On snowy night of Glaciera, largest continent of Frost Reign Regions Archipelago, silence stretched across the ice-laden breath of the world. The wind whispered like dying spirits through the ancient pines, clawing across the pale skin of the land. In the distance loomed the Obsidian Thorns, a mountain range as jagged and cruel as the name it bore—black spires of frozen stone rising like the teeth of a buried god.
Tonight, they wore a mantle thicker than ever recorded, snow upon snow pressing down as if the sky itself had grown weary of its burden and cast its grief upon the earth. From their serrated peaks, avalanches murmured in their sleep, ready to awaken with ruin. Ice hung in the air, suspended like breath caught between life and death.
Above it all, beyond the reach of mortal warmth, a shadow stirred. Taller than any beast known to man or myth, it loomed without shape, smoke without fire, absence made flesh. From its shroud of nothingness, two eyes glowed—crimson, ancient, patient. It watched the village of Dreigskaal below, nestled in the cradle of the valley, its flickering hearthlights like the last resistance of mankind against the eternal night.
Dreigskaal was old. Older than most remembered. Built on bones, both literal and forgotten. Its people lived hard, quiet lives, marked by frostbite and superstition. They spoke little of what slept in the Thorns. Even less of what moved during the Glacieran Solstice. And yet tonight, beneath the unblinking gaze of the thing above, the air had changed.
The snow did not fall—it descended, heavy as sin, drowning roofs and silencing prayers. Wolves did not howl. Crows did not stir. The world had gone still, as if holding its breath for something it remembered only in its oldest, most cursed dreams.
No one in Dreigskaal saw the first mark—a circle of black ice etched perfectly into the snow outside the home of the eldest widow. Nor the second, carved into the frozen lake where fishermen once whispered blessings to unseen things below. But the shadow saw. It watched. It waited.
The shadow, silent as regret, receded into the maw of its frozen cave—deep within the heart of the Obsidian Thorns where the light of day had never kissed stone. It vanished without sound, as if the very mountain exhaled it back into the void. Yet the snow did not ease with its departure. Instead, it fell heavier, as if the heavens were burying the land beneath sorrow. Each flake landed like a whisper, countless and cold, drowning the world inch by inch.
In the village below, tucked beneath layers of creaking timber and ancestral dust, a girl sat by the window of a narrow, frostbitten house. The glass was fogged by her breath, blurring the outside into shapeless white. Her fingers moved with practiced grace over a half-knit sweater—thread of deep indigo and ash gray, rough to the touch but warm enough to fend off Glaciera's merciless air. Each stitch whispered a memory, each loop a tradition.
She hummed softly, oblivious to the silence that had swallowed Dreigskaal whole. Her hands worked quickly, pulling the wool into form, forming patterns from habit. Upon the chest of the sweater, she embroidered a single word, like she had every year: "Haneul 1311". A date. A name. A memory. She did not remember when the ritual began—only that it felt necessary.
The designs changed each winter. Last year, antlers entwined with stars. The year before, a single crow beneath a moon. This year, her hands had moved without thought, shaping the outline of a closed eye, rimmed with frost.
She was a seller, known across the neighboring settlements for her warm clothes and quieter smile. Traders came and went, taking her wares up the mountain passes. She never left. Not once. She had no need to. The world came to her doorstep.
But she did not notice the small changes outside her window. She did not notice the dark frost spreading along the edges of the stone well in the village square—frost that pulsed faintly, as if breathing.
She did not hear the silence of birds or the absence of wind chimes that should have rattled in the night breeze. She did not see the faint red smear, barely visible in the snow, leading from the chapel door to the woodshed behind the baker's home.
She did not sense the eyes that had not blinked in hours, watching from beneath the snowbank across the street. She did not know that Dreigskaal had already begun to change. That the thing in the mountain had marked this year differently.
Inside, the fire popped in the hearth. The girl smiled softly to herself, holding the half-finished sweater to her chest like an old friend. Tomorrow, she would finish it. Tomorrow, she would hang it in the window for sale.
Meanwhile, deep within the belly of the Obsidian Thorns, the cave breathed frost. Darkness hung thick, not merely absence of light but the presence of something older, heavier—something waiting. The shadow that had watched the village now began to take shape, no longer a formless void but a creature recalled by the moonlight that filtered in thin strands through cracks in the stone above.
It stepped forward, slow and terrible, its limbs dragging frost with them. The pale blue glow of the moon spilled like a ghost down the cave wall and touched the beast—and its form answered.
Massive, hunched, and furred in a coat of snow-matted white, it resembled something once whispered of in myths long buried by time: a giant of winter, a beast older than mankind's fear of cold. Its body was layered in thick, coarse hair that steamed in the cave's unnatural chill, muscles beneath writhing with quiet menace.
From its head curled two obsidian-black horns, twisted like a ram's but broader, cracked with ancient runes that pulsed faintly with sickly red light. Between them, its face was hidden beneath tangled fur and shadow, save for its eyes—two suns of crimson fire that did not flicker, did not blink, did not forgive.
Its breath coiled from its maw in coils of black mist, rotting the frost where it landed. As it stood tall, its head nearly brushing the ceiling of the cavern, the earth itself seemed to groan under its return.
Then it spoke—not with voice, but with will, its whisper echoing through the ice as if the walls remembered the sound. "A century has passed," it breathed, the cave trembling with the weight of the words. "Fimbulwinter shall come."
After the whispering faded, silence did not return. The cave held its breath for a heartbeat, then began to tremble—not like an earthquake, but like something stirring beneath. The frozen ground, solid for a hundred winters, cracked with brittle agony.
From the fractures seeped a sound—wet, brittle, and wrong. Then came the hands. Blackened fingers, skin stretched thin over bone, clawed their way out of the ice with desperate hunger. Some wore rusted rings, some clutched shattered blades, others bore the sigils of forgotten houses long consumed by frost. One by one, they tore free, dragging themselves into the world again—Draugr.
Their faces were half-eaten by rot and time, skulls grinning beneath split flesh, eyes hollow or burning faintly blue with cursed light. Armor clung to them in jagged patches—chainmail frozen to bone, tabards stiff with centuries of blood, helmets fused into what remained of skulls. These were not men. Not anymore.
Once, they were warriors. Knights. Hunters of monsters and defenders of halls now collapsed beneath snow. They had died in cold—frozen on battlefields, buried beneath avalanches, entombed in glacial wars no one remembered. And now, summoned by the whisper of the beast, they rose.
The air grew heavy with the stench of old death and deep magic. Frost bloomed in the shape of runes across the cave floor, pulsing with necrotic light. The cavern walls wept black ice as more Draugr clawed their way up from the floor like worms from a corpse.
Some let out guttural moans—broken voices that had not spoken in a hundred years. Others stood in silence, heads tilted toward the towering figure that had called them back. Their king. Their god. Their curse.
The beast did not look at them. It did not need to. Its gaze was fixed south, beyond the cave, beyond the village, to the sleeping lands that had long forgotten the true meaning of winter.
The undead gathered, forming ranks from chaos. Shields rose. Blades were drawn. No war drums sounded. No banners waved. Only the sound of bone scraping stone and ancient metal rasping free of ice.
The next morning dawned beneath a pale sun that managed to cast a fragile warmth through the crisp Glacieran sky. The storm had passed. The snow had settled. And despite the sharp wind that cut through the valley like a tempered blade, the light touched Dreigskaal with an illusion of peace.
Smoke curled from chimneys in twisting columns, rising into the pale blue sky. Doors creaked open one by one, and the village stirred to life like clockwork shaking off a heavy sleep. The cold remained, but it was familiar—livable. The kind of cold people had learned to endure, to thrive within.
The fishers were the first to move, dragging sleds toward the lake, breaking thin new ice along the edges with swift swings of their axes. Nets were cast, and the crack of boots over snow echoed with casual routine. The market square, rimmed with timbered stalls and crooked canopies, filled quickly with sound and scent—smoked meat, dried herbs, fresh furs, the jangle of coins and the low murmur of bargaining voices.
Merchants unfurled their worn banners and opened crates of ironwork, preserved game, tinctures of mountain herbs, and wool garments. The girl who had sewn by the fire just hours ago stood now beneath her stall's awning, hanging the unfinished sweater marked Haneul 1311 beside others from years past. Her smile was small, tired, but genuine—like a flower blooming through frost.
Children played near the chapel, throwing handfuls of snow at each other with shrieks of laughter. A bard tuned a stringed instrument by the tavern's door, plucking out a song half-remembered from better seasons. A local blacksmith stoked his forge, its smoke blending with the clouds above, his hammer falling in slow, steady rhythm. Coins changed hands. Bread was broken. Ale was poured. Life thrived.
And beneath it all, not a single soul spoke of the cold that had been too quiet. Of the tracks that no wind had erased. Of the frost that clung to the old well like a wound refusing to close. They did not see the pale circle carved into the bark of the village's oldest tree. To them, it was just another day.