Audio Release for Yelen & Yelena Chapter 14: Dark Snows

Part 3: The Rot

Velna flees the village after a single act of defiance brings the soldiers down on them, but what is waiting in the forest is worse… Stick around to the end as Worldbuilding Part 3 is at the end of this chapter, and I talk about how I went about constructing my fantasy religions for this novel.

I’ve included the transcript for the Worldbuilding section below in this post.

CWs: eviction, animal death (an owl), mycelial body horror, fear of drowning/freezing to death.

Listen now read along

Music Credits:

Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

Intro/Outro: Quinn’s Song: The Dance Begins

Soundtrack: SCP-x6x, Giant Wyrm

Worldbuilding (3)

I think when I was trying to come up with fantasy religions and fantasy aspects and spirits and stuff, I think I came up with Yarash first, who has absolutely no role in the book whatsoever now, but that’s just how it goes, isn’t it.

I was playing with ideas to work out — (well apart from literally just now, that’s the only time you see [Yarash], I think). I was playing with ideas to work out how a fantasy religion would have developed, so I ended up doing a tumblr post on this, or a couple of tumblr posts on this, which went my closest to viral on tumblr that I’ve got. Basically, I was talking to my husband about this idea of a god with a necromancy cult and the cults are driven off into the wasteland or something. And that’s how Yarash becomes the spirit of midwinter. And he was like, yeah, that’s not how religions work, though, is it?

And he was right. Religions are not based on a single static event and beliefs. Folk beliefs are not really based on single static events, even though they may claim that they are. A religion is a moving vehicle of many parts and layers, and it’s also a living, breathing thing that changes and shifts over time.

So what sounds more real than some necromancy cult is, OK, a god whose followers wanted to raise the dead at midwinter festivals, right? And they couldn’t do it. So they used puppets instead as representative of the dead. And then as magic progressed, they actually did manage to make the dead reanimate for short periods. And now you have your first major splintering of the adherents of this religion, and a rupture between the conservatives who say puppetry is the only right way to do these rituals because that’s traditional, versus the newer group who say that necromancy was the intention behind the puppets. So therefore you should now switch to necromancy.

And the two factions fight about this internally for a while, probably forever, but it comes down to who is holding secular power at that time, and what they think of the necromancy magic.

So if you have a ruler of some kind who sees the value in necromancy, you’re going to see that religious faction rising above the puppetry one. And this is where you’ll get discourse.

In this case, let’s call it the ‘Old Bones’ discourse, where the puppets are referred to as the Old Bones, the traditional way to conduct these rituals.

And when popular opinion or the political climate shifts, you may see a suppression of necromancy and an uplifting of the puppets as the only true
way to do these rituals. And necromancy might even be banned for a time. But this is like a seesaw, right? It goes back and forth until things settle down. Maybe necromancy is normalised now in other parts of society. And so the rituals go back to puppets to differentiate the religious rites from the more mundane uses of necromancy or the more political uses of necromancy.

And you’ll find signs for like chiropractors having a sign of a puppet hanging over the door because the puppets represent the old bones, and that’s now blended with modern popular understanding, and so you end up with these festivals perhaps divorced completely from their original religious ritual, and maybe nobody even really believes in this god anymore, but they still have puppets as a traditional part of a midwinter festival.

And that’s how you get puppets in midwinter.

And also, that’s where necromancy comes from.

But your protagonist may not know any of that history at all. Because how many people actually know the ins and outs without misinformation, without bits and pieces of folklore getting… mangled horribly and mixed up with mainstream religious ideas?

How many people actually know actual Medieval Christian theology, for example, around the 12 days of Christmas?

How many average people on the street know you know can name 10 saints days in the Christian calendar? If you’re in a Catholic country, or an Orthodox country, yeah I reckon people could do that. If you’re in a different country where things have gotten divorced from their original context, how many people could actually do that, even if they say that they’re a Christian, they come from a Christian background; maybe they’re a lapsed Catholic or something….?

So does your protagonist have any kind of understanding of that?

But you need to know that because it’s just more interesting if you’re going to write about somebody having faith and somebody not having faith you know,
you need to know the ins and outs of it.

Anyway, I think that feels more real and dynamic as a faith system, so you can start to hang other things off it.

And that’s how I approach myth-making. It’s not the only way, it’s not the “right” way, I’m just saying that’s how I approach it, and I always try to represent different levels of faith in these fantasy scenarios, and have different angles on it so that I can kind of make it feel a bit deeper, a bit richer, and a bit more realistic.

So Yelena is incredibly pious and very faithful to her chosen spirit, but she’s not thinking about the afterlife. She’s very focused on finding joy in the here and now. So she picks a spirit that is all about that, and all about finding pleasure and all about giving pleasure to other people, crucially, because Erish is about mutual giving and receiving of things. Not just giving and receiving of orgasm, but giving and receiving of pleasure.

And yes, pleasure is a euphemism in this case for orgasm or for sex in the fantasy culture that I’ve created, or in Yelena’s culture specifically, because there are people who pass through that hostelry who wouldn’t know what Erish worship was. And people in Northport probably don’t know what Erish worship is. Like the sailors, they have no idea that that’s what she’s doing, you know, because they’re all about their pleasure, and they have very firm ideas about what their pleasure entails.

But for Yelena, like, Velna is basically a pillow princess. So she’s not reciprocating. She doesn’t particularly like that, I don’t think. But Yelena gets pleasure in making Velna come, right, so she enjoys that aspect, and so therefore the giving and receiving of pleasure is mutual, she’s just getting that mutual pleasure in a different way. Just because she doesn’t have an orgasm every time doesn’t mean that she isn’t engaging in Erish worship, right, so that’s that’s the whole thing about Erish.

Velna isn’t religious, doesn’t believe in a lot of things, and then has this really disturbing experience in the woods. And not to victim blame with Velna, but I think her agnosticism about spirits has really tripped her up here, because she doesn’t have as strong a faith in something like Yelena does. And so there’s nothing out there to listen to her to begin with. There’s nobody out there who knows her. And so the prayer goes to literally whoever is listening to be ignored, or not, as they please. And so that has knock -on consequences.

Whereas Yelena’s devotion to Erish also has some knock-on consequences, but in slightly different ways.

And so those are kind of elements that I’m playing with, that I’m kind of leaving up to you to intuit, and, you know, like play with in your own kind of… way as readers, I guess, and to think about. And so these are elements of fantasy religion building that I just thought I’d share with you for now, for this chapter, and I’ll save the rest for another time.

If you do want to know anything specific just reach out to me on Bluesky or message me on Ko-Fi; let me know. Drop a comment on cmrosens.com and let me know if there’s anything that you’d like me to maybe write a longer blog post about, or do a special episode on.

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