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Tarnold knew the performance was doomed when all his playwright’s tricks were exhausted. His players were lost to performance jitters. Perhaps the text was to blame, or the superstitions surrounding the performance of a dead scribe’s unfinished work, but each mummer had succumbed to one form of unprofessionalism or another.

Artlo, who played a character known only as the Philosopher, wouldn’t stop dying. Each time he pantomimed his last breath in the company of that kindred pair of macabre spirits known as the Lamb and the Wolf, he prolonged his death rattles to the point of absurdity. This time, Nenni had laughed so hard her Lamb’s mask fell off her face. It landed on the ground with a loud crack.

Emile removed his Wolf’s mask. Its sharp, jagged edges were chafing his jowls to pulp. He winced in pain—Tarnold knew he was about to ask for the poultice again.

“Stop!” Tarnold said. He did not need to yell. The Mummers’ Round’s renowned acoustics ensured even the eaves-perchers, with their half-copper admission, could hear the softest sigh with clarity.

The old theater rested near the lord castellan’s hillfort and provided a nice glimpse of the dark forest. On banquet nights like tonight, nobles descended from the castellan’s manse to drunkenly take in the mummers’ theatrics. A displeased crowd of drunken nobles was worse than the humiliation of a failed play.

The actors released their poses and turned to face their chief dramatist.

Tarnold rubbed the bridge of his nose with his fingers and looked to the wings, where a mustachioed man, dressed in black finery, leaned against one of the story stones.

“Duarte,” Tarnold said to the well-dressed man. “Buy me as much time as you can.”

Duarte nodded in understanding. “I’ll hold the audience until I hear your sign.”

“Do not disturb us, even if Lady Erhyn herself shakes off her malaise and demands a preview. We are on the verge, Duarte. We must fall together to rise together!”

“Rise we shall, Tarnold. With the gust of life.” Duarte kissed the palm of his hand and placed it on the story stone for good luck. He disappeared from the stage and exited the theater. Silence pervaded while everyone waited on the sound of the heavy bolt sliding shut.

Once they were sealed within the Mummers’ Round’s walls, with the sun dipping closer to the evening, Tarnold unleashed his temper.

“Ask a Great City boy for water, and a Great City boy will bring you fire. There is to be one death, and one death alone, Artlo.” He turned to Nenni. “Stop laughing at Artlo’s nincompoopery, you daughter of Skaggorn. Shake off your provincial humors and exude the cold menace of death.” Finally, he pointed to Emile. “I can see your blood dribbling down your cheek. Dab your cheeks.”

“Please, let me fix some padding to the inside of this accursed wolf mask.”

“Project through the pain! Did Soates complain while writing her Kindred Fables on her deathbed? No. Be honored! One of her own heirlooms chafes your cheek.”

“This one doesn’t fit me,” Nenni said. She had picked her lamb mask up off the stage floor. “It keeps sliding off.”

“Then use straps!” Tarnold said, pulling off his own belt to throw it at Nenni’s feet.

Endless hours of rehearsals had done nothing to prepare the troupe for the performance of Soates’ final, unfinished story. Part of that, Tarnold had accepted as his own fault. As the chief dramatist of Alderburg’s greatest—and only—theater, the grim task of finishing her story fell to him.

“Lambs in the Orchard was Soates’ final gush of madness. The very last of her spark is here, in our hands... and you all choose to desecrate her memory, picking at it for your own vanity and comfort. She spent her final moments coaxing truths from the impending nevermore. Had death not stilled her hand while writing this very scene, perhaps we would all have a far greater understanding of our own brief and tragic existence!”

The actors remained silent, chastened even, until Artlo cleared his throat and spoke up.

“With respect,” the gangly Demacian started. Tarnold knew Artlo meant the opposite, and rolled his eyes to show it. “Perhaps an unfinished work is simply not meant to be finished by another.”

Tarnold sensed an attack on his integrity. They had had this argument over and again. “Are you suggesting that this production is a work of sacrilege?”

“We seem unable to replicate the emotions of a master writing against time.”

“Are you mad? We are out of time!” Tarnold pointed to the dwindling rays of sunlight piercing the wooden walls of the theater. A chilly sensation swept through him.

“Perhaps, we perform the bits we know and leave the unfinished unperformed. Is that not a better way to honor Soates? You must acknowledge, Tarnold, this,” Artlo said, pointing around himself, “does not work!”

Artlo was right. They had failed to recreate the spark found in the prolific bard’s other fables. Their ailing patron, a Soates devotee, expected the impossible—an ending to an unfinished work. In desperation, Tarnold had authorized Duarte to travel to King Jarvan II’s Great City to the west, and hunt down the bard’s original masks. They were ancient and therefore costly.

Tarnold’s head slumped, his shoulders followed, and then he was on his back, struggling to breathe. His heart raced against the quickening hour.

“We have to cancel the performance.” He rubbed his forehead, trying to eke out some last shred of luck, but finding only sweat. “Worse, we’ll be forced to offer refunds.” He gasped out. “We already spent the gold!”

“It’s probably not a good time to mention that the lamb mask is broken.”

The color drained from Tarnold’s face. “What?”

“When it fell off my face, it broke. It was an accident!” Nenni held the pieces of the mask in her hand. One of the wooden ears had snapped off. “I think I can strap it back together.”

“This is utterly majestic.” Tarnold almost laughed. “That’s what we spent the gold on. They were Soates’ original masks. They’re on loan!”

“She said it was an accident,” said Emile.

“Let me think.” Tarnold stood up to take in the theater. Its storied round had existed for centuries. The story stones were the foundation of the Mummers’ Round. The circle of towering flagstones had stood in the theater’s location long before anyone settled the Nockmirch. Over the years, wooden viewing platforms were erected to allow more a better view of the theatrics and rituals performed inside the round. Performers and singers notched the pillars with their sigils, leaving their mark upon hallowed grounds.

The theater had been home to Tarnold during many difficult times. Now, under his stewardship, it was the source of all his sorrows.

“A broken mask tells two stories,” said a voice from the middle balcony, reserved for the wealthiest nobles. Even in his loneliest moments, Tarnold dared not rest his head on those fine cushions. “Three, if you consider the tale of the maskmaker... Alas, no one wishes to hear that story.”

“We agreed for no visitors during rehearsals!” Tarnold said to his performers.

“She’s been here all night,” Nenni said. “We thought she was with you.”

Had she? It was possible. Tarnold had battled insomnia for weeks. His attention snapped to the woman in the golden seats, which were reserved for the Lady Erhyn herself. Two summers ago, King Jarvan II’s little heir had sat upon those velvet cushions to enjoy Tarnold’s rendition of The King of All Fishes. The boy had clapped loudest as the final curtain fell.

“Who are you?” Tarnold said. “Step into the light.”

The woman came forward, but the light illuminated little of her mystery. Her eyes were distant stars shining through mist. She wore a ghostly half-mask with a curious twirl of a twig sprouting off the top. Upon that sprig was a single dark leaf. Her elegant gait sang of nobility, and Tarnold finally recognized the crest on her gown.

It was their patron, recovered from her malaise.

“My lady Erhyn, I did not recognize you! Please forgive me.” Tarnold offered a respectable bow. “Tell me, what mask is this that graces your face? It is familiar yet beyond memory.”

“It is made of eldlock.” She spoke in a calm voice. Her words were clear, even as she whispered. “The stories tell that any wood removed from an eldlock will continue to blossom and flower in season with its mothertree, as long as it still stands. No distance may sever their bond.”

“It is exquisite, my lady.”

“I have interrupted,” Lady Erhyn said, gesturing to the actors. “Perhaps I could suggest a change.”

“Why, of course!” Tarnold fidgeted with his hands. He looked to the wings, and to the stage. The mummers were keeping their mouths shut, for once. “Advice from our favorite patron is always welcome.”

“All actors were masked in Soates’ day—perhaps all must don masks to channel the strange spirits she saw at death’s door, as she scribbled furiously into the night’s embrace.”

“I like that!” Artlo said. “Where is the casket of masks? There were others in that trunk,” he called as he vanished behind the stage.

“Now, wait, let’s talk this—”

Tarnold was silenced by the sight of the gaunt lady with the eldlock mask clasping her hands together. There was something off about their benefactor.

Before Tarnold could put his finger on it, Artlo returned onstage, dragging a trunk that was as long as he was tall. The name Q. W. Soates was engraved on its long side. Suddenly, it struck Tarnold how much the old trunk resembled a coffin.

Artlo lifted open the heavy trunk’s lid. “Smells like dead poets,” he said.

The man really has no taste, Tarnold thought.

A heavy creak of rusted hinges reverberated through the round like the howl of a starving dog. The other two actors craned their necks to peer inside.

“Before you choose,” the woman in the eldlock mask said. “Please heed these next words wisely. The hour is late, the show waits to play, and tonight can be truly memorable if all choose the mask that is right for them, for the spirits we become...”

“...Inhabit us,” Emile completed.

“The mummers’ tenet,” Nenni said.

“Whatever flavor of madness this is,” Artlo said, a grin spreading on his face, “I want to be a part of it. Come, Tarnold. Even you must agree that at this late stage, we must perform with the gust of life.”

“Intrepid,” the lady said.

Tarnold heard the hint of a strange smile on her face. He couldn’t remember... had the nobles’ balcony not been empty when Duarte left? The whole theater was empty... Lady Erhyn struck him as different now, too. She seemed gaunt and haunted. Perhaps the noble lady Erhyn hadn’t entirely shaken off her affliction. The evening chill was settling in.

“My lady, I am most pleased at your recovery. Perhaps I can fetch you a cloak?”

“Now, this is the mask to honor a forgotten poet,” Artlo said.

Lady Erhyn waved off Tarnold’s offer, turning to Artlo. “An ominous choice. The Vulture picks at what remains, and when nothing is left... it flies on to perches far removed from here and waits for the next meal.”

“Pecking at Soates’ legacy sounds like a feast.” Artlo turned around and showed off his guise: a bone-white mask with a long, hooked beak. The gangly man resembled a carrion bird.

The gaunt lady approached the stage. She seemed so ancient, yet hale and graceful in her moves. Her skin did not look like flesh. It reminded Tarnold of plaster, after it had been set and smoothed. Her hair was the very night itself, radiating outward in a wavering embrace. He felt as if the breath were stabbed out of his lungs. How could he have ever mistaken the two?

“You’re not Lady Erhyn.”

The actors were oblivious to Tarnold’s epiphany. A chilling swoon descended upon his heart. Its beating pulsed loudly in his ears, nearly drowning out the actors’ words.

“Switch masks with me,” Nenni said to Emile. “Your soft skin can’t wear such a handsome mask. My skin’s weathered worse, I’ll reckon.”

“If you want to wear that agonizing thing...” Emile offered the wolf mask to his stage partner. “I mourn for your lovely cheekbones.”

The two slipped on their swapped masks.

The walls whispered as a gust of wind swept over the Mummers’ Round. Shutters clacked shut. Tarnold heard voices in that swift and swirling breeze.

“Heartbeats, Lamb. Here,” a deep voice growled.

Tarnold looked for the source, but could only see his mummers. They seemed to have forgotten all about him. Then, in his left ear, sang another voice.

“Bits of light,

Dancing in the dark,

Playing on, playing on, playing on...”

The words flew through Tarnold with a jolt. On the stage, he saw Nenni and Emile, hand in hand, wearing each other’s masks. Then he saw the otherwordly words were coming from the actors’ mouths.

“Yes,” Emile said, shifting his voice up to a lilting and haunted falsetto. “I see my darlingest Wolf now.”

“Ahhh.” Nenni let out a relieved growl, her voice guttural and deep. “That feels better, little Lamb.” The actor dropped down on all fours, and stretched lower than a human should be able to. “Is it time to play chase?”

“When the veil lifts,

You shall claw and bite,

My arrow swift, and on to the next act we go.”

Tarnold crossed the round, keeping his eyes fixed on the gaunt lady. “What trickery is this? Please, leave us be!”

The woman turned to Tarnold. “I am not your patron,” she said.

Tarnold looked to his masked actors. “All of you, clear the stage. Go home. The performance is over.” He raised his voice, shouting toward the barred entrance. “Duarte!”

“Tarnold...” The woman who was not Lady Erhyn turned and looked at him with the enormity of her vast, glimmering eyes. Even behind the eldlock mask, they shone with a light born of darkness. Their eerie sheen pulled Tarnold’s attention out of his body. Whoever this was, he knew her and did not; feared her and sought her. Running from her felt foolish, and reasonable. Without deciding to, he walked toward the stage.

“Take the masks off,” he said. “Now. This is madness... This play is cursed! Don’t you see? What if, in the conjuring, Soates did not happen to die while writing the play, the act of writing Lambs in the Orchard was itself what killed her... The narrative itself is a curse!”

It was not the gaunt lady, Nenni’s wolf nor Emile’s lamb that replied. Artlo, or whatever spoke through Artlo, answered in a screeching voice. He spread his arms high and stood upon one leg, like a carrion bird.

“The author waits for my beak,” he said. The corners of his lips cracked and split open. “Soates is truly dead... as none remember her now as she once was.” Tears ran down Artlo’s stretched cheeks. The voice stilled Tarnold’s heart and stopped him in his stride. “Soates flies in my wake, soon lost and forgotten. Words on a page. A name on the wind. Shreds... nothing more.”

“Shreds of Soates is still Soates,” said the gaunt lady.

“He ceased the performance...” Whatever spoke through poor Artlo didn’t care how much pain it caused the man’s body. The actor’s arm violently wrenched forward and stretched, its bony hand pointing an accusatory finger at Tarnold. “And he wears no mask...”

“You are so close to Soates,” the woman said to the dramatist. “Choose a mask, and see her final scene come alive.”

He thought about running from the Mummers’ Round. He pictured himself fleeing up to the lord castellan’s fort on the hill, or into town. What would he find in Lady Erhyn’s house? He looked to the gaunt woman. The sun had almost set. The evening cacophony of insects and night birds chirped out their greetings to the coming night. How many nights had he dreamt of Soates’ final moments, of the final scene...

“Everyone must wear a mask,” the woman said.

Mouth agape, Tarnold nodded in agreement with the woman in the eldlock mask, that dark leaf dancing in an unfelt breeze.

“If I must choose a mask, then I confess, I know the one I would select is not in that trunk, nor is it on the stage.” He felt life return to his limbs. His bones were stiff and unwieldy... but that was a temporary condition.

The gaunt woman smiled. “You wish to wear my mask? That is a most excellent decision, dear Tarnold, a man of creativity and curiosity. Come and remove it from my face.”

“I shall take your mask, and become you. May the spirits we become...”

“...Inhabit us deeply and truly,” she finished.

When Tarnold did, and placed the living eldlock mask on his face, he saw, finally, the true ending of Soates’ play. It was flawless and terrible, life-giving and breathtaking.

“Places, my friends and fellows,” he said. “Our tale waits for no one. Let us fall together to rise as one, and sing our harmonies with the gust of life.”

“One last gust,” replied Lamb, Wolf, and Vulture.

And together, they played.

Duarte had kept the news about Lady Erhyn hidden from Tarnold all day, even though the truth of her passing threatened to burst forth from his lips. Her malaise carried her off in kindred company before dawn, or so the new lady of House Erhyn had said. The news could break the morale of the entire troupe. Tarnold, he knew, would take it exceptionally hard.

But just as sorrow weighed down Duarte’s heart, there was a brightness, an exciting turn of good fortune beyond the tragedy. Lady Erhyn, on her deathbed, bade her estate to fund the Mummers’ Round, and Tarnold specifically, in perpetuity.

However, as the hour drew later, the inebriated nobles grew weary of the wait. Belligerent and insulted nobility often led to lashings, mockings, and worse: sanctions against future endeavors.

As Duarte was about to address the amassed watchers, daubed with ashes and charcoal in mourning of Lady Erhyn, he heard Tarnold’s signal to open the doors.

He rushed to the gate and removed the heavy deadbolt. The audience rushed in and stopped short as they found the actors posed upon a stage covered in wilted black-stemmed roses. Their buzzing anticipation was hushed by the macabre tableau. They quickly and quietly found their seats. Lady Erhyn’s seat of honor was the only empty spot in the house.

The actors held their strenuous positions while the noble audience waited for Soates’ long-lost and unfinished masterpiece to finally begin.

Duarte saw no sign of Tarnold. It was unusual for the dramatist to desert his cast on opening night—normally he would greet the audience before watching from the wings with a bottle of wine.

He turned to inspect the opening stance. Nenni and Emile were locked in a mortal embrace. Nenni, wearing the wolf mask, held an arrow that seemed to stick directly into Emile’s side. Emile’s hands were wrapped around Nenni’s throat.

Artlo, who was supposed to be playing a philosopher, now inexplicably wore a mask that resembled a dirge crow. He perched atop a prop tree, suspended over the other pair, his arms outstretched like great wings. Dead flowers hung from his arms like feathers.

They weren’t even breathing...

The audience stayed silent, eagerly awaiting action, but Duarte realized something was amiss. Backstage, Duarte checked the dramatist’s favorite perch. There was no bottle of wine, and no Tarnold, either.

Instead there was the last surviving copy of Lambs in the Orchard.

He thumbed to the last page. The story remained unfinished, but there was a new line written in Tarnold’s steady hand.

The end is not for those who wear no masks. She showed me, and it was beautiful.

Magga was about to die for the fourteenth time. She had bitten into a rotten apple–yet again. Its putrid flesh had, as always, infected her with carrionshade. The actress went through the motions of stumbling to her death while shouting her final words for all to hear.

“Oh, but how wondrous a dream is life? Only now—too late!—do I wake to see its myriad of splendors,” she bemoaned.

With a puff of smoke and glittering powder, Kindred made a grand entrance upon the stage. As per tradition, they were played by one actor, his head covered by two opposing masks. He approached Magga, the white mask of the Lamb facing her.

“Hark! Do I hear a plea for my keenest arrow? Come, child, let the warmth of your heart fade into the cold embrace of oblivion.”

Magga refused, as she had thirteen times before. Any nuance in her performance was buried beneath the ear-splitting delivery of her scream. On cue, Lamb spun around, revealing the second mask–that of the Wolf.

“There is naught ye can do to stave off thine end,” growled Wolf.

“I am but a poor young maiden! Please, let my piteous cry fall on all four of thine ears.”

The audience seemed enraptured by the unfolding dramatics of the Orphellum Mechanicals. With the twin threats of plague and war on the tongues of those in neighboring protectorates, death dramas were all the rage.

Denji, the actor portraying both Lamb and Wolf, descended upon the young actress, awkwardly baring wooden fangs. Magga offered her neck. At the threat of Wolf’s bite, she triggered the device sewn into her blouse’s collar. Ribbons of red fabric unspooled to the delighted pips and yelps of the audience. They’d gotten what they paid for.

By the time the Mechanicals had staggered back to their wagon and set off in the direction of Needlebrook, there were no stars to be seen. Instead, a veil of clouds stretched across the night sky.

Needlebrook always delivered a good audience, Illusian, the company’s owner and sole dramaturg, explained once more. He staggered around, drunk on his own accolades—as well as the wine Parr had grifted from the locals.

The night wore on, and the troupe had descended into bickering. Tria and Denji lambasted their playwright over the quality of his plots, which fell into a predictable structure: tragedy strikes maiden, death finds maiden, death takes maiden. Illusian argued that complicated plots detracted from a good death scene.

Magga, the youngest of the bunch, agreed with Tria and Denji’s diagnosis, but kept her mouth shut. Had she not stowed away in the wandering troupe’s wagon, she would certainly be somewhere far more miserable. Luckily for her, the Mechanicals had recently lost several actors due to Illusian’s insistence on complete artistic control. Because of his attitude—and obvious mediocrity—they were facing a drought of fresh faces. And so, the Orphellum Mechanicals agreed to contract Magga to die in all their dramatics for the foreseeable future. For which she had been grateful.

Illusian was still smarting from Denji and Tria’s words when he motioned to Parr, their wagoner, to stop and make camp. The inebriated auteur set out his bedroll in pride of place next to the wagon. He then threw the rest of the bedding into the long grass nearby.

“Ungrateful players can sleep in the wilds,” Illusian spat, “where they shall hopefully find their manners.”

The rest of the troupe built a fire and swapped stories. Denji and Tria had fallen asleep in each other’s arms while whispering potential names for their unborn child into each other’s ears. They had nattered on about the day the traveling company would stop in Jandelle, a town so perfect and peaceful they would set aside their vagabond ways to raise their child.

Magga moved closer to the crackling fire so its pops and whistles would drown out the irksome affections of her traveling companions.

But sleep never came. Instead, Magga tossed and turned, thinking about the looks on the audience’s faces as the coiled spurts of blood unfurled from her neckline. A pretty maiden struck dead by her own naïveté was all the theatrical pomp Illusian could muster, but the crowd lusted after the gruesome façade.

Eventually, she left her bedroll and set out into the woods to soothe her unsettled mind.

In the dead of night, Magga came upon a low grassy mound with slabs of standing stone at its base. Although she could not read the inscriptions, her fingers traced the familiar etching of Kindred’s twin masks. This was a place of the dead, a burial site built long ago.

She felt a chill on the back of her neck that compelled her to look up. She was not alone. Magga immediately understood what she saw, for she’d encountered a crude impersonation of them night after night. But poor Denji couldn’t begin to instill the dread washing over Magga. Before her, perched on a weathered barrow-archway, was Lamb herself, flanked by her ever-faithful counterpart, Wolf.

“I hear a beating heart!” said Wolf, his black eyes twinkling with delight. “May I have it?”

“Perhaps,” replied Lamb. “I sense she is afraid. Speak, beautiful one. Tell us your name.”

“I-I would have yours first,” stammered Magga, stepping backward. Her slow escape was halted by the speedy Wolf, who materialized unsettlingly close behind her.

He spoke directly in her ear. “We have many names.”

“In the West, I am Ina to his Ani,” said Lamb. “In the East, Farya to his Wolyo. But we are Kindred everywhere. I am always Lamb to Wolf, and he is always Wolf to Lamb.”

Wolf reared up and sniffed at the air.

“She is playing a boring game,” said Wolf. “Let us play a new game, one of chasing and running and biting.”

“She is not playing, dear Wolf,” said the Lamb. “She is frightened and has lost her own name. It hides behind her lips, afraid to come out. Worry not, dear child, I have found your name. We know it as you know us, Magga.”

“P-please,” Magga stammered. “Tonight is not a very good night for—”

Wolf’s great pink tongue lolled out of the side of his mouth, and he proceeded to cackle.

“All nights are good nights for pouncing,” said Wolf, laughing.

“All days are, too,” Lamb said. “With light comes a clear shot.”

“There is no moon tonight!” cried Magga. She used what Illusian had taught her—to gesture grand, so those in the back could see her movements. “It is hidden by a blanket of clouds, tucked away from my eyes and yours. Without the moon, what would be the last thing I would see?”

“We see the moon,” replied Lamb, as she caressed her fabled bow. “It is always there.”

“There are no stars!” said Magga, trying again, this time gesturing smaller and speaking quieter. “No menagerie of twinkling diamonds, glittering in the midnight hue. What more beautiful view could one hope for whence one meets Lamb and Wolf?”

“This Magga-thing is playing a new game,” growled Wolf. “It is called ‘stalling.’”

Wolf stopped moving and cocked his head to the side. He turned his sideways snout toward Magga before speaking. “Can we play ‘Chasing the Magga-Thing and Bite Her to Bits?’?” Wolf clacked his fangs together loudly for effect.

“Let us ask her,” said Lamb. “Magga! Do you prefer Wolf’s chase, or my arrow?”

Magga was trembling now. Her eyes raced to take in every last detail of the world around her. It wasn’t such a bad place to depart. There was grass. There were trees. There was the ancient archway. There was stillness to the air.

“I would prefer Lamb’s arrow,” she said, looking at the rough crusts of bark on the trees. “I’ll imagine myself climbing to the highest boughs, like when I was a child. Only this time, I will never stop climbing. Is that what it is like to go with you?”

“No,” said Lamb, “though it is a nice thought. Fear not, little maiden, we are just having our fun. You have come to us tonight; we have not come for you.”

“I cannot chase Magga-thing,” said Wolf, with a hint of disappointment in his voice. “But there are other things nearby. Other things ripe for the chasing and the biting. Hurry, Lamb. I am hungry.”

“For now, know that your theatrics have pleased us, and we will watch them until the day we meet again.”

Wolf passed over Magga and disappeared into the woods. The shadowy beast snaked away through fields of tall grass. Magga looked back toward the weathered barrow. Lamb was gone.

The actress fled.

When Magga returned to the encampment, she found it in utter ruin. The wagon she had only just begun to call home had been ransacked and reduced to a smoldering husk. Bits of clothing and ruined props lay strewn across the campsite.

She found Denji’s body near where he’d slept. He had died protecting Tria, whose corpse lay behind him. Judging from the trails of blood, their deaths had not been slow. They had dragged themselves toward each other, their fingers entwined in one last caress before death.

Magga noticed that Illusian had managed to kill two of the bandits before being burnt to a crisp along with Parr in the wagon.

The only thing that remained untouched were Denji’s Lamb and Wolf masks. Magga picked them up and held them in her hands. She placed the Lamb mask over her own eyes and heard the voice of Wolf.

“Chase the Magga-thing.”

The maiden ran the distance to Needlebrook, never once looking back.

The Golden Round was filled to the brim with a sea of twinkling eyes, all glittering in excitement at the velvet curtain. The king sat in the theater with the queen and their advisers, all eagerly awaiting the onset of the dramatics. Everyone hushed as the black curtain lifted to reveal the actors.

Magga sat in a quiet dressing room under the stage. She heard the crowd fall silent as she studied herself in the mirror. The luster of youth had faded from her eyes years ago, and left her with a long shock of silver running through her hair.

“Madame!” said the stagehand. “You’re not in costume yet.”

“No, child,” Magga said, “I only dress at the last moment.”

“It is the last moment,” said the young stagehand, holding the two final pieces of Magga’s costume: the same Lamb and Wolf masks from her days with the Orphellum Mechanicals.

“May your performance be blessed tonight,” the stagehand said.

Magga prepared to leave for the stage. She slipped the masks over her head. The old chill from the dark barrow crept down her spine. She welcomed it—as always.

She enthralled the audience as she glided onto the stage, embodying Lamb’s graceful movements. She thrilled the crowd with her rendition of Wolf’s playful savagery. She, as the twin deaths personified, eased the suffering of her fellow actors, or ripped it from their throats, until the crowd stood on its feet and erupted in thunderous applause.

It was true. All audiences loved a good death, and they loved Magga’s more than any other.

Even the king and queen were on their feet in praise of her work.

But Magga heard no applause and saw no ovations. She didn’t feel the stage beneath her feet, nor the hands of her fellow mummers in hers as they bowed low. All she felt was a sharp pain in her chest.

When Magga looked out over the audience, every single face was either a lamb or a wolf.

Tryndamere came into the world knowing only the harshness of survival, for the frozen steppes where his clan made their home never truly thawed. Though they praised all the Freljord’s old gods, as well as the Cult of the Three, they prayed most often to a spirit-deity known to ravage the tundra—a hearty and unkillable tusklord. Since the raw materials required for armor were scarce, the clan instead put its resources toward the forging of great blades, inspired by their god’s ivory canines.

The stamina and dueling prowess of Tryndamere’s people became legendary. They were able to fend off other raiding tribes, slay the great beasts of the mountains, and repel Noxians encroaching to the south. Tryndamere himself grew to be a brash and formidable warrior, but it wasn’t until a particularly cruel midwinter night that his strength was truly tested. An unusual storm swept in from the east, bringing with it an icy darkness, and a towering, horned figure silhouetted against the full moon.

Some in the clan knelt, believing that their boar-god stood among them. This creature dripped with ancient magic, true enough, but he was not of the Freljord… and those that knelt were the first to die.

Tryndamere looked on in horror. He could feel unhinged brutality rising in his heart at the sight of the invader’s cruel, living sword. Whether taken by bloodlust or some other madness, Tryndamere raised his own blade, and let out a defiant roar.

The dark figure swatted him aside like an insect.

Tryndamere lay surrounded by the dead, in snow soaked almost black with blood. He drew what he thought would be his last breaths as the creature approached and spoke. Tryndamere tried to hold onto the strange, archaic words, but as his life force slipped away, it was the thing’s laughter that burned itself into the young warrior’s memory.

For Tryndamere did not die that night. He was revived by a rage unlike anything he had ever experienced. He looked to the eastern horizon, intent on avenging not only the destruction of his clan, but the desecration of his own martial pride.

However, retribution was not what the steppes offered him. There were survivors, and they would not be long for this world if Tryndamere could not find others to shelter them. There were Noxians to the south, Frostguard to the north, and the dark figure had come from the east. To the west, it was said that some tribes were gathering before the supposed reincarnation of Avarosa—once, he might have dismissed such fanciful rumors, but now he knew this was his only recourse.

Tryndamere and the remnants of his people arrived in the valley as little more than beggars. The young warrior was determined to show his clan’s worth, and win them the Avarosan leader’s protection so that he could return to thoughts of revenge. Brandishing his tusked sword, he did what came naturally, and challenged others to duels. Holding the image of the dark figure and its echoing laughter in his mind, Tryndamere quickly bested anyone who stepped forward.

His singular fury was deeply unsettling to the Avarosans. The northern warriors, too, noted his rapid healing between bouts—unlike the Iceborn that walked among them, the more Tryndamere gave in to his rage, the more quickly his body healed. Many suspected he and his clan practiced strange and unnatural magics, and so Tryndamere’s plan to prove his worth was now endangering the wider acceptance of his people.

But not all of the Avarosans had turned against him. Their warmother, Ashe, was looking to strengthen her position with a political marriage… to someone who could face down the endless challengers for her hand, and to her rule. Seeing an opportunity in the handsome barbarian, she pledged to take in his clan as Avarosans, if Tryndamere became her first and only bloodsworn.

As he spent more time in Ashe’s company, he began to believe what others had whispered—that she was indeed the divine reincarnation of Avarosa herself. His rage found temperance in her thoughtful leadership, and a genuine affection grew between them.

Even so, serving as Ashe’s champion, Tryndamere now looks to an uncertain future. The barbarian king can see war brewing all too clearly on the Freljord’s horizon, yet he still thirsts for his own, personal vengeance, and begins to wonder if his predestined fate might not be at his queen’s side after all…

“Mom… can I ask you a question?”

“What’s wrong, Nunu? There’s something crinkling your nose, and I don’t think the elkyr can be blamed… well, this time. No offense, Kona!”

“Haha, elkyr smell like doocicles! But… we always make ‘em pull our carts anyway. I don’t wanna leave, mom. I like that village. I found a warhorn in the mud!”

“Then come close, my little grimaceling, and I will remind you. There is a reason the Notai must leave as the snows settle. An adventure that winter’s mother has entrusted to us.”

“You mean Anivia?”

“Mhmm. They say she is a phoenix, with icicles instead of feathers—her wings borne on frigid wind, brrrrrr! But we Notai know, it is hope that carries Anivia, and that she is not a guardian of our realm, as the Avarosans say. She is freedom. She is the spirit that fills you as you follow your passion, no matter how mean the world is. Do you know what passion is, Nunu?”

“Is it when the barbarian kisses the warmother?”

“Hmm, sometimes, and sometimes the warmother kisses the barbarian. But if I had to name it, I would call passion… the feeling of one last celebration as winter hits, the warmth inside even better because the first snows are falling. The dancing, the singing, a lyre in my hands, shivering even as I burn with this—this thing I try to name! This is what Anivia has tasked us with carrying across the Freljord. This is what gives her wind on her migration! Some villages see us as untrustworthy traders, others fear us for the ice that announces our arrival, the winter that can mean life or death. But to them all, we bring song, we bring togetherness, we link each village with our spirit. Can you imagine what a gift this is, Nunu? To know what we know because caravan carts have rattled it into our bones. Life is an endless string of opportunity for songs...”

“Like these?”

“Yes, like my song strands. Each string is a song, each knot in the string a note, and each note a place we’ve been while following Anivia. Like this one. This is the droning murmur of pilgrims, gathered beneath the statue of Avarosa at Rakelstake—a frozen lake that glitters like a jewel too massive for anyone to own. But the Avarosans have built a monument beside it, and say they own it anyway. They live their lives as if they are statues. Warmothers, Iceborn, they do not move, they fear the world that exists outside of Avarosa’s shadow. But to others, they have already moved too much…”

“The Winter’s Claw. They hate Avarosinians.”

“Avarosans. But the song binds them together, like this. This is the sound of the chains tying wolfships to Glaserport, and the Winter’s Claw to the past. The old ways. Blood in the snow. They live their lives on shattered ice. They think it is their might that cracks a path to sea, the wolfships prowling through… but it is not strong to cling to chains, and to demand that others carry them as well.”

“I ‘member the wolfships, mom. They were made out of wood. Not wolves! The Winter’s Claw don’t know how to name things.”

“Some things, Nunu, should not be named. Like the Frostguard Citadel, above the Howling Abyss. All those secrets… secrets of my own, of the warmth I have found… They preach there the words of the Three Sisters, but I think secrets are their true faith. How can you rescue someone from something they don’t know? That only this howled dirge remembers, rising from the Abyss. What the Frostguard guard against.”

“Are they heroes, like in the songs? I want to be a hero, too!”

“Listen to these notes, Nunu. They are the fortress at Frosthorn Peak and the crypts beneath. They are quiet. Empty. Whatever the Iceborn fought against has been forgotten. And now, with nothing else to fight, they use their power to rule. Avarosans, Winter’s Claw, Frostguard, they are the same. They use statues, chains, secrets, to push men down onto their knees. But you… When I look out onto the road, I see your future, Nunu. The joy you will bring to so many, as you have brought me. As winter’s mother wills it, and as she sends her winds to carry you, I will send love. You are my heart-song, Nunu. What notes should we add next? Where should love take us?”

“We’re probably going to another village. But this one won’t have warhorns...”

“No, Nunu. There is always more out there, you only need to imagine it! We could travel to a bridge that once spanned the sky! Only it collapsed in a forgotten age, and most of it lies hidden behind the clouds. But, can you hear that? Someone is step, step, stepping along its edge. We could pass into the tombs of creatures who ruled the Freljord before humans, find the mist that freezes in mid-air, giving ancient dreams shape. What is that in front of you, Nunu? Can you catch a dream on your tongue? Or find glacial tunnels that branch, as if tracing the shape of a world-tree that our ancestors destroyed, and buried in ice. All these things you can find, if only you look. You can go anywhere you can imagine.”

“Could we go to the top of the whole wide world, so I could play my warhorn? I bet then even Avarosa would hear it, and she’d come back!”

“We can go there right now, Nunu, if you tell me all about it. What would you see? What is the story in your heart?”

“I know how it starts! Once upon a time, there was a boy named Nunu, and Layka, his mom… and she was beautiful, and they lived in a caravan, and… they were trying to think of where to go next.”

“And what did they decide, Nunu?”

“They decided they could go anywhere together! And so their caravan flew off into the sky when Kona grew wings out of her butt, and flapped harder than Anivia! And the two of them were warm, and safe, even though snow was falling. What’s that feeling, mom? Like a hug, only…”

“It’s home. It’s home, my little hero. And that is where we will always be, no matter where we go. It is how we know, though the cold comes with us, though it can be hard and demand hope… it will never be winter, Nunu, if you love the person beside you.”

Anivia is an ancient Freljordian demi-god who represents the eternal cycle of life, death, and rebirth, intrinsically associated with the changing seasons. To those who venerate her, she is the elemental soul of the Freljord—a symbol of hope, and a sacred catalyst of change.

Stories passed down through the ages often tell of how she rewards those who are kind and humble. On the rare occasion a mortal glimpses her—or at least claims to—she is described as a noble spirit-bird of ice, with glittering wings that span the heavens, and a piercing cry that can be heard over even the fiercest storm.

The songs of the nomadic Notai tribe tell how Anivia’s birth first brought snow into the world. When she burst from her giant egg of ice, tiny pieces of it were hurled into the sky, and it has fallen as snow ever since. And, according to the sagas of the Mourncrow tribe, the frigid winds that scour the Freljord originate from the first beats of her wings.

Indeed, the full power of winter is Anivia’s to command, and to those who seek to desecrate her homeland, she is a bitter foe. When roused to anger, she can cleave fortresses and mountains, and her screech can summon blizzards cold enough to shatter steel.

One of the most enduring and respected beliefs is that Anivia’s greatest gift to the Freljord was the creation of True Ice. Infused with elemental magic, this unmelting substance is pure and potent, and the greatest seers and ice-mages have long strived to use shards of True Ice to amplify their might, while weapons that have even a tiny sliver forged into them are deadly beyond belief.

When mortals first arrived in the Freljord, Anivia welcomed them. Seeing that they could not withstand the cold, she guided them to secluded valleys where they could shelter, become established, and slowly harden themselves against the elements. She nurtured and watched over them for those first precarious centuries—and they, in turn, worshipped her.

Anivia hoped that these newly arrived tribes would remain unified in defending the Freljord from outsiders… but slowly, infighting and blood-feuds became all too common, making an invasion inevitable. According to legend, a greedy southern king marched his warriors up through the mountains, seeking to claim dominion over the northlands and shackle their wild magic for himself. So enraged was Anivia at the outsiders’ hubris and disrespect that she blasted them with a snowstorm that lasted a century and a day. Scattered standing stones can still be seen on the Scouring Plain, which the locals claim are all that remain of that ancient army.

Other tales include the Avarosan legend of Ulla Shatter-Spear, an Iceborn warmother who was favored by Anivia for saving a young hawk from a rimefang wolf. Across her lifetime, the Cryophoenix protected Ulla from harm, and when she finally fell in battle, having witnessed almost a hundred winters, it is said that Anivia welcomed her with wings spread wide.

If all these legends are true, then Anivia must have witnessed the rise and fall of countless mortal civilizations. While there are still some dwindling remnants of those earlier times, most have long been forgotten, and buried beneath millennia of ice.

But death cannot touch Anivia herself. The sagas speak of how she has been struck down and slain a handful of times throughout history, though she is always reborn—for as long as the Freljord exists, her soul is immortal. While it may be hundreds or even thousands of years before she rises again, each rebirth coincides with the dawning of a new era. Thus, her appearance, while regarded as a wondrous blessing, is often the harbinger of something terrible on the horizon.

Once, it is said, she sacrificed herself against a march of towering Balestriders. Anvia knew she could not slay these colossal creatures, and so she plunged into the ice beneath their feet, shattering her own body in order to entomb them.

Recently, some claim Anivia has hatched from the egg once more, and that she has appeared before the new leader of the Avarosans—the Warmother Ashe. In her, perhaps Anivia sees one who may be able to finally reunite the Freljord.

Yet if the Cryophoenix has indeed returned, as more and more shamans and spirit walkers proclaim, then it must be asked: what great threat has she come to face?

The battle spilled over like a feast before them. Such delicious life—so many to end, so many to hunt! Wolf paced in the snow while Lamb danced lithely from sword edge to spear tip, the red-blooded butchery never staining her pale coat.

“There is courage and pain here, Wolf. Many will gladly meet their end.” She drew up her bow and let loose an arc of swift finality.

The last breath of a soldier came with a ragged consent as his shield gave way to a heavy axe. Stuck in his heart was a single white arrow, shimmering with ethereal brilliance.

“Courage bores me,” the great black wolf grumbled as he tracked through the snow. “I am hungry and eager to chase.”

“Patience,” she murmured in his shaggy ear. As soon as the words left her, Wolf’s shoulders tensed and his body dropped low to the ground.

“I smell fear,” he said, trembling with excitement.

Across the muddied field of snow, a squire—too young for battle, but with blade in hand, nonetheless—saw that Kindred had marked all in the valley.

“I want the tender-thing. Does it see us, Lamb?”

“Yes, but it must choose. Feed the Wolf, or embrace me.”

The battle turned its steel toward the squire. He now stared at the roiling tide of bravery and desperation coming for him. This would be his last dawn. In that instant, the boy made his choice. He would not go willingly. Until his last breath, he would run.

Wolf snapped in the air and rolled his face in the snow like a new pup.

“Yes, dear Wolf.” Lamb’s voice echoed like a string of pearly bells. “Begin your hunt.”

With that, Wolf bounded across the field after the youth, a howl thundering through the valley. His shadowed body swept over the remains of the newly dead and their useless, shattered weapons.

The squire turned and ran for the woods until thick black trunks passed in a blur. He pressed on, the frozen air burning his lungs. He looked once more for his hunter, but could see nothing but the darkening trees. The shadows closed tightly around him and he suddenly realized there was no escape. It was the black body of Wolf that was everywhere at once. The chase was at its end. Wolf buried his sharp teeth in the squire’s neck, tearing out ribbons of vibrant life.

Wolf reveled in the boy’s scream and crunching bones. Lamb, who had trailed behind, laughed to see such sport. Wolf turned and asked, in a voice more growl than speech, “Is this music, Lamb?”

“It is to you,” she answered.

“Again,” Wolf licked the last drop of the youth’s life from his canine jaws. “I want to chase again, little Lamb.”

“There are always more,” she whispered. “Until the day there is only Kindred.”

“And then will you run from me?”

Lamb turned back to the battle. “I would never run from you, dear Wolf.”

Ashe hails from the northern Freljord, where brutal tribal raids and inter-clan warfare are as much a part of the landscape as the scream of the frozen winds, and the unyielding cold of the tundra.

The only child of Grena, the matriarchal chieftain of the tiny Avarosan tribe, Ashe was Iceborn: a member of the warrior caste, gifted with an ancestral connection to the magic of her lands, and the rare ability to wield the power of True Ice. Everyone assumed that Ashe would follow her mother as the tribe's next leader. However, this was never a glory Ashe desired. The grim responsibility of her warlike lineage and extraordinary gifts instead left Ashe feeling isolated, burdened, and alone.

Her only respite was when Sejuani, an Iceborn girl from a sister tribe, would stay with them for the summer hunts around the Ornnkaal Rocks. The girls' friendship defined their childhoods, but was cut short just as they reached their teens. Somehow, Grena had offended Sejuani's grandmother, and the fellowship between their tribes ended suddenly.

Soon after, with her youth fading, Ashe's mother began her lifelong quest for the “Throne of Avarosa”, a supposed hoard of treasures and magical items that she hoped would return her people to greatness.

But Grena’s belief in prophecies and legends led her to take risks, which often left her tribe enfeebled. Finally, during a dangerous and unnecessary raid in another tribe's lands, Grena was killed. Her sudden death left young Ashe on the run, while most of her tribe was wiped out.

Alone, pursued, Ashe followed her mother's last map to a deserted glacier where she found the supposed grave of Avarosa, and her magical bow of True Ice. Ashe used the weapon to avenge her mother's death, then turned west.

Whether it was out of duty or loneliness, Ashe gained a reputation by protecting the many scattered hearthbound tribes she encountered. She spurned the custom of taking thralls, and instead chose to adopt these desperate people as full members of her new tribe, and her fame grew quickly. Soon many began to believe that she did not just carry the weapon of Avarosa—Ashe was the legend herself, reborn and destined to reunite the Freljord.

But tall tales would not feed her followers, and their long march south left the tribe on the verge of starvation. So, Ashe leveraged the myths surrounding her, using them to form alliances with the powerful and land-rich southern tribes, promising to unite them into a nation capable of challenging neighboring kingdoms.

These new alliances brought new dangers, and Ashe quickly found herself at the center of a political feud. A Warmother, as Freljordian tribal leaders are known, was expected to wed, and taking a husband from one of the major tribes would anger the others. Ashe could take several husbands, but this would only bring the conflict to a boil within her own household, and the ensuing bloodshed would shatter the alliances she had fought to build.

Her answer was an impoverished vagabond from a mountain clan that had been nearly wiped out—the warrior Tryndamere. He was neither a spirit-walker nor blessed with any elemental powers, but upon his arrival in Ashe’s new capital, Tryndamere had thrown himself into every dueling ring he could find. He fought with abandon, desperate to prove the destitute survivors of his clan were worthy of adoption by one of the stronger tribes. But even for the Freljord, his brutal fighting style and extraordinary vitality were unsettling, and many suspected he was touched by dark magic. Ignoring this, Ashe offered to adopt his people as her own, if he became her first and only bloodsworn.

Tryndamere accepted reluctantly. Though a political marriage, the attraction they felt for each other was palpable, and slowly a true affection blossomed.

Now, Ashe stands at the head of the largest coalition of Freljordian tribes in many generations. Even so, the unity she would bring rests upon an uneasy peace threatened by internal intrigues, foreign powers, the growing violent horde of the Winter's Claw, and a supposed destiny that Ashe must at least pretend to believe…

Even from a distance, Sejuani could see the mammoth was dying, but like everything in the Freljord, it fought to live with every fiber of its being. Half a dozen spears and twice that many arrows jutted from the colossal beast’s matted hide, its russet hair stiff with frozen blood, but still it wouldn’t die.

Its furious bellows shook the mountainside, and Sejuani kept glancing to the lightning-wreathed summit, fearful of an avalanche.

Or something worse…

Purple lightning flared beyond the mountains, silhouetting the toothed peaks and turning them into serrated fangs ripping open the sky.

She and her Winter’s Claw hunters had stalked the mammoth for a week, driving it toward the shallow canyons of the foothills, but each time it broke through their ring of spears and axes to flee higher up the mountain’s pine-shawled flanks.

Of the ten warriors she had set out with, only seven now remained.

Three less mouths to feed.

Sejuani hated having to think this way, because these were fine hunters and fearsome warriors, but Viljalmr the seer was predicting one of the harshest winters in living memory and the Winter’s Claw’s supplies of food were dwindling fast. The mountain herds of Elnuk they would usually raid had already been driven south to the greener lowlands by their Avarosan drovers, and the fish of the Ice Sea were locked below thick pack ice.

She hauled back on Bristle’s reins, pausing to gather her thoughts. The giant drüvask grunted and shook his head in annoyance, the smell of the mammoth’s blood thick in its nostrils. The mounts of her hunters were wary at being this close to a mammoth, but Bristle was eager for a fight.

“Easy there,” she said, loosening the stiffened scarf from across her mouth and feeling the cold on her skin like a slap in the face. “This is not a fight for tusks, but spears and bows.”

“Good to know even Iceborn can feel this svaaging cold,” said a cloaked figure riding next to her. His voice was muffled by the furs wrapped around his face, and all Sejuani could see were his bloodshot eyes. The rest of his face was hidden behind a leather mask wrought in the shape of a roaring bear, its snout formed by thick, overlapping knotwork.

A low rumble built in Bristle’s throat at the man’s nearness, so Sejuani ran a hand through the coarse, wiry hair of his flanks to calm him.

“I feel it well enough, Urkath,” Sejuani replied, “I just don’t gripe about it.”

Urkath nodded up the mountain and said, “How much higher do you think our quarry will go before it turns and fights?”

Some three hundred yards ahead of them, the mammoth trudged uphill through the snow, its steps labored and a trail of crimson staining the virgin whiteness of the landscape.

“It won’t be long,” said Sejuani. “He’s lost too much blood to reach the summit. He’ll turn before the timberline.”

“How do you know?” asked Urkath.

“I don’t,” admitted Sejuani, “but I’m betting he thinks we won’t follow him if he gets higher.”

“Is he wrong? Any higher and we’ll cross into the realm of He Who Stands.”

Even thinking about the Volibear and the Ursine flooded Sejuani’s mouth with the taste of warm blood and the sensation of lightning in her veins.

Images flashed in her mind, sharp, bright, and painfully real. Memories that weren’t hers, sensations she hadn't felt, woven together as though she’d lived them only moments ago.

Fangs and claws ripping flesh from the bone…

Elongated skulls with cold, blue fire burning in empty eye sockets….

A pact and a living city reduced to blackened skeletons of stone and timber…

Slaughtered corpses hung from the withered branches of death-nourished trees…

“Warmother?” said Urkath.

Sejuani tried to answer, but the words wouldn’t come, as though a more ancient, primal part of her soul was looking out through her eyes, the part that once ran with the beasts, knees and palms bloody, skin raw and bare, caked in mud.

Urkath reached out and placed a hand on her fur-swathed arm.

“Warmother?” he said again, more urgent this time.

Her hackles raised at his unwanted touch. Saliva filled her mouth as her lips pulled back, baring her teeth, ready to tear his throat out.

Sejuani closed her fist on the spiked pommel of her saddle, hard.

The pain cleared her head and wrenched her back to the present as she let out a shuddering breath.

“You’ll want to take that hand away,” she said, her eyes flashing a pale winter’s blue and her tone icier than the mountain winds.

Eyes watchful, Urkath snatched his hand back and said, “Apologies, Warmother, but to enter the lands of the Lost Ones without their leave… it’s a death sentence.”

A shadow blotted out the low sun before Sejuani could respond, a towering figure of a man wearing the wide-horned helm favored by warriors of the Lokfar.

The coastal peninsula of Lokfar was one of the harshest, most brutally cold regions of the Freljord, and only those with fire in their blood could endure there.

Its warriors were typically rangy, lean, and stoic.

Shedding blood alongside Olaf the Berserker for many years had taught Sejuani that he was none of those things. Even on foot, he was easily the biggest Freljordian she had ever seen, the equal of the mounted Sejuani and Urkath in height. Some said Olaf’s mother must have lain with a troll to grow so big, but they never said it to his face.

He climbed into the teeth of the oncoming blizzard like a man out for a stroll, his powerfully-muscled body made thicker and broader by the furs and iron plates bound across his chest and arms.

The braids of his beard were frozen into spikes of fiery orange and his pale eyes were alight with the prospect of potentially facing what lay at the top of the mountain.

“A death sentence, you say,” said Olaf, striding past them. “I like the sound of that.”

The mammoth sank to its knees within a spear’s throw of the cliffside timberline.

Its blood soaked the snow, and Sejuani almost felt sorry for the beast, coming so close to the border between this world and the terrible things that dwelled in the storms wracking the summit.

She pushed thoughts of sentiment aside. An animal this size would feed the Winter’s Claw for a week—surviving a day, an hour, or even the span of a breath was a victory in the Freljord.

Sejuani slid from Bristle’s back as her hunters dropped to the snow, unstrapping long, thick-hafted spears from their mounts. She reached over her shoulder and unlaced the thongs securing her mighty flail, Winter’s Wrath.

Steeling herself for the pain, she gripped its leather-wrapped haft and swung it around her body, feeling the deathly cold of the True Ice secured at the end of its thick chain. Pale radiance built behind the blue of her eyes, and she exhaled a breath of aching cold.

The flail was a weapon of great power, but it came with a cost.

Glowing lines of hard, crystalline blue formed under her skin, threading the veins of her forearm and reaching up to her corded bicep.

Urkath drew his great longsword, its hilt worked from the jawbones of a rimefang wolf and its blade sharp enough to cut stone. Olaf unsheathed his mighty axes, their blades glimmering with hoar-frost.

“My edges hunger,” said Olaf, his teeth grinding in anticipation. Blood flecked his lips where he’d chewed the inside of his cheeks.

“We do this right,” said Sejuani. “Together. No heroics.”

Olaf grinned and nodded, his eyes glazing over and his mind already sinking into the blood-mist of the berserker.

Sejuani took a step toward the mammoth, lifting the flail and letting the beast see the glimmering cold of its True Ice.

“Get up,” she ordered. “You are a king of the Freljord. You don’t die on your knees.”

The mammoth glared at her and, taking strength from her words, pushed itself to its feet. It threw back its shaggy, tusked head and loosed a ferocious bray of defiance. The sound echoed over the mountains like the Forge God’s legendary Carnyx, a war-horn whose blast could be heard all around the world.

The sound shook snow from the trees, eclipsing the storm raging at the summit.

The mammoth lowered its head and stamped its huge front legs, each as thick as the ironwood trees ringing the rocks at Ornnkaal. Its head swayed from side to side, displaying its jagged, sword-like tusks, each capable of goring a warrior to death with a single blow.

“We will give you a good death, you have my word,” promised Sejuani.

“A glorious death…” grunted Olaf, the words forced out between bloodied teeth, but Sejuani wasn’t sure whose death he meant.

The Winter’s Claw hunters spread out, weapons at the ready. The warriors with the spears flanked the mammoth left and right as Sejuani, Olaf, and Urkath stood before it, meeting its challenge head-on.

With a bellow of rage, the mortally wounded beast charged.

Its speed was ferocious, far faster than should have been possible.

It churned the snow, throwing up great chunks of black rock and bloody ice.

Sejuani and Urkath dove to the side, but Olaf leapt to meet the beast with a bellow to rival that of his foe. His ax struck the mammoth in the center of its head, but bit only a finger breadth before skidding from the thick bone of its skull. With a dismissive flick of its trunk, the mammoth tossed the berserker over its back. Olaf landed hard on the rocks behind, dangerously close to the sheer drop of the cliffs. He came to his feet with a delighted, lunatic laugh.

Sejuani rolled to her feet and swung Winter’s Wrath in a wide, two-handed sweep.

The flail’s True Ice smashed into the mammoth’s back knee.

It faltered, stumbling as the limb buckled beneath it.

The beast crashed to the ground and skidded to a halt, trying to push itself to its feet on a back leg that wouldn’t work. Sejuani’s warriors closed in, ramming their spears into its flanks with the grim, pitiless precision of hunters who had done this many times before.

Thrust the blade, twist the haft, withdraw to a safe distance.

The mammoth roared and surged upright as iron spearheads pierced its body, fresh blood staining the snow. A successful hunt had little to do with glory or honor; it was about exhausting the prey, wounding it and wearing it down until it couldn’t fight back.

Then came the killing.

One of her warriors slipped in the snow, and the mammoth jerked to the side, stamping down with one mighty foreleg. The man’s scream was cut off as he was crushed to gory red paste beneath its massive foot.

The other hunters backed off, chests heaving, looking for an opening to strike again.

The mammoth swung its lethal tusks from side to side, turning on the spot and backing toward the edge of the cliff. Sejauni moved left, keeping the head of her flail in motion. Urkath circled right, sword held high at his shoulder.

Sejuani resisted turning her head as she heard Olaf’s ululating battle cry.

He charged headfirst at the mammoth, his ax flashing silver in the waning light.

The beast lowered its head, tusks ready to gore the berserker to death.

Olaf was deep in the blood-mist, a state of mind that turned him into a ferocious killing machine, a living avatar of death. The mammoth swung its head up and Olaf leapt into the air to grip one of the slashing tusks with his free hand. Using the momentum of the beast’s movement, he swung up and over its head to land on the mammoth’s shaggy back.

His ax hacked down, like a woodsman chopping at a stubborn tree-root.

The mammoth reared up, shaking its body to dislodge the berserker, but Olaf had ridden wilder monsters than this. He gripped a handful of its long hair and laid a flurry of blows upon the mammoth’s back. Seeing his chance, Urkath charged toward the beast, sword raised to cut its exposed throat.

Its trunk lashed around his waist like a tentacle of the boneless creatures that sometimes washed up from the deep ocean on Yadulsk’s shores. The mammoth lifted Urkath into the air before slamming him down on a jutting black rock.

Sejuani heard his spine shatter even over his scream of agony.

Twice more it smashed him against the rock before hurling his body aside.

Urkath’s bloody remains fell to the snow, his body shattered, his arms and legs hideously twisted. Sejuani screamed and sprinted forward as Olaf continued to chop through the beast’s thick hide to its spine.

The beast’s eyes were maddened with pain and fury, but still it saw her coming.

It bellowed and thrust its tusks at her, almost too fast to avoid.

Almost…

Sejuani dropped to the snow and slid beneath the mammoth’s belly on her back. Holding the haft of Winter’s Wrath in one hand, she screamed as she took hold of the chained shard of True Ice in her fist.

The pain was unbearable, as if she’d thrust her hand deep into a fire.

She slammed the shard up into the mammoth’s chest, turning her head from the flaring burst of blue-white fire as it punched deep into its body.

Sejuani slid out from under the mammoth and sprang to her feet. The chained True Ice fell from her numbed hand. Her fingers were black and clawed with frostbite.

The mammoth staggered, its mighty heart freezing in its chest, the blood in its veins turning to ice. Its eyes misted with the white of a blizzard and it staggered like a drunk as it fought to stay upright.

“Olaf, get off!” yelled Sejuani. “Olaf!”

Her voice was hard and commanding, a voice to be obeyed. It penetrated the blood-mist wreathing Olaf’s mind, and he vaulted from the mammoth’s back.

He landed next to her, chest heaving, eyes wide and his ax blade soaked in blood.

Sejuani wanted to speak, but the pain was too great. That was good, she hoped, it meant the hand wasn’t beyond saving. Her fingers throbbed in agony, and she thrust them deep within her furs, doing her best to hide the pain.

The mammoth staggered and swayed, dragging its back leg as its blood grew ever more sluggish and cold. Her hunters closed in, spears poised, but Sejuani halted them with a word. The hunt was over. The beast had its back to the cliff, nowhere to go.

Though the mammoth knew it was beaten, it lifted its head proudly.

It had fought to the last, and Sejuani held her weapon high, honoring its spirit.

The great beast stared her down, caring nothing for the gesture.

Instead, it stepped back and over the cliff.

Sejuani ran to the cliff’s edge and sank to her knees, watching as the mammoth fell thousands of feet down the mountain before landing on a wide expanse of heavy snow.

“Svaag!” swore Sejuani, balling her fists in the snow, heedless of the pain.

Olaf stood over her, leaning dangerously far out over the cliff.

“Ach, we’ll just climb down to carve it up,” he said with a shrug. “The beast saved us the bother of dragging its carcass off the mountain.”

Sejuani sighed, about to agree with him, when she heard a distant cracking sound. A sound babes in arms were taught to recognize.

The sound of breaking ice.

A network of angular black lines spread out from where the mammoth had landed and Sejuani realized the wide expanse of white wasn’t a stretch of tundra at all. It was the frozen surface of a mountain tarn, a lake pool formed in a deep hollow.

The ice splintered into jagged segments and Sejuani watched with a sick sense of horrified inevitability as the mammoth’s body slid beneath the frigid black waters, far beyond their reach.

“Svaaaaaaag!”

Defying all Sejuani’s understanding of the human body, Urkath yet lived.

His ribs were smashed and his spine was splintered into fragments, but he still drew breath as Sejuani and Olaf squatted next to him. Incredibly, he’d managed to prop himself up against the very rock that had destroyed his spine, drawing short, hiked breaths.

“Wolf calls me home…” he said with a pained grin, his voice little more than a whisper.

“Lamb would never think to come for you, Urkath,” said Sejuani, taking his hand. “We are Winter’s Claw. We don’t go meekly into the beyond.”

Urkath nodded. “My sword?”

Olaf pressed Urkath’s weapon into his palm and closed the man’s fingers around its grip.

“The tale of your death will be told at the hearthfires for many seasons,” said the berserker, a melancholic edge in his voice. “I envy you that.”

Urkath coughed a mouthful of blood and said, “I’d gladly… swap fates with you, big man.”

“No,” said Olaf sadly. “I do not think that you would.”

Urkath turned his head, the light fading from his eyes, and said, “The gods… they show me a fine sight… as I die…”

Sejuani followed his gaze to the top of the mountain, where a vivid borealis of crimson and amber had driven away the lightning, a swathe of light painting the night sky that was as beautiful and magical as it was strange.

She saw Urkath’s bloodstained mask lying in the snow and slid it over his now lifeless face.

“Wolf will be here soon,” whispered Sejuani. “Give the old bastard a scare for me.”

They left Urkath there, at the border between the realm of mortals and the Lost Ones.

His body belonged to the Freljord now and his spirit would roam the frozen winds until the cold, atavistic soul of the land found a use for it.

Their mood was grim as they descended the mountain.

To stay on the hunt any longer would be pointless. As it was, they had only scraps to sustain them back to the Winter’s Claw encampment, two days’ travel westward.

Exhausted and with hunger gnawing at her belly, Sejuani swayed in Bristle’s saddle, her frozen hand tingling beneath her furs.

Olaf kept pace with her on foot, keeping his own counsel, his mood dark.

Night closed in as they reached the foot of the mountains and camped in the lee of a titanic menhir. It had once been part of a great stone circle higher up the mountain, but had toppled in a long-ago earthquake. The smooth stone surface was carved with ancient symbols no one could read, and a pair of frozen skeletons lay entwined at its far end, a frosted blade lying within their bones.

Lovers or bitter enemies, who could say?

Dawn brought fresh snows and colder winds coming off the high peaks, as though the mountain itself sought to drive them from its slopes. Their route home took them past the remains of a village that had once stood where the road turned to the mountain pass. Its structures were ghostly tombs now, its inhabitants dead or long gone.

Nightfall on the second day saw them come within sight of the Winter’s Claw encampment.

A few guttering torches marked its edge, and Sejuani’s heart sank to see how few they were now. Not so very long ago, when she had first marshaled her followers, they numbered in the thousands, but hunger and the harshness of recent seasons had forced her to scatter her host.

“How do you fare?” asked Olaf as they trudged toward the beacons of light, the first words he had said since coming off the mountain.

“At last, he speaks,” said Sejuani, irritated at his sullenness.

“Ach, don’t mind me,” said Olaf. “Each time the blood-mist takes me I hope it will be the last time. That I will finally die in glory. And every time it fades, I am sad that I know I am one step closer to dying at peace.”

Sejuani shrugged. “Have no fear, Olaf. With enemies all around us, I promise you days of blood and battle, nights of death and fury.”

Olaf grinned, and his grim countenance vanished like snow before the summer.

“You swear it?”

“I swear it,” promised Sejuani. “But to answer your first question, Viljalmr will take it as an ill-omen that the tribe’s leader returns with nothing to show for her hunt.”

“A pox on his kind,” spat Olaf. “Seers only ever speak in riddles and deliver naught but grim portents. I’d sooner trust a southerner.”

Sensing an opening, Sejuani asked, “Are you ever going to tell me why you went south?”

“No,” said the berserker. “I don’t think I will. Some tales are best left in the past.”

Sejuani ran the stiff brush through Bristle’s fur, letting the anger burning within her after the meeting in the tented longhouse flow from her with every hard sweep. As she’d feared, the seer, Viljalmr, had found great woe in her having returned without meat for curing. Circling the firepit, his cloak of raven feathers glistening in the orange light of the flames, he told the assembled claw-leaders that the coming winter would be the grimmest any of them had known.

Olaf had openly mocked the man, telling him a child could see the same thing.

The other hunting claws had met with little more success—Svalyek’s claw had taken six elnuk from an Avarosan drover who’d waited too long to lead his herd to greener pastures, and Heffnar’s group had found and killed a small pod of horned seals trapped on land after the ocean floes had frozen to the edge of the land.

It wasn’t nearly enough, but it would keep the tribe’s bellies full for a few days.

Fear made the tribe’s blood run hot, and shouting voices clamored to know what she would do, how she planned to keep her people alive until the spring muster. Sejuani had no answer, and angry voices echoed long into the night with ill-formed thoughts on how they should survive.

Some said they should march south to Ornnkaal Rocks and make peace with the Avarosans, but they were quickly shouted down by Gunnak, the most bellicose of Sejuani’s war-leaders. Beating his tattooed chest with his ax, he demanded they take their claws and carve a red path as deep as they could into Avarosan lands to earn a glorious death.

Sejuani had to admit, despite its suicidal futility, the idea of riding into the southern lowlands with blades unsheathed greatly appealed to her. Others said they should try another hunt. After all, wasn’t there still light and food enough to mount one more expedition?

Heads nodded at that suggestion until Hunt-leader Varruki explained there was barely enough food to sustain the hunters, and that everyone would be frozen and starved before they returned.

Quieter speakers said maybe they should disperse the tribe, each family making their own way into the wilds. Smaller groups would be easier to feed after all…

Sejuani had quashed such talk straight away.

She knew it was going to be hard enough to get the full tribe back together in the spring months as it was. Breaking up even further would only tempt each smaller group to turn from the Winter’s Claw to try and forge a new life in the south.

In the Freljord, community was life, and to separate further was to die. No one could endure alone, and only by the combined will of the tribe, even one as harsh and unforgiving as the Winter’s Claw, was survival even possible.

Besides, going south meant a life lived as a prisoner of the fields, of homes built from stone, of tending flocks. That was not the Winter’s Claw way, and would never be their way.

Sejuani would rather die with the blood running hot in her veins and a blade in her hand than stooped and worn down by years of grubbing in the dirt for seeds.

In the end, Viljalmr had marched straight up to her, a brazen threat to her authority.

How were the Winter’s Claw to survive?

Once, she would have struck him down for such open defiance, but his question was fair and everyone gathered in the tent knew it.

Her people needed a leader who could make life and death decisions without fear, so she told the assembled leaders they would have her answer when dawn’s light clawed over the mountains.

Now, brushing the thick hair running down Bristle’s back, she felt the raging storm within her mind finally calming. Grooming the giant beast always soothed Sejuani’s emotions, reminding her of a time when things had been simpler, though part of her knew that life had never been simpler, not really.

She thought back to when she’d brought Ashe to the Winter’s Claw after finding her alone and in exile on the ice. She smiled, remembering how her childhood friend had mistaken Sejuani for one of the Ursine.

Her strokes grew harder as she thought of how Ashe had betrayed them and turned her back on Sejuani during the raid on the Ebrataal. That was the moment Sejuani had known for sure there was no chance of the Winter’s Claw ever making peace with the Avarosan.

Bristle grunted in annoyance, stamping his hoofs in irritation.

“Careful, lass, the beast’s getting unsettled,” said a voice from behind.

Sejuani spun, reaching for the knife at her hip.

A shape lay at the corner of the corral, small and useless looking, like a bundle of rags.

She released her grip on the knife, shocked to see who had spoken.

Lying in a makeshift bed of straw was a wretched old man who should have been left out on the ice to die many years ago. His legs were stumps that ended just above the knee, and his sightless eyes were mottled white like a gull’s egg.

His name was Kriek and he’d once been the seer of Olgavanna’s tribe, farmers and builders who’d refused the call to Sejuani’s banner. So she had sent Urkath’s war-claw to wipe them out and take their herds, their furs, their iron, and their salt. The survivors fled up the slopes of a mountain whose summit seethed with the red rock that flows.

When Urkath returned, it was with Kriek on his back and he’d seemed confused when Sejuani demanded to know why he’d brought them a useless mouth to feed. Urkath claimed the Ursine had driven them from the mountain, speaking of blade-pierced titans draped in bloodied fur and horns, gaping skulls, and fists that hurled fire.

He’d simply said that the mountain had told him to bring the blind man, before dumping him unceremoniously at the edge of the village. Sejuani had given orders that no one feed the seer, that he be left behind for the Freljord to take. But here he was, many months and leagues from that battle, alive and, more confusingly, somehow still with the Winter’s Claw.

“Word is you glimpsed the realm of the Lost Ones on the mountain,” said Kriek. “Don’t envy you that, lass. I saw them once, back when you drove us into Hearth-Home.”

Sejuani put aside her irritation long enough to say, “You didn’t see anything. You’re blind.”

Kriek nodded and said, “Oh, I seen them, better’n any true-shotted archer ever did. White and gold in the clouds, lightning for blood, and voices of thunder. I saw, I did.”

Sejuani peered into the milky whiteness of his gaze.

“Those eyes haven’t seen anything in many a year.”

“True,” said Kriek. “World went white for me on my tenth winter, but some things are best seen without eyes, lass!”

Sejuani tapped the flat of her blade against Kriek’s neck and said, “Call me lass again and I’ll slit your throat right now.”

“Ah, yes, that’s right, you’re no lass, you’re Warmother, ain’t ya? You remember that next time some seer tries to tell you what to do,” laughed Kriek, waving a filthy, gnawed hand at her. “But listen, you know warriors who lose a hand or leg’ll swear they can still feel the cold in ‘em? Same for my eyes. Now I see more’n I ever did before, more’n I ever wished to see. Things you’d gouge your own eyes out with that knife if y’saw the half of them.”

“You don’t know the things I’ve seen,” said Sejuani.

“That’s right,” said Kriek, leaning in. “Ever since that night you and your spirit walker made offerings to the Lost Ones… You sang the oaths, you burned the wood in the death knot, and offered up the weapons and bone, so what do you see? Days of blood and battle, nights of death and fury?”

Just thinking of the slaughter at the city by the river filled Sejuani with a hunger for raw meat, a thirst for marrow sucked from splintered bone.

She shook her head free of the sensations and said, “How are you alive? I told my people not to feed you, to leave you behind.”

“Old Ornn fed me,” said Kriek. “At Hearth-Home, just before your killers came out of the smoke. Lifted me up like a babe and nourished me with a mouthful of broth from his great cauldron. That he did, yes!”

Sejuani sighed. Kriek was clearly mad, but she was more irritated that someone in the Winter’s Claw had clearly been feeding this old fool when their own were going hungry. She went to rise, but the old man’s hand shot out and took her wrist in a powerful grip.

“On my honor, not a scrap of food has passed my lips since your dead man brought me down the mountain,” said Kriek, his lifeless white eyes boring right into her, as though something else stared out from behind them, something infinitely older and wiser. “Never took no food. Nor water, neither! Ornn’s great cauldron seen to that! No company that sups from it ever leaves unsatisfied. One mouthful and your belly don’t growl for a whole turn of the seasons!”

“Ornn’s Cauldron?” scoffed Sejuani. “That’s just a legend. Wishful thinking. It’s one of the lost tales to tell to children.”

“And where d’you think them tales come from but truth!” snapped Kriek. lifting the furs covering his body. “This look like wishful thinking to you?”

Sejuani let out an involuntary gasp at the sight of Kriek’s torso, his flesh ruddy and pink, his belly full and soft with fat. Sejuani was ivory pale, her wrists too slender, the flesh pulled tight over her frame, pressing against the bones for want of meat and fat and fish.

“How…?” said Sejuani.

“I told ya,” said Kriek. “The Great Cauldron of Ornn. Lost Ones stole it from Hearth-Home for spite’s sake. Said Ornn was too soft on mortals, that if they could fill their bellies any time they wanted, they’d get spoiled and weak! So they killed his followers and took it to their mountain, high up where its power now paints the sky with blood-red light. Ornn’s crafty, y’see. His magic’s too wyrd-cunning to stay hidden forever. Even the Lost Ones can’t keep power like that out of sight! Ask that spirit walker friend of yours. If he still remembers he’s a man, he’ll hear the truth of what I say!”

Sejuani shook her head. “Udyr’s gone. He walked into the blizzard. Said he needed time away from the spirits looking to get inside him. Said he needed to find a way to strengthen his will.”

“Then it’s all on you, Warmother,” said Kriek. “What’s it to be? The old ways? Frozen on your knees or your blood soaking warm southern soil? Or maybe try and take back what the Lost Ones stole? You’ve faced them before, so what’s one more time, eh?”

The old man’s story was lunacy, wasn’t it? How could she possibly convince her people to march into the mountain realm of the Ursine on the word of a madman?

The Freljord was a place of dark mystery, where legends walked the ice, and its magic was there in every breath. Some whispered that Ashe had fought her way to the legendary bow of Avarosa, and Sejuani’s own Iceborn powers were proof that magic was woven into the very fabric of the landscape… but still…?

“Why would you help me?” asked Sejuani. “My warriors slew your tribe.”

“Don’t you understand yet, Warmother?” said Kriek, the timbre of his voice deepening, becoming low and melodic. “We are all one tribe and it is long past time you understood that. You think too small, like a fighter only seeing the foe in front of them. You must think like a Warmother, like a queen! There is a season for fighting, a season for leading, and, aye, one for dying. But a time is coming when the sons and daughters of the Freljord must stand together or you will all die, one by one. And the first step on that road is staying alive. Tell me you hear me, daughter of Kalkia.”

Sejuani nodded and said, “I hear you.”

Sejuani left Kriek and Bristle in the corral. First light was breaking over the mountains, and she paused to savor the coming of a new day.

The orange glow of the dying hearthfire was visible within the tented longhouse, where her people waited to hear what she had decided.

Olaf squatted by its entrance, running a glittering whetstone over the blade of one of his enormous axes. He looked up and his eyes narrowed.

“You have the look of someone chewing a nettle,” he said.

“I know what we have to do, but no one’s going to like it.”

Olaf shrugged. “They don’t need to like it. You’re Warmother. You tell them what to do and they do it. That’s how this works.”

“I’ll want you at my side,” said Sejuani.

Olaf rose to his full, towering height, hooking his ax over his shoulder.

“No,” said Sejuani. “Blade out.”

Olaf nodded slowly and said, “You going to tell me your plan before we go in?”

“Remember how I promised you days of blood and battle, nights of death and fury?”

“Aye, Warmother, I do!” said Olaf, his smile as wide as the horizon.

“We’re going back up the mountain,” said Sejuani. “To the realm of the Ursine to steal the Great Cauldron of Ornn from the Volibear.”

“You’re right, they’re not going to like it,” said Olaf. “But I love it!”

Sejuani was the child of a Freljordian political marriage that ended as coldly as it began. Her mother, the Iceborn warrior Kalkia of the Winter’s Claw, abandoned her new family to pursue the man who had captured her heart years before, and the tribe fell into decline and chaos without a young Warmother to lead it.

Sejuani was instead raised by her grandmother, Hejian. Though Sejuani tried her best to earn Hejian’s love, she was never able to meet her arduous expectations. As the tribe’s troubles grew in the years that followed, Hejian had even less time for the girl.

Wealth, love, safety—these were things Sejuani only experienced secondhand, through visits to the Winter’s Claw’s sister tribe, the Avarosans. During the summers, Grena, the most famous warrior in the region, took Sejuani into her household. After discovering Grena had in fact once bested Kalkia in a duel, the Avarosan Warmother instantly became Sejuani’s idol… and Grena’s daughter Ashe became the only person she ever truly considered a friend.

After Grena questioned the treatment of the young girl by her grandmother, an affronted Hejian cut all ties with the Avarosans. The Winter’s Claw then instigated a series of conflicts with other neighboring tribes, attempting to reclaim the lands and honor they had lost with Kalkia’s flight, but these desperate tactics only led them further into ruin.

Somehow, word of this reached Kalkia.

Hearing of her former tribe’s misfortunes, she returned and took up the mantle of Warmother once more. Even so, quelling these hostilities left the Winter’s Claw with game-poor lands and precious few other resources, forcing them to rely on the grim Frostguard for protection.

Sejuani was galled by this, and resolved to seize leadership from her mother. She swore a sacred oath to lead a perilous raid against a Noxian warship, hoping that fulfilling this oath would be enough to rally the tribe to her, with enough support to wrest power from Kalkia and the Frost Priests.

During the vicious assault, Sejuani freed a juvenile drüvask from the ship’s butchery stores, naming it Bristle for the feel of its hide. Though she could not have guessed it at the time, this creature would grow to become one of the largest drüvasks ever seen, and remained with Sejuani as her loyal steed.

Her raid a success, Sejuani decided it was time to challenge her mother directly for the tribe. By the ancient customs, a duel between a mother and her daughter was unthinkable—but Sejuani would not be deterred.

Outraged, the Frost Priests were forced to intervene, and Kalkia died in the struggle before Sejuani could reach her.

As the new Warmother of the Winter’s Claw, Sejuani began attacking and absorbing nearby tribes, consolidating her power and gathering a veritable horde of followers. Her defiance of the Frostguard also attracted outcast shamans, spirit walkers, Iceborn and Stormborn, and unrepentant worshippers of all the old gods from across the Freljord.

Where once they had been weak, disgraced, and preyed upon by their neighbors, in only a few years the Winter’s Claw had become feared throughout the northlands for their speed, brutality, and absolute devotion to their Warmother.

Now, as the seasons turn, Sejuani marches on the southern tribes, Noxian interlopers, and even the borderlands of Demacia—raiding, pillaging, and conquering any who stand against her. Ultimately, she seeks to cast down and destroy the burgeoning coalition of tribes formed by her childhood friend, Ashe. As far as Sejuani is concerned, the Avarosan Warmother has betrayed not only their friendship but, far worse, she has also betrayed Grena’s legacy.

And so, Sejuani will prove that only she is worthy of ruling the Freljord.

Even as a child, Braum was much larger than other Freljordian youngsters, but his mother taught him never to use his size to intimidate or bully. She came from a proud line of herders, and believed true courage lay in using one’s power not to dominate, but to protect those in need.

When Braum was still a boy, ice giants devastated a neighboring tribe. That tribe had long preyed upon the herds of Braum’s people, but his mother didn’t hesitate to head out across the tundra to help the survivors, bearing furs, foodstuffs, and healing supplies. At first, Braum didn’t understand why she would aid their rivals—but after her actions saved many lives, they became lifelong allies. He finally understood what his mother meant when she said all the Freljord’s people were a family, and from that day forth, he pledged to bring that family together.

As Braum grew, it was clear he was one of the revered Iceborn, though even among their number, his strength and ability to endure the elements were legendary. He became a local hero, rescuing children who had slipped into icy ravines, saving travelers stranded in blizzards, and protecting families from ravaging wildclaws. Whenever he appeared, people knew help had arrived. He was a figure of hope, known for his liveliness and laughter, and the easy way he made friends.

Eventually, Braum realized he was needed beyond the valleys and tundra where he’d been raised. Bidding his mother a tearful farewell, he set out to travel the Freljord.

Over the years, countless stories spread of Braum’s mighty feats and good deeds. While most had at least a kernel of truth, they grew increasingly far-fetched and mythic—such as the legend of how he chopped down an entire forest in a single night using only his bare hands, or how during a volcanic eruption, he saved an isolated farmstead by picking it up and carrying it to higher ground.

A more recent tale spoke of how Braum found his immense ram-headed shield. As the story went, it was an enchanted vault door, forged in ancient times and set into a mountain. Braum heard cries from within, but he couldn’t break the door down. Undeterred, he punched his way through the mountain’s bare rock, rescuing a troll boy who was trapped inside. He ripped the unbreakable door off its hinges, and has borne it ever since.

As with many legends about him, Braum laughed uproariously when he first heard this particular tale—but far from refuting such stories, he embraces them. Why let the truth get in the way of inspiring others to acts of generosity and kindness?

No matter how he actually found his shield, soon afterward Braum made his way to the sacred site of Rakelstake, where many tribes had gathered to hear the words of the Avarosan warmother, Ashe—said to be the reincarnation of Avarosa herself. There, he witnessed the barbarian Tryndamere, desperate to prove his worth, savagely beating any who would face him.

As Braum watched, he saw that Tryndamere was growing increasingly unhinged. During one duel, he was so lost in his fury that it seemed certain he would kill his opponent, despite having already prevailed. Deciding things had gone far enough, Braum planted himself in front of the downed fighter, shield raised, and Tryndamere hacked and smashed against the impenetrable bulwark. When the barbarian’s rage finally subsided, Braum’s good humor won him over, and before long the pair were laughing and drinking to each other’s health. Some even say that it was Braum who first introduced Tryndamere to Ashe. The barbarian would later marry her, becoming her only bloodsworn.

Braum doesn’t hold any particular tribal allegiance, for he views all within the Freljord as brothers and sisters. Even so, he sees in Ashe someone who can end the centuries-old feuding among the Freljord’s tribes, and the Avarosans have informally adopted him into their number. Braum’s dream, as he often tells adoring children, is that someday the Freljord will be united in one big family… and then he can retire to become a humble poro herder.

Though Braum counts no one as his enemy, he has had a few run-ins with the Frostguard since he started carrying his shield. He doesn’t understand why they have a grudge against him, nor why they seem so interested in what he now bears…