Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

Ireland — a land that has known real famine to the marrow of its history — keeps a spirit of hunger that is, uniquely among all the terrors of this chronicle, a test of charity , and one that the giver, not the monster, decides the outcome of. The Fear Gorta — the "man of hunger," the hungry man — walks the roads of Ireland in the guise of a beggar : emaciated past belief, skeletal, gray, wasted to nothing, the very image of starvation given legs — and he goes from door to door, in the lean times and the between-times, asking, in a thin voice, for food : a scrap, a crust, an alms of anything at all. And here the legend divides on a single hinge, and the hinge is you . To the household that gives to the Fear Gorta — that answers the famished beggar with food, however little, and a kind word — he brings good fortune : prosperity, plenty, luck for the year, the household that fed hunger blessed with never knowing it. To the household that turns him away — that refuses the starv...