The Myth of St. Panagea and the Winter King

Once upon a time, in the early days after the fall of the Cumaeans, when bold heroes defeated dragons and demons to make the world safer for the generations to follow after, a man and his companions built a fort to guard the mouth of the only mountain pass between the cold northern seas and the eastern provinces.
At first he and his companions lived peacefully together, but after a while it became clear that they would need to continue to roam and fight the evil things that still lived everywhere in the world - the demons and the dragons may have receded but they were not the only monsters in the world. So they left the fort and continued to fight for the side of good in the world. And the man defeated a great evil, and pried from it a dreadful weapon that dated back to the Pronoan Times - before Cumae, before the Lin Elves and their war with the Cacogens of the Moon; a weapon with an evil heart, that turned the man to evil.
And he betrayed his companions, one of whom was his wife, and all his companions perished and his wife perished, killed by the demoness who tricked the man into thinking she was his wife, because she looked like his wife had looked. But she didn't sound like his wife had sounded, and when he confronted her, in that moment the man realized what he had done.
So the man waged a war on the demons, and the devils, as was the will of the weapon, and of its true masters. He also waged war on the angels, who fought him, but felt pity for him and did not destroy him.
He left the world then, and went back to his fortress built long before by his companions. And his rage was such that it made the storms rage for five months of the year, the cold dark months that reminded him of his loss, when Typhoneth ruled the north in darkness and storms that should have stayed in the sea instead raged on the mountain.
But then, a champion of Phanuel, a paladin named Panagea came with power and confronted him, not with an army, but with peace - a peace so appealing that it cracked the rage in him, and he relented, and she was not destroyed in the storms that year. Her spells were woven from love and infused with comfort, to try to convince him to reject the evil weapon, not from hate, but from goodness.
She came to the man in the storm, the deathless Winter King, and begged him to relent, so that the people living on either side of the mountains could use the pass to bring food and furs and wood from the plateau to the towns, where every year people were starving because of the winter storms.
And Lord Phanuel told her his name, giving her power over the man. But St. Panagea refused to use the name, fearing the man would feel betrayed once more. And she looked for him before the storms and could not find him. So she looked for him during the storm, and the skin began to peel off of her hands and face, but still she looked, and inside his fortress the storm did not rage, and she found him. But she did not use his name.
He relented, but the weapon would not let him go.
Typhoneth relented, but he would not stop his storms. Still the Lord of Stormrage agreed to only let them free for five weeks, not five months. St. Panagea stayed with the man, and knew his name, but did not use it, and that was why Typhoneth was not completely bound. And Phanuel was glad that she had saved the man, but for her disobedience once she left him she could never return to the fortress he had built, so she died in love, in Coldhorn, waiting for him to come for her; but he could never come. And to this day the storms rage for five weeks in the mountains, and priests and the people worship in the Chapel of St. Panagea in Lower Coldhorn, which records her legend on the murals of its walls.

Summary

An ancient hero earns his rest, goes out for a few more adventures and defeats a great evil, which gives him an ancient weapon that corrupts him.
The hero betrays his companions and his wife, but the evil forces aren't content to leave it at that; a demoness does a doppleganger move and takes the place of his wife, presumably before the hero realizes his unspecified betrayal has led to her death, and evidently they live together for some time, but he gets suspicious and figures out to his horror what happened.
Then he goes on a warpath and kills demons and devils (two separate types of creatures here? Or lumped together as a single concept? We can't be sure from the text) with the interesting detail "...as was the will of the weapon, and of its true masters." And as if that's not enough, this hero even goes after the angels, who feel bad for him and don't destroy him.
Then he left the world - figuratively, it seems, as in, he became a hermit - and went back to his fortress, but he was still so angry that he made storms rage through the Coldhorn Mountains for five months of the year, effectively impoverishing the communities on either side by cutting them off from each other and the rest of the world.
Then - some unknown number of years later, a paladin champion of Phanuel named Panagea came to him with love rather than weapons and it worked inasmuch as the storms relented, but she didn't get him to give up his weapon and Typhoneth doesn't stop the storms, just restricts them to five weeks rather than five months.
Some business about his name ensues, where names are emblems of power and of great concern to fiends, but Panagea doesn't use his name - implying she truly reconciled him, and didn't compel him with magical binding. He wouldn't give up the weapon, though. Then she's cursed, or he is, because in some way they're separated - either she left and couldn't come back, or he wouldn't go to her, or she couldn't leave or else that would come to pass, but eventually she did, and it did. And, as is the typical format for natural myth, an explanation of the storms closes the story, as well as an origin story for the Chapel in Lower Coldhorn which is actually there to this day.

Historical Basis

The timing of the myth is suspect right from the beginning - "In the early days after the fall of the Cumaeans" was a period not nearly as lost to history as the mythic tone suggests. This would be the time of the first Autarchs and the reclamation, not some ancient proto-era of demigod heroes slaying dragons and demons. Scholars think that this is a relatively recent addition to the story to lend it greater historical credence.
In fact, the story itself is mostly unknown to history and no records or references to any such weapon or person appear before the first appearance of this story, not in the lost ages of ancient Autarchs, and certainly not in the remote mists of the Pronoan age, but a mere 200 years ago. No other known myths besides this one refer to the vague weapon, or to a personage known as the Winter King.
St. Panagea, on the other hand, is referenced in several tales and has been on the official catalog of Celestii saints for the past ten millennia at least. And curiously, one of them does make a passing reference to St. Panagea soothing the jealousy of Typhon by showing him adoration and building a shrine in those same mountains that rivaled those of Phanuel and Ysebiel that were evidently already there; in that story, however, there is none of the business with the weapon or the fortress; and none of these shrines exist today unless they are all three within the footprint of Coldhorn Fortress and no longer separate shrines accessible to common travelers. More to the point, a storm that lasted 5 solid months would surely have appeared somewhere in the literature before this listing, but the one month and one week storms have a long history in Naarodan songs and folklore, none of which references five months of storms.
A legend persists that during the height of the annual storms, the ghosts of the companions at the fort come to life and re-enact their murders while the storms rage, but thus far no archivist has seen any proof. In the end, it may simply have been a marketing ploy several hundred years ago to drive more tourism to the area, supported by a gullible or at least willfully uncritical audience of the rich and powerful of the empire; relics of this oddly compelling figure are a common roadside attraction to separate tourists from a few coins on the roads of the Empire, and for a time a small museum dedicated to so-called artifacts of the Winter King was operated out of the House Absolute, though it was partially collapsed and abandoned in the earthquake of 12002.
In the final analysis, scholars agree that the story may preserve some details of an older and more 'authentic' myth, but that it has been through a collision with a relatively modern circumstance - perhaps a famous warrior who fought dragons, demons and devils and on the basis of his hit list, preferred to stay anonymous, but still wanted his story to be told. Any number of warlords and heroes of the day might fit the bill, and by cleverly suggesting this was an ancient myth from a lesser known town in a sleepy northern province, it's not terribly surprising that the story caught on in Khazig, and from the prime province, spread rapidly across the rest of the Empire.