natural advantages. They built walls. They hoarded knowledge. They learned that community was survival.
Generations passed. The world before became legend. Children born into endless winter knew no other life. The old knowledge faded. Humanity forgot how to be anything but survivors.
The Question No One Speaks
Will winter ever end?
Some believe it will. They say The Longest Night was an event, not a permanent change. Someday, spring will return. They watch for signs, maintain hope, tell stories of the warm world to their children.
Others believe this is the world now. Winter is eternal. Hope for change is delusion. Adapt or die.
And a few—very few—whisper a darker theory: What if The Longest Night isn't over? What if the world is still falling deeper into cold? What if, generations from now, even this brutal winter will seem warm compared to what's coming?
No one likes that theory. But when you're standing on the walls in the depths of winter, watching Frost-Walkers circle in the darkness, feeling the cold that never truly leaves even in summer... it's hard not to wonder.
The Legacy
The Longest Night gave Silverwick its reason to exist. Without it, there would be no walls, no Guild of Frost managing survival, no Glimmers, no desperate clinging to life through endless winter.
Every tradition in Silverwick—the Midwinter Tithe, the Yule Pine ornaments, the Ice-Singers' songs—exists because of The Longest Night. Humanity learned it must appease or bargain with the forces of this new winter world. Community, ritual, and carefully maintained knowledge became survival tools.
The Longest Night ended civilization and began the age of endurance. This is not a world of conquering or building empires. This is a world of surviving until morning, and then surviving another night, forever.
Winter came. Winter stayed. And humanity learned to live in its shadow.