The Morana idol, carved for the goddess of winter
In Poland, children still carry a straw doll to the river at the end of winter, set it on fire and throw it in. The doll is Marzanna. In Czech and Slovak villages she is Morana or Morena, and the day she goes into the water was called Death Sunday. When she drowns, the winter goes with her.
Who Morana is
Morana is the figure of winter and death in Slavic spring rites. The fifteenth-century Polish chronicler Jan Długosz names "Marzana" among the old gods, which is one of the earliest written mentions. Scholars still argue about how much of a goddess she was before the chroniclers wrote about her. The rite is better documented than the goddess: a straw figure dressed as a woman, carried out of the village with songs, then burned, drowned, or both.
The sheet on the cover describes her the way we see her. She is a tall, slender figure, close to frail, with skin as pale as fresh snow, eyes of piercing ice-blue, and long silver hair that moves as if a winter wind were always passing through it.
Her winter in the game
In Forgotten Eras, Morana's winter is coming, and she is felt more than seen. Frost creeps into roots, the air bites, and every choice Ivan makes moves the forest closer to healing or to a winter that never ends. She speaks with Ivan as a voice. Her idol is the part of her that has a shape you can stand next to.
From sketch to idol
The concept went through four pencil stages before the final one. The crown came first, a tall headdress of points, and the face under it stayed calm and cold from the beginning. The skull at her chest arrived at stage two, the crescent and the cross-in-a-circle sign at stage three, and by stage four the carving covered the pillar from crown to base, with the hair falling down the back. The final stage, painted in dark wood on a purple-lit rock, is the one that went to the modellers.
She stands with three other carved idols in the kingdom: the Leshy, the Vodyanoy and the Grey Wolf.
Sources: Forgotten Eras on itch.io. Jan Długosz, Annales seu cronicae incliti Regni Poloniae, fifteenth century.
