King’s Walk Eve. Two parades. One staring just before dusk that’s bright, playful, and noisy, and filled with spooky decorations. A second starting at midnight that’s quiet and somber. The bright lanterns have been swapped for ones with red glass panes. If you want to get to the south side of the river from the north, you have to take a boat. Southwards bridge crossings aren’t allowed.

This started as a throw-away reference in a narrator piece I’m writing. I wanted an in-setting analogue to Halloween. That turned into me examining the cultural habits surrounding the holiday which, as it turned out, had two different celebrations: one public, one personal.

That turned into thinking about the story behind the ritual, and drawing on real world mythological cycles—The Mabinogion, Cú Chulainn, Arthurian legends—and coming up with my own: the Aedrath Cycle and a king that crossed the river while carrying his dying brother (I may modify that name, since it does feel somewhat fake/imposed).

We worldbuild to exercise our creativity, sure. It’s fun exploring these worlds we create, and seeing what they contain. It’s fun inventing things and seeing how they line up (or contradict).

More than that though, we also worldbuild because it informs the characters that live in those worlds. I came up with a holiday and a potential mythological cycle, just so I could have a throw-away reference. Only now, there’s a holiday that people can look forward to and have opinions about.

And now, when Sunniva carries a teacup up to the Highhill cemetery to bring them back, when they look down at the River Ossen, they can see the bridge that they walk across every King’s Walk Eve, and feel the weight of a mythic holiday that the city has been celebrating for as far back as anybody can remember.