Wanderers
Wanderers or Winter Bearers are giant creatures living in the icy lands north of the Cradle of Stars, mainly on the Misty Song Island.
Standing on four slender, gnarled legs, they stretch their endless necks toward the sky as if talking to the stars.
Naturally peaceful, these animals, taller than mountains, seem to feed in the clouds.
No one knows how they appeared or how they reproduce.
The clans living north of the Cradle of Stars say that they are the ones who bring cold and snow. Indeed, their sweat turns into icy mist that falls along their slender bodies, making them white and shiny.
It is said that meeting their gaze would drive you crazy. In the chronicles of Pelak Brodirsson, there is mention of their glance, it would be made of an emptiness that would suck your soul in an endless fall, a look made of non-existent and yet innumerable eyes.
Black Ice by gutter dog
Today a large group of adventurers came to my hospice. They are in a critical mental state. Listenning to their delirious and faint whispers, it is allmost certain they all looked into a wanderer's eye. They were 20 apparently, the ones who didn't die of a stroke or suicide afterwards came back muted, closed allmost like empty corpses, whispering to themselves without noticing the world around them. Only 6 made it to my humble clinic and out of them only two clearly spoke during demencia bursts. They screamed about these eyes they kept seeing in the back of their heads, thousands of them, never closing. They spoke of unknown lands of sorrow and dispair, of the lack of meaning and importance of our lives and of the shame they felt being humans. They all refuse to eat. We are forcing them but it will be a hard task to even keep them alive. They are not willing to do so themselves. We tried a few treatments but bloodletting didn't work and the herbs didn't seem to do much either. I will treat their wounds but i fear they might never come back from what they saw. If only I could find a cure...
For some, the wanderers would actually be made of black ice, corrupted by the presence of Farajokull, the frozen sleeper.
They are the wardens of the North, feared and revered. Peaceful but deadly, like the biting cold.
It is said that some of them have been seen eating the corpse of a fellow creature in order to grow.
We don't really know why they move around so much in the uninhabited valleys of the Misty Song Island, but they seem to be more present around the Ice Throne, a thousand-year-old fortress carved in the corrupted ice of the island. Could they be its guardians?
One can sometimes find the stone-like corpses of these behemoths, half-buried in the snow, on the sides of the steep ridges of this inhospitable land.
The size and rocky surface of these enormous shapes lead many to believe that they are full-scale statues rather than fossilized corpses.
In any case, adventurers have been trying for decades to follow these creatures closely to recover the fine scales of pure ice that fall from them, an ice so pure that it makes for an excellent alchemical catalyst and sells for a considerable price. A risky market but with a lot of potential.
In Snow they go The cold wind they blow But me I want to ride oh But me I want to dance oh In their smooth and pure coat I would finaly let go In the heart of ice I'd float I would finaly let go In their gaze I'd dive My mind might not survive But me I want to ride oh But me I want to dance oh In their smooth and pure coat I would finaly let go In the heart of ice I'd float I would finaly let go In stone they'll grow In stone they'll grow
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