Notes
This book has no notes.
On perchts - Part II
They usually carry some shed of their former selves and might still be obsessed with certain places or things like tidiness. This can only be deduced by their behaviour, however, since the percht seem unwilling or unable to communicate and some are known to repeat some phrases again and again. This seems more like the behavior of parrots then actual patterns of speech. Some percht are strong enough to retain a good portion of their former self and realise their predicament of been trapped in a solid form. Most of those percht are quite old and lived through numerous such transformations. With the coming of summer the percht begin to melt and eventually the originating spirit is set free again. Violence against a percht's solidly frozen body is another way to free the trapped spirits and so even the still sane percht might entice someone to attack and destroy them. In their percht state those spirits that embraced their new state are destructive and mildly dangerous. Their ultimate goal is to postpone or even better prevent the coming of spring. To this end they swear fealty to the oldest of their kind. The oldest tales predating mankind call her by many names. The frozen crone, the hag that rides the winter storm, mother death-chill or the matriarch of winter. In our days folklore simply calls her the percht queen. As such she has found her way into myth and faerie tales, usually as the antagonist, although a select few tales attribute her with some redeeming qualities like the admiration and even rewarding of diligence and duty or admitting her defeat in the face of true love. Though some assume she is just some old spirit that got trapped in the percht state for all eternity she herself gave other accounts. To some of her unwilling guests she claimed to have always been an entity of winter and cold and it was her who wove her spells into the cold that entrapped spirits to become her percht servants. She claimed that is is her who dulls the light of the suns and that there were ages in the past in which she ruled uncontested and the fiercest winter imaginable held the land in it's grip the whole year on, without any spring to be seen. She claimed that the coming of the next age of her regency is inevitable and eventually the work of her and her percht minions will succeed. While of course such outrageous claims of an age of ice are absurd at best, the threat of the queen and her percht is a real one and only vigilance and diligence can ward her off for another year.
