Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

The boreal winter forest — the landscape of the Wendigo: silent, vast, cold, where survival depends on cooperation and where the failure of that cooperation produces the worst of all transformations. There is a specific kind of hunger that the cultures of the northern boreal forest recognized and named, and it is not the ordinary hunger of a missed meal. It is the hunger that comes after days without food in winter, when the cold has consumed everything and the game has gone and the distances are too vast to travel and the help that should come has not come. It is the hunger that stops being hunger and starts being something else — a consuming force that threatens to override everything human in the person who experiences it, including the knowledge of what cannot be done. The Wendigo — called Witiko in some dialects, Weetigo in others — is the spirit of this hunger. Originating in the mythologies of the Algonquian-speaking peoples of the subarctic forests of North America (p...