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# Borealia

A frozen wasteland.

Story
They had been walking for twelve days.
The wreck of the Southwatcher was far behind them now, broken on the jagged ice like a snapped spine. They pulled what they could salvage on the sled: rations, a tent, a few tools, and the black iron case Captain Merrow had chained shut before they left the harbor. No one dared open it. No one wanted to.
The cold was inside their blood now. It crept past the layers of fur and wool, sank into their marrow, and hollowed them out like old trees. Their breath came slow and ragged, frosting their beards and lashes. The sun, when it rose, was white and merciless. The night brought no darkness, only the green ribbons of the aurora, curling like smoke over the horizon.
And the wind.
The wind never stopped. It screamed and whispered, it laughed and howled, it spoke.
The others didn’t hear it. Or if they did, they lied.
It began on the fourth night. Just a word, maybe two, coiled into the gusts that scraped across the ice. Something about warmth. About hunger.
By the seventh day, it spoke more clearly. It had learned his name. It curled around his ears like breath on skin, close and warm.
They will not live. You know it. You feel it. They are slow. They are tired. You are strong.
Jarn, the quartermaster, had slowed to a limp. His boot was full of blood. The girl, Nella, slept with her knife gripped so tight her fingers were going black. And Bren, old Bren, he cried in his sleep now, softly, like a child who has forgotten his own name.
You could survive. If you stop pretending. If you stop dragging the dead weight.
The whisper came when the wind rose. It never spoke when the others were near, only when he walked behind the sled, holding the rope, feeling the strain in his back, the gnawing in his belly. He could almost hear the crackling of a fire, taste the meat on his tongue.
Last night, when Nella turned away to piss behind the ice ridge, he caught himself watching her with a knife in his hand.
He had not remembered drawing it.
Tonight the wind is louder. It circles the tent, rustling the canvas, sliding under the seams. It speaks of marrow, of fat, of smoke. It tells him that only one can leave the ice, and the others know it. That they are waiting for him to act. That they will eat him if he does not eat them first.
He lies awake, eyes wide, listening to the wind speak truths he already knows.
Out here, in on the ice, there is no right or wrong. Only the cold. Only the hunger. Only the survival offered by the whisper in the wind.

Listening to the ice spirits

# Description

Borealia is a harsh and forbidding land, locked in ice and silence for most of the year. During winter, the only light is the common auroras, during summer, the sun and ice will relentlessly burn the eyes. It is a landscape of jagged stone, black cliffs, and endless snowfields. Wind shrieks across the plains like a living thing, carrying with it the voices of lost souls and the howls of beasts that should not exist. No one lives here. Few charts exist, and those which do aren't accurate and contains many white spots.

The continent is technically made up of several large land masses, shattered, hidden under ice, but the frozen seas between them are almost always locked together by thick, shifting pack ice. These ice bridges stretch from horizon to horizon, creaking and groaning with every shift in the wind. Every third year, on average, the summer manage to break the pack ice into huge, drifting islands and opening narrow, treacherous channels. These windows of open water last only a few weeks before the cold reclaims the sea.

## The Spirits

Legends speak of spirits that roam the white wastelands. Some are whispered to be guardians of ancient truths, while others are hunters of the living, drawn to warmth and sanity alike. There are tales of the snow beasts, snatching travelers away in the night. Ice spirits whisper to wanderers, nibbling away their sanity. Forgotten gods are said to sleep beneath the mountains, stirring only when disturbed by foolish mortals. Then again, others claim that even gods fear this land.

Few sane people go to Borealia, and those who do seldom return sane, if at all. Those who do often speak in riddles, their minds shattered by what they witnessed. Some return with pale skin and frost-bitten eyes, claiming to have spoken with the dead.

## Valthurak and the Black Run

The one place where the snow does not rule is a narrow region in the center of the continent, where Valthurak, a volcano, still burns beneath the ice. Its molten heart creates a muddy flow that runs for miles across the snowfields, keeping a narrow path of land free from the eternal freeze. This place is known as the Black Run, and though the heat wards off the frost, the air is toxic, heavy with sulfur and ash. Strange plants grow there, twisted things that seem half-alive and half-stone. It is the only place where the earth is bare, but the price of warmth is the risk of corruption.

Some claim the volcano shelters something older than the world itself. A gate, a prison, or a womb, no one agrees. But there are stories, always stories, of a city of obsidian hidden beneath the mountain, built by the first fire and sealed in silence.

Borealia is not merely a place. It is a test, a whisper from the old world, and a graveyard of forgotten dreams.

Struggling across the open ice

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