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The cold had a voice.
It spoke in long breaths over the ice fields, in the creak of ancient glaciers shifting beneath their own impossible weight, in the crack of frozen lakes tearing themselves open inch by stubborn inch. It whispered through snow-bent pines and howled through mountain passes sharpened like knives. It was the first sound every child of the white lands heard, and it would be the last.
There were no stories of other lands here.
No warm forests. No endless seas. No strangers. The world began with the mountains in the distance, and it ended with the other mountains farther still. Everything beyond that was storm and death and the sky.
The people of this land called themselves Ska'len, the Clan of the Cracked Glacier, because the very ground beneath them split open like a scar that refused to heal. Their village clung to a wall of black ice, carved from the cliff face itself in sweeping tunnels and rounded dwellings half buried in snow to keep the heat from fleeing. Light came not from flames — too greedy, too hungry — but from cold blue plantlife that clung to stone like frostbitten stars.
Seven hundred lived there.
Seven hundred who had never seen rain, only snow. Seven hundred who had never heard insects sing, only wind. Seven hundred who knew only their own people, and their enemies farther north.
The Ska'len were carved by their world as surely as the ridges around them.
They were tall and thickly built, layered in dense fat and heavy muscle that kept the life in their bodies where it belonged. Their skin ranged from pale ash-grey to deep storm-slate, marked in stripes of white or silver that glowed faintly when the lights in the sky grew strong. Their ears were short and rounded close to the head. Their hair grew thick, often curling with wild stubbornness, the color of snow or ice or storm clouds.
Their hands ended in curved climbing claws, black as volcanic glass, grown not for war — though they served it well — but for gripping slick stone and ice. Their fangs were wider, harsher, made for tearing frozen meat when prey fell in winter and no fires were spared to soften it.
