where are the fantasy/scifi races who hibernate?
i can lose hours thinking about such a culture. the rituality and cyclicality of it. how they turn a simple, survivalist drive into story after story. how they build their lives to be abandoned for a while every year.
underground, beneath every house, hospital, and community center, is a chamber nobody enters - except for a certain week at the end of autumn. it’s a week of chores and feasting. and in the evenings, families begin to clean out these dim, quiet rooms, making sure to tell their children why this is all so important.
people stop going to work. they bed down their gardens and let their fields lie fallow. the stores pack away their merchandise. the boats are hauled out of the water. maybe the power grid and the internet shut down.
everybody covers their furniture in sheets. white, for the clean snow where no feet ever step? or maybe black, for the safe darkness below? they burn strong-smelling plants in their houses to ward off pests, and they hang amulets on the doorknobs - because just think how many monsters and demons were born in their culture to wreak havoc on a winter house.
or on a hibernating body, and the tetherless soul inside it.
so they must be very careful, as they cross over. they eat the correct last meal and sing the correct last songs. they wash themselves clean in freshwater and exchange their living clothes for wrappings, like a chrysalis or a shroud. they cover their eyes with jewelry, so no unwanted visitor can slip inside that way.
i’m not sure what the underground room looks like on the inside. they might cover the floor with pillows for comfort, or dried flowers for significance - or they might lay on the bare ground, as they have always done. they might carve pictures into the walls. they might take their valuables down with them, or they might simply leave all that stuff in a box upstairs. after all, thieves have to give themselves to the ground too.
you light a lamp, and keep it lit until everyone’s safely asleep. then it burns out on its own. the door is closed. it’s as dark as the inside of the earth.
above, the weather and the animals pass through ghost towns.
and when the thaw begins, when the first plants wake up and the cracking of ice shakes the waterways, the people come out. they chase the dust and ghosts from their cities with noise - anyone who can’t play an instrument bangs on a cooking pot. they run up and down the streets, arms extended to the sun. (the sun!) they wash the sheets that they’d used to cover their houses and hang them out to dry on every clothesline, until it looks like the buildings have grown wings.
because this isn’t waking up, this is rebirth.