The Veiled Mother

“In northern lands of snow and ice”

“Where ancient souls have turned to dust"

“From pacts of old and broken trust”

“The Winter's Breath shall claim her price”

Most commonly referred to as The Creed of The Veiled Mother, The Veiled Mother refers to a collection of beliefs and religious practices native to the north-east of Kashura, around northern Griselderyn and the lands beyond The Auroras. It is nowadays rarely practiced in densely populated areas where it has mostly been replaced by worship of The Ur-Ashaar, but belief still holds strong beyond the edges of civilization.
It revolves around worship of The Veiled Mother, a faceless, formless entity that, by their beliefs, is the manifestation of cold and winter itself.
Besides The Veiled Mother, practitioners of this faith also venerate nature spirits native to their specific homelands. Bodies of freshwater, such as lakes and rivers especially seem to hold significance to them.

Core Beliefs:

The Great Cold

According to the beliefs of this faith, upon their death, every living, sentient creature comes face to face with The Veiled Mother at the moment of their death, from the smallest rodent to the mightiest dragon. Before her, all is equal: wealth, status, strength, emotion, they all lose meaning. She guides the souls of the dead to their final rest, into The Great Cold, where all dead go to die.
They believe that there is a finite amount of souls in the world, and once the last child has been born, once there are no more souls left, The Great Cold will swallow the world. With this, the world will return to its calm, dead state, without life, without happiness or sadness, without pleasure or suffering, and end to life, to purpose, to existence.

Winter Incarnate

The Veiled Mother is the very manifestation of Winter, Cold and Death incarnate. Despite this though, she appears as kind and motherly, to some even seductive. Her acts of kindness and benevolence however ultimately further her goals, accelerating the world to its ultimate and inevitable end.

Followers and Worship:

The reasons why one might worship The Veiled Mother are manifold, though there are some general trends:
Most do not worship her out of general reverence, but out of necessity, to appease her and to gain her favor. They offer sacrifices to appease her, sing her hymns for mild winters, and offer their own dead for her to claim in order to avert sickness and pestilence from those still living.
There are however also those that have been chosen by The Veiled Mother, those capable of channeling her gifts, that wield the cold of winter and the power of death itself. They generally fall into two categories:

Those blessed by the mother but not loyal to her cause use her powers in battle to take life, to slay as many of their enemies as possible and to halt the growth of civilization. They almost always take vows of chastity, for how they understand it, to avert the end of the world as long as possible, the number of births must be low, so populations cannot grow out of control.

However, those loyal to her cause wield her powers to further her ends. They encourage hedonism and unlimited excess, the endless growth of cities and civilizations. They revel in the inevitable end of the world, for as they see it there is no point in extending life indefinitely if that life has no joy or pleasure in it. In their eyes, if the end is inevitable, one might as well enjoy the time they are given.

Aliases:

The Creed of The Veiled Mother
The Winter’s Breath
The Final End