Before the goddess, before the legend, there was a woman who endured.

Long before she was known as the Cailleach—Queen of Winter, shaper of mountains, keeper of the cold—she was called Morag.

Born into a glen where survival is earned and warmth is never promised, Morag grows beneath a sky that teaches patience and a land that remembers every mistake. She learns early that winter is not cruel, but honest. That waiting saves lives. That love, when rushed, can break more than it heals.

As Morag comes of age, she builds a life from work, family, and quiet devotion to the rhythms of the land. She loves, she marries, and she hopes—carefully. But when her people begin to fear winter instead of respecting it, when they call spring before its time and mistake desire for destiny, Morag becomes the lone voice urging restraint.

They stop listening.

Loss follows loss. Graves multiply. Traditions erode. And slowly, the woman who once held her community together becomes the one they turn away from—too cold, too cautious, too willing to endure.

Cast out not by violence but by forgetting, Morag retreats into the high hills, carrying nothing but memory, grief, and an unbreakable understanding of what the world truly requires.

There, in the heart of storm and stone, winter listens.

Before the Winter Queen is a haunting, intimate prequel to The Valentine of the Cailleach and Frost and Flame—a mythic tale of love, family, endurance, and the devastating cost of being the one who remembers when others choose not to.

It is the story of a woman who did not seek power.

And the goddess who was born because the world left her no other choice.