The Silent Drift
The Great Cold Wilderness of the Contemplatives
The Silent Drift is the vast, trackless snow-wilderness beyond the settled lands of Caldhaven — a place of “no sound but the wind and the falling snow,” sought by hermits and contemplatives as the cold desert where the soul meets the Cold alone. It gives its name to the great contemplative order, The Order of the Silent Drift, whose first founders went out into it “to be still,” and to Mother Aldis, its greatest mystic.
The Desert of Stillness
As the warm religions have their burning deserts, Frostianity has its cold desert — a place of testing, purgation, and encounter. Prophets and saints withdrew into the Silent Drift to fast and pray (as Connor Frost withdrew into the wilderness for the Three Temptations); its silence is held the truest school of the prayer of stillness. Hermitages and the cells of the Stillers are scattered through it, and pilgrims venture to its edges to “hear the great silence.”