Consider this like a preview, without giving away too many details. Before winter had schedules and streetlights, it had silence.
Long nights stretched farther than certainty. Fires burned low. Food ran thin. People slept lightly. Not because they were afraid, but because attention mattered.
In those months, stories were not told to entertain. They were told to keep people awake.
This is why winter has always carried strange stories. Not as spectacle. Not as fantasy. But as a way of rehearsing watchfulness. Faith, fear, memory, warning. All braided together, because winter made no distinction between them.
