Page 6 of The Villains of Winter

Suddenly, in the cold dark, Elliott would only hear the familiar rattle of the engine and squealing of a burst tire. He’d felt a powerful ache of horror because he immediately knew it was the Ford. He knew the car would crash without a grip onto the road.

Elliott prayed beneath his breath that Knox, James, and Finch wouldn’t crash into the cluster of trees and injure themselves. That they all would remain intact.

However, he didn’t know to pray that his biology teacher wouldn’t be on his trail back for the night with a phytology specimen sample to examine the petrification and incrustation fossilization. His teacher crossed the rain-slicked path as he waved to Elliott. Excited to share his new findings.

Elliott didn’t know the impact would shatter Mr. Newton’s bones, eye sockets, cartilage.

He didn’t know it would be the beginning of several of their dark secrets.

At that moment, a single snowflake drifted down from the sky as if to take the body of Mr. Newton as sacrifice. Through the shock of trauma, all Elliott could think of was the annual winter sacrifice ceremony.

​​ CHAPTER FOUR

THE HIBERNAL CEREMONY WAS THE oldest ritual in New England history.

The winter ritual was protected under the First Amendment in the United States constitution as the freedom of religion for pagans. Every year in the pagan college, a student was slain as sacrifice to the winter solstice.

Seaxnēat was the patron deity of the Saxons. Winterfylleþ, the first breath of winter, was the patron deity of the Crucian pagans. Winterfylleth.

To serve the winter was an honor.

To exalt the winter was the highest act of worshipping art.

Thus, to be admitted into the college, the students were expected to participate in the sacrifice. To ascend to artistic perfection. To rise gloriously in politics as if in warfare. To fearsomely defend the ancient rites and rituals of art and heathenry as though it were a bloodstained battlefield against ancestral tradition.

After all, the forefathers of the country had failed miserably to preserve paganism.

The pagan traditions were retranslated into Christianity and Catholicism. It was a humiliation.

Oh, how delighted Americans were by reindeer and little elven men. Oh, how jolly the holiday sales were every December! The ancient tradition of Yule was reduced to plastic, artificial lights and wreaths that held no artistic value. Instead, the rich folklore of the Yuletide was expropriated and thereafter rechristened as Christmas.

The ceremonial drinking and oath swearing were forsaken.

The great pagan history of Samhain was defiled by the Western church with similar disregard. Oh, how the tiny American children loved their bright polyester Hallowe’en costumes! Ah, lest anyone forget the adults and their trashy, prurient, hypersexualized outfits that littered the streets. How gleeful they were in their inanity! The manufactured pumpkins lined the homes of Americans across the country in secularity. How perfectly fine they were to be the uninitiated. How pleased they were to be the unfledged.

In sacred history, Samhain was the time of year where the Celts appeased their dead, lit bonfires to repel evil spirits, and in reverence left feasts, harvest, and offerings in the wintry woods. Its significance in later generations were rendered meaningless and senseless. Trick or treat.

The Anglo-Saxon belief in Ēostre was supplanted with Easter service. The Catholic churches were full of believers on Lupercalia, paying homage to St. Valentine, instead of whipping women brutishly with goat hides for blessings of fertility as the Romans practiced. The New Years celebrations were popularly embraced throughout the United States, resplendent with champagnes and nationwide parties with no acknowledgement of Janus, the Roman god of doors and gates from which the holiday originated. The altars, strenae, and temples were burnt and abandoned.

The Baneburians despised it all. The desecration of paganism was painful in its unsophisticated superficiality. Paganism was no longer cultured, instead rather reductive and profaned beyond sensible recognition. Heritage was diluted into revenue and consumerism. The inferior holidays could not deign to be artistic in any sense.

There was only the hibernal ceremony left in Banebury, Connecticut. In the Northern Hemisphere, the Gregorian Calendar established the winter solstice as the first breath of winter.

Therefore, over the annals of modern time, Winterfylleþ was unified with the winter solstice on December twenty-first or December twenty-second in the event of a leap year. Their final tradition belonged entirely to the Crucian pagans and thus, the winter ritual was fearsomely preserved as the hibernal ceremony.

​​ PART TWO: ÆSCWULF COLLEGE FOR STATECRAFT AND ART

BANEBURY, CONNECTICUT

AUTUMN

THE YEAR OF THE HIBERNAL CEREMONY

​​ CHAPTER FIVE

ELLIOTT’S BARE FOOT RESTED AGAINST James’s boot underneath the hunter’s moon of coppered October. The phosphorous fog receded in the distance of the silent mountains. James had stripped down to the waist beside him, his chest dampened from exertion, his roughened breath briny from the brackish river where he’d rowed for five thousand meters. Elliott’s shirt rested beneath his head. He star gazed beside him in the serenade of the crickets, the campfire warm against their cheeks, the earthy resin of cedar bark redolent of rained soil. He’d fallen asleep against Elliott’s shoulder, his lips parted in the dark. He’d always fallen asleep that way.

Elliott savored the moment. The rare moment they were truly alone. The sky was awash with brisk stars above the vast canopy of the Nixon Forest. The clouds heavy, rich with petrichor; the wind bowed like an archer. Despite the threat of death that encroached them in the winter ritual, the autumn was Elliott’s favorite time of year.