closing the shutters at night
good luck or just good sense?
For many people living around the Arche and the lake towns, especially rural and farm folk, it is considered bad luck to sleep without your windows covered. In some places it is enough to simply have shutters hung superficially to each side of bedroom windows, with no need to close them when asleep. Both versions of the superstition are widely held and observed however.
History
Believed to have started as a reaction to several children's deaths in the second and third century AS. At the time, these incredibly traumatic deaths were attributed the mythical creature called the Perpallaki. Though no real evidence for any such creature could ever be found, it became a common belief that the monster entered into children's bedrooms through their window. In reaction, many rural and isolated families, on whom the Perpallaki was said to focus it's attacks, began installing wooden shutters on the insides of all their bedroom windows. They would then close these shutters at night, ostensibly keeping out the child killing monster.
This had it's own short term effects of course, causing stress and fear in children who's only experience with real darkness would have been for a couple of hours every week during the Truenight. The children would be provided with plenty of candlestones so there was sufficient light to sleep, but parents generally agreed that any discomfort in the children would be worth their lives.
There were variations of these measures as well. Some believed that the whole family needed to sleep in a single room, or that the windows only needed to be shuttered up during mid-week when Esha was set. Over the years and eventually centuries however, even when the supposed Perpallaki attacks ceased, the tradition of shuttering windows to sleep continued and developed into a general sense that leaving them open would be somehow dangerous or unlucky.
The practice and the superstition around it is considered extremely foolish and mockingly low class in the cities and the rest of Austur, but still remains. In the early 700s, in the interests of national unity in the face of heightened muada attacks, the Council banned the Builders Guild from adding shutters to new house construction. Despite this though, some around the western Arche and north of Nuvemason Lake, simply made their own and hung them after they moved in.
Execution
Where most Austurians would find the idea of sleeping in darkness somewhere between absurd and terrifying, the tradition has echoes even in the present. Throughout the towns, cities, and farms up and down the Arche and even around the lake towns, the vast majority of houses still have shutters built on the insides of the windows.
Most do not use them anymore, and many have them as a sort of architectural tradition, without even being aware of their origin, but many families around smaller logging or farming villages will still close those shutters at night and sleep with candlestones.
"Me cousins guild-mate took thu shutters dun ooff his windas to be mur like sum Landen floater. Tuu days later his dotter disapared, and in a week, dint thu Uma jus cum show up and tell im she wus a cultist an bin arrested. Old bargmens tale or utherwise, oldfashunned may be, but I'll nut so much as tuch me shutters!"
- unnamed hemp farmer, Lespuar (789AS)
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