The Sixfold Star
The Rime Star · the Chief Symbol of the Faith
The Sixfold Star (the Rime Star) is the supreme symbol of Frostianity — the six-armed snowflake that is to Frostians what the cross is to other faiths. It marks every Frosthall, altar, grave, vestment, and book; it is traced in the The Frostmark gesture; and it appeared in the heavens to the emperor Cassius with the words “In this cold, conquer.”
The Form
A perfectly symmetrical six-pointed snowflake about one still center. Its geometry is itself a creed:
- Six points — the six Crystalline Virtues (Stillness, Patience, Clarity, Temperance, Endurance, Purity).
- One still center — the Cold itself, the source from which the six radiate; also the hidden seventh virtue, Hope (the center from which the falling snow descends).
- Three diameters (three lines crossing the center) — read as the Three Colds: three lines, one star, one center.
- Six as the number of the Six Winters of Making and the 6×2 Drifts.
Uses
- The Frostmark gesture — brow, heart, right shoulder, left shoulder (“still, cold, clear, and kept”); see The Frostmark.
- The Frost-cross / Frost-star pendant — worn by the faithful; the crusaders’ badge (the frost-cross, see The Rime Crusades).
- Architecture — the hexagonal plan of the Ice-Vault Frosthall; the six-petaled rose-windows of blue ice-glass.
- The grave-marker — set over the dead as a pledge of the Reforging.
The “No Two Alike” Teaching
A favorite Frostian meditation: that no two snowflakes are alike, yet all are sixfold and all are kept. So each soul is utterly unique, yet all share the one pattern of the virtues and the one center of the Cold — “the Hoarfather freezes each soul a different star, and not one is lost in the drift.”
Significance
The Sixfold Star proclaims, in a single sign, the whole faith: the Cold at the center, the virtues radiating, the Three Colds, and the uniqueness and keeping of every soul. To make the Star is to confess all of this at once.