Before the first winter, the wheel turned clean. Yav, the living world of breath and soil, rose and set inside Prav, the divine order that keeps every season in its rightful place. Beneath both lay Nav, the world of the dead, a still black water where the finished went to rest and did not stir.
Morana kept the seam. She is the goddess of winter and of death, and she is also their end. Each year they drown her effigy in the river, and each year she does not stay drowned. She rises with the thaw, green at the edges, and the world remembers how to begin again. She is not the frost. She is the turning that outlives it.
Then the wheel cracked. Through that crack the three worlds bled into one another, and Nav broke its banks. The dead, who had lain face-up and quiet, found the road back to the light open, and they walked it. Now the finished are not finished. A spirit felled in the light sinks into Nav in plain sight of all, and rises again wearing a colder, stranger power than the one it died with.
So the Wardens are called: folk-heroes who still carry a name worth dying under. They contest the sacred Sites where the wheel is thinnest, and turn it by hand toward the spring, or toward the long dark.
Nothing here is hidden but a single held breath. Everything already dead is watching.
