Winterbinding
The Winterbinding— Circa 787 CE
The storm had trapped the valley for a week, the snow climbing to the lintels and the wind singing in the chimneys like a choir gone mad. Inside the hall, the household gathered at his summons—every servant, huntsman, and tenant who bore his crest. The Graf stood by the hearth, pale firelight dancing across his sharp features.
“You serve me as Graf Klaus von Nibelheim,” Valkaenar said, “but your service demands you know more.”
He lifted one hand. The doors groaned shut of their own accord, the great iron latch sliding home without touch. Candles rose from their holders, drifting into the air like pale stars. The hall glowed in a hundred small suns that turned as one toward him.
Then he dropped all semblance of humanity.
Light struck him strangely, bending at his edges. The faint lattice of scales along his throat shimmered with red frost. Wings unfolded—vast, translucent things that caught the air like veils of ruby-stained glass, their edges rimed in winter light. The warmth fled from the room. Frost filmed the goblets on the table and traced the walls in fine, delicate veins.
No one spoke. Even the wolves beyond the doors went silent.
“You live beneath my roof,” Valkaenar said, his voice carrying the resonance of something far older than a man. “You eat of my land, you sleep in my valley. All of it endures because I permit it. So long as my secret endures, so will you. Should it fail—”
He turned his gaze toward the nearest candelabrum. Every flame in the room guttered and died. Darkness swallowed the hall for the span of a heartbeat—then flared to life again as the candles reignited in perfect unison, blazing twice as bright.
“—then even light will forget you.”
Adelhard, only a boy but already marked by faith, fell to one knee. His breath misted in the air. “Deus absconditus,” he whispered, trembling.
Valkaenar drew his sword, cut his palm, and bled into a bowl of wine. The mixture hissed and steamed; the scent of blood turned sweet, almost floral. “Drink. Speak of what you have seen, and your tongue will forget how. By my word and yours,” he said, “this house endures.”
One by one, they stepped forward—servants, hunters, stable hands—each taking a sip, eyes wide with fear and reverence. Adelhard came last, his fingers trembling as he raised the bowl.
When it was done, Valkaenar closed his hand over the bowl. The sanguine wine froze to white crystal; the candles steadied.
“Now,” he said softly, “we understand one another. Serve me faithfully, and you will never know hunger or cold beneath this roof. You are mine now, and my providence is yours. Break the silence, and the mountain will answer before I do.”
The steward met his gaze. “Then the mountain will never have cause.”
Valkaenar smiled faintly, wings fading into shadow as he reshaped the spellwork around himself to again become the man they had always known—tired, human, merciful.
“Good,” he said. “Then let the storm end.”
And as the household watched, the wind that had battered the valley for seven days faltered, then ceased. Snow drifted lightly through the window cracks, slow and harmless.
Adelhard knelt last, head bowed. “You are chosen,” he said.
Valkaenar looked down at him, amused. He said nothing more.
When dawn came, the sky cleared as though scoured clean. None who stood in that hall ever spoke of what they’d seen again, yet each bore the memory like a brand—terrifying, beautiful, and absolute.
The storm night was only the beginning.
When Valkaenar bled into the wine and made his household drink, the magic didn’t stop at flesh.
It rooted.
Each who drank that night carried a thread of his will woven into their blood, and when their children were born within his domain, the thread passed quietly to them.
The oath became lineage.
The geas was simple: loyalty, secrecy, preservation.
It did not choke thought or choice; it only closed the mouth at the edge of betrayal, the way a mountain stills an avalanche before it falls.
Those bound could leave his service, but never speak what they had seen.
Their descendants would feel the same hush settle in their throats when the House was named.
Positions within the household would be filled with descendants of the Winterbound. If none were available, Valkaenar would be notified and it would be handled.
As the centuries moved, Valkaenar appeared as himself only rarely—once to each generation to empower the spell and to give tangible truth to it; enough to remind the blood what it obeyed.
By the time the spell itself began to fail, the whispered legend had permeated enough that it no longer mattered. A descendant of the Winterbound that didn’t believe only needed to step foot upon the grounds of Nibelheimhof for an unsettling sudden understanding that Herr Klaus was not to be trifled with, Graf or not.
