Widow’s Peak

Widow’s Peak is the ancestral home of the Lovelace family, an unassuming dynasty of Quietfolk who have lived, largely unnoticed, in the Blastlands around Old Bravo (and now New Bravado) for decades. Quietly, they have tended their land and kept their traditions. And it was only in the starving years that followed the Hiway War that this insular community looked beyond its high walls to the fading Lonestar and said, with kindness, “let us help”. The Lovelace’s heavy focus on community and family have led them, in the past, to tend towards isolationism. Since the Hiway War and the de-installation of the Barons however, the Lovelaces have slowly gained ground both literally and politically. Now, in terms of landmass, their holdings rival the Railroad Conglomerate’s. 

The town itself consists of four primary public buildings, the Courthouse, the Silo, the Morgue and the Church. The remaining buildings are generational homes in perpendicular rows in a rough square around the town’s central building (the Courthouse). A soft slope leads you down into the Undercroft, a space intended to house the memories and tokens of familial remains of the Lovelace families, extended families, and those travelers who died as an unknown to the Lovelace homestead. Located outside the town Church’s courtyard, this sacred space is the culmination of all lives lived in and around Widow's Peak over the generations. Each space of remembrance has a lantern, or an item in honorarium of that individual.

All of the buildings face inward, in an old Lovelace tradition, and they’re all painted a strict eggshell white; painstakingly maintained. The Lovelaces are people of tradition and people of habit. And it is their strict adherence to tradition that has kept their community from the terrors of the Long Night and beyond for longer than living memory.

Once a year, from roughly mid-December to mid-February, the Lonestar sky goes completely dark. Crops die, livestock starve and the peoples of the San Saba bed down or freeze. Terrible threats stalk the Long Night - and only the warm hospitality of indoors and firelight stave off the terror and chill. No one knows why the Long Night comes. Only that the sun will one day fail to rise and in its place instead rise the Longwalkers, mysterious entities which stalk the Long Night like figures from myth and story, sometimes inspiring the creation of the same.

To beat back against the Long Night, and against the insidious depression that accompanies two sunless months, the celebration of Winter Lights is a Lovelace tradition that most of the San Saba honors. Feasts and firelight are the main components of any winter light festival - but the grandest and loveliest of them all include hundreds of tiny, softly scented candles that the Lovelace’s spend the latter months of the year preparing for that singular purpose.

The religion of the Lovelaces is as understated as their whitewashed houses and undyed linen chemises. They are a fundamentalist sect of the Nuclear Family, which informs their community-centric, sometimes isolationist, views. There is no single “father” in the Lovelace family - but dozens, and no single mother or sibling figure that maintains archetype. Instead, Lovelaces often identify strongly with a figure in the Nuclear Mythos and, throughout their lives, emulate their chosen figure in their daily lives, pontificating on role and purpose their whole lives through.

Virtual Events Based in Widows Peak

Hearthbound