A Song for Winter: Favorite Food - Druid Candy

    Every year after the harvest the united Clans of Wintersong and Drackonas played host to a circle of harvest druids from the south for a week.  During that week the druids hosted a festival consisting of games, feats of strength, feasts, and rituals to ensure the future fertility of the fields. Festivities went on day and night for the entire week, culminating in the burning of a large wicker man filled with wheat, meats, mead, and other offerings to the Allfather. Each year, William looked forward to the harvest festival for one reason only: druid candy.

 

    Druid candy was a unique sweet treat that only the druids seemed to know how to make. Each piece of the sweet treat was a mixture of specially grown fruits and berries that were liquified and sealed inside a piece of crystallized honey. From his first taste when he was a small child, William was hooked on the sweet treat. Each year he would countdown the days till the next festival and he could get his fix again. Of course, after every festival William would try to save a small horde of them to ration throughout the year but that plan always failed after about a week leaving him craving his sweet treat again.

 

    When William was small his parents would just give him the druid candy but somewhere around the age of ten that stopped and he was forced to figure out how to get the treats himself. Druids of the Harvest didn’t have use for coins nor did they need a blacksmith so those two routes to attain the druid candy were out of the question. Being decent at ax throwing was enough to net a small bounty of the druid candies but the real prize was to be won in the fighting tournaments. This is where William shined even from a young age.

 

    Despite being a peaceful people the Harvest Druids still trained themselves in martial arts as well as nature casting. So to hone their skills every festival had a fighting tournament between warriors from Clan Drackonas and the Harvest Druids. William easily dominated the youth tiers, quite handly dispatching druids and clan mates alike. That was until he came up against the Archdruid’s daughter, a tan-furred lioness with purple-colored eyes named Violet, in the final round. She was more than able to adequately defend herself against William’s sword and ax. As the tournament came to a close every year William and Violet would face off once again. Sometimes William would win but in others, Violet surprised him with a new tactic and took the victory. In the end, it didn’t matter who won as Violet always gave her portion of the druid candy prize to William as she could get them year-round anyways. After the festival, William always wished he could have spent more time with Violet outside of the tournament but she was always involved in the rituals going on. William wasn’t in love with her at least he didn’t think he was as he already had someone but she weirdly fascinated him.