❄ Frostianity ❄

The Whitening — Sacred Account

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tagsfrostianity, connor-frost, whitening, passion, ascension, central-event
aliasesThe Whitening - Sacred Account

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The Whitening — The Sacred Account

“They thought to unmake him with fire. But the Cold cannot be burned away; it can only be set free.” — Glacial of Voss 19:30

The Whitening is the central event of Frostianity: the betrayal, condemnation, attempted Melting, miraculous Sublimation, and third-dawn Reforging of Connor Frost (33 A.F.). It corresponds in importance to the very crux of the faith; the feast of The Whitening (Holiday) is the highest holy season of the Frostian year. For its doctrine see The Reforging (Resurrection Doctrine).

I. The Last Cold Supper

On the eve of the feast in Wintermere, Connor gathered The Frostborne Twelve in an upper room. He broke the Snow-bread — “Take and keep; this is my body, given to keep you cold” — and passed the The Cup of Clear Ice — “This is my breath, the new covenant, poured out and frozen for many.” Thus he founded the The Cold Communion. He washed the feet of the Twelve with snow, and foretold that one would betray him and that Corin would deny him “thrice before the dawn-frost forms.”

II. The Garden of Hoarstones

Connor withdrew to pray in the Garden of Hoarstones on the slope above the city, in the agony called the Sweat of Meltwater — “and his prayer was so sore that water, not frost, stood upon his brow, and he prayed, ‘Father, if it may be, let this thaw pass from me; yet not my warmth but thy Cold be done.’” (Glacial of Maren 26:39). There Jurden came with the temple guard and betrayed him with a warm embrace — the Kiss of Thaw.

III. The Trials

Connor was tried first before the Solarite high council under the high priest Caiphus the Bright, who charged him with blasphemy for naming himself the Cold made flesh; then before the Calorian governor Marran the Tepid, who “found no fever in him” but yielded to the crowd stirred up by the priests. During the night Corin denied him three times in the priest’s courtyard, “and the dawn-frost formed, and Corin went out and wept, and his tears froze on his face.”

IV. The Melting

Connor was condemned to the Melting, the Calorian death for those who “troubled the warmth of the state”: the victim was bound naked upon the great black The Sunstone in the city’s heat-court, where fires were heaped and the noon sun focused through warm-glass, that the cold might be “burned out of the body.” He was scourged, crowned with a wreath of kindling-thorn, and made to bear his own bundle of firewood to the place — the Way of Embers, now retraced by pilgrims (see The Way of Embers (Pilgrimage)).

For three hours he hung upon the Sunstone in the heat. The Glacials record his Seven Cold Words, the last being:

“It is kept.” (Vell est servat.) — Glacial of Voss 19:30

And at the ninth hour the sun was darkened, a killing frost swept the heat-court though it was high summer, and the great curtain of the Solarite sun-temple cracked from top to bottom.

V. The Sublimation

Here Frostianity departs entirely from the warm world’s expectation. Connor did not melt, and he did not merely die. As the soldiers came to break his limbs, his body passed directly from flesh into a holy white vapor — a pillar of snow-smoke that rose from the Sunstone into the darkened sky “and the heat-court was filled with a fragrance of clean snow.” This is the Sublimation (Frostian: the Rising-White): the cold cannot be burned away, only set free. His body was not found upon the stone; only his grave-furs remained, “white and uncorrupted, folded as one folds a thing to be kept.”

The disciples wrapped what frost remained and laid it in a new tomb cut in The Glacier of the Sepulchre, sealing it with a great ice-stone, and the Calorians set a guard.

VI. The Reforging

On the third dawn, the women — Maren of Hollowfrost, Saint Eira, and the others — came with frost-oils to anoint the body and found the ice-stone rolled away and the tomb full of light:

“He is not melted; he is not here; he is Reforged. Come, see the place where the Cold was kept, then go and tell the Twelve.” — Glacial of Corin 16:6, spoken by a Frostwalker of dazzling white.

Connor appeared, Reforged — no longer mortal warmth-and-flesh but glorified frost, solid yet radiant, who could be touched (he bid Yorin the Doubter touch the frost where the kindling-thorn had pierced) yet who came and went through sealed doors as snow comes through a shutter. He appeared to the Twelve, to Lazren, and (the Acts says) “to more than five hundred at once on the slopes of Mount Hoar.”

For forty days the Reforged Connor taught the apostles, then on Mount Hoar he was taken up into the White — rising into a cloud of snow with the promise, “I go to keep a place for you in the White Horizon; and as you have seen me rise into the white, so shall I come again out of it.” (the Ascension into the White, kept as The Rising (Holiday)).

VII. Meaning

The Whitening teaches the heart of Frostian salvation (see The Doctrine of Stilling (Salvation)):

  • The Thaw of the world (sin, death, decay) did its worst to the one perfect Cold — and could not melt it.
  • By the Sublimation, Connor “opened the white road” by which the faithful may be stilled and kept rather than melted in The Mire.
  • The Reforging is the firstfruits of the general Reglaciation, when all the kept shall be raised as glorified frost.

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