Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

Most of the beings in this chronicle come to us — down chimneys, up rivers, through keyholes. The old Swedish countryside preserved, into the collectors' notebooks of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the great exception: a practice by which a human being went to them — deliberately, on schedule, alone, to extract from the assembled powers of the midwinter dark the one commodity they hold and we lack: knowledge of the coming year. It was called the årsgång — the year-walk — and it was no fireside fancy but a documented folk ordeal, practiced above all in Småland and the southern provinces, remembered by named informants who had done it or watched their fathers prepare for it. The protocol, assembled from dozens of tellings, runs like the rubric of a forbidden liturgy. The walker chose the year's thinnest night — Christmas Eve, New Year's Eve, in some parishes Lucia's night — and spent the day of it in preparation by subtraction : fasting completely; speaking to...

Of all the things abroad in the Scandinavian midwinter — and the old North's Yuletide nights were as crowded as any season in Europe — the one the walkers of Skåne and Småland feared on the road itself was a pig. Not a boar of flesh: the gloson — the "glowing sow," the grave-sow, gravso in her older and darker name — a spectral sow, huge, black or ash-grey, with eyes that burn like embers in the dark (the glow that names her) and, running the length of her spine, her dreadful signature: a back like a saw — a ridge of bristles sharp as razors, hard as iron, set like the teeth of a blade. She runs the roads between Christmas and New Year — above all the church roads, the paths the parishes walked to the early Yule service in the black of the morning — and she runs them low and fast , head down, silent but for the click of her feet on the frozen ruts. And her method is the most anatomically specific horror in all northern folklore: the gloson runs between the legs of th...