Vludria

The Shape of the Frozen Crown:

 

On the Lyceum’s great globe, Vludria sits like a tilted crown of ice at Gaea’s far north. Its main mass is a broad shield of bedrock buried beneath leagues of ice, fringed by sawtooth coasts and broken archipelagos. From above, one sees a vast white disc streaked with blue, cracked by dark lines where mountains pierce the surface or volcanoes bleed heat.

 

Three major structural bones hold it together.

 

The first is the Stone Root, the ancient continental core. It is a slab of thick, stable crust that has ridden high on Gaea’s mantle for eons. Its hardness resists deep folding; instead of building high ranges, stress fractures it into long, low ridges. Beneath the ice, these ridges define basins and channels where under-ice seas and meltwater rivers gather.

 

The second is the Fire Vein: a broad belt of hot mantle material pushing upward along a curving line through Vludria’s interior. Where this plume reaches closest to the surface, it thins the ice and warms the rock. Volcanic vents, geothermal springs, and lava tubes perforate the crust, creating the Fire Crevasses that underpin realms like Aegyrfell and Svarheim.

 

The third is the Polar Cap, not a structure of stone but of ice itself. Millennia of snowfall have piled and compacted into a dome of glacial ice thousands of feet deep, thickest toward the centre, thinner near the coasts. The ice sheet creeps in slow motion downslope, calving into frozen seas as towering bergs and grinding its way over bedrock, carving troughs that will fill with water should the ice ever retreat.

 

At the edges, the crown fractures into fjords and sounds. Along the western margin, cliffs of dark rock and blue ice drop into a sea that alternates between slush and black open water depending on the season. To the north and east, the coast dissolves into tangled pack-ice, floes of varying thickness pressed into chaotic mosaics by wind and current.

 

Above it all, the sky is rarely still. Even on cloudless nights, the stars share the firmament with the aurora: veils of shimmering colour that ripple and fold, brightening in pulses that correspond uncannily with quakes deep below the ice. To Frostborn eyes, this is no coincidence. When Kryathor dreams, the sky glows.​

 

Regions of Ice, Stone, and Fire:

 

Vludria can be thought of as three worlds layered together: the surface waste, the under-ice vaults, and the sky.

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The Northern Waste

 

Most visitors’ first impression of Vludria is the Northern Waste: a wind-raked expanse of snow, ice, and exposed rock stretching from the central ice dome to the outer seas.

 

The surface is far from uniform. In some places, the ice lies smooth and white, broken only by sastrugi—ridges sculpted by wind—and the occasional crevasse. In others, old pressure ridges have shattered into mazes of jagged blocks, each taller than a house, their edges lit with luminous blue where sunlight penetrates.

 

Bedrock outcrops—nunataks—rise like black teeth from the ice, their flanks home to lichens and hardy frost-moss. These islands of stone serve as landmarks and sacred sites for the Free Tribes who traverse the Waste. They give names to each: Wolf’s Tooth, the Three Sisters, Surtan’s Thumb.

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Snowfall is less generous than outsiders imagine. Much of the Northern Waste is a desert in terms of moisture. Storms, when they come, are ferocious: walls of driven snow and ice-crystals that grind exposed rock and carve fluted shapes into anything that stands still too long.

 

In the deeper interior, the sun climbs low even in summer and vanishes entirely in winter. One half of the year is day without true night; the other half is night without true day. Frostborn eyes adapt; outsiders’ spirits do not always keep pace.

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The Fjord-Scars and Icebound Seas

 

On Vludria’s western and southwestern coasts, glaciers have carved deep valleys whose lower reaches have flooded as the ice retreated slightly over the ages. The result is a coastline of fjords: steep-sided inlets where dark water lies between walls of rock and ice.

 

Here the pack-ice breaks more frequently, pushed offshore by katabatic winds pouring down from the interior. In late summer, bands of open water—leads—extend between floes, allowing hardy vessels to slip between bergs.

The Fjord-Scars are home to some of Vludria’s only surface settlements with a sense of permanence: ice-harbors carved into cliff faces, smoke-holes dark against white, glowworm lines of lanterns marking switchback paths.

 

Where these fjords open onto broader sounds, the Icebreaker Fleets of the coastal clans keep watch. Their ships are reinforced barges and long-hulled sailcraft, sheathed in heartsteel ribs. They ride low in the water, their bows designed to climb and crack floes rather than pierce them. In winter, they are hauled onto ice-shelves and serve as anchored strongholds; in summer, they range far, hunting frost-whales and trading with distant coasts of Haeslios and Krioslos when the seas permit.

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The Auralis Glacier and Crown Plateau

 

Toward Vludria’s eastern arc rises the Auralis Glacier: an ice-plateau slightly higher than the surrounding sheet, its surface notably smoother, its crevasses more regular.

 

From above, Auralis glows faintly even at noon, its ice shot through with vertical columns of trapped air and dust that catch and refract light. At night, the aurora seems to favour this region, dropping its curtains low, wrapping them around the plateau like veils. The Monastery of the Silent Flame crowns one of Auralis’ central ridges, its towers and halls carved directly from ice that has stood frozen since the First Raising of the polar cap.

 

The Crown Plateau beneath Auralis sits nearer the Fire Vein than most of Vludria. Heat wells up from far below, not enough to melt the ice entirely, but enough to create vertical channels—chimneys of warmth around which caverns and galleries form. These vertical paths are lifelines: they allow Frostborn to travel between surface and deep underworld.

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The Fire Crevasses and Aegyrfell Range

 

Along the arc of the Fire Vein, the ice thins and the crust cracks. Long chasms split the surface, their depths glowing faintly with reflected fire. Volcanic cones rise where magma has found direct routes to the sky, their summits crowned with steam plumes and occasional fountains of ash.

 

This is Aegyrfell: a region of volcanic bastions and black glaciers stained with soot. Lava tubes run for miles beneath the crust, still warm long after their fiery rivers have drained. The Forgeholds of Aegyrfell colonise these tubes, their smithies built around lava lakes, their halls lit in red and gold.

 

At the heart of Aegyrfell stands the Anvilheart, an open-throated volcano whose crater hosts a forge-city. Its rim is lined with foundries and hammer-halls; its slopes are terraced into stepped streets. When the mountain exhales smoke, the plumes twist into shapes that Forgeseers read as omens—curling sigils in the sky.

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The Under-Ice Vaults

 

Beneath the surface, Vludria is hollow where other continents are solid.

 

The slow grind of glacial ice over warmer rock has gouged caverns and tunnels. Meltwater streams run, sometimes under pressure, carving sinuous channels. In places, the weight of the ice above has caused the crust to sag, forming basin-caverns whose roofs are ice and whose floors are warmed by geothermal vents.

 

The greatest of these vaults house cities: Svarheim foremost among them. Others hold hidden states like the Vethran Deep Court. Some are partly flooded, their ceilings hung with hoarfrost chandeliers, their floors divided between steaming pools and ice ledges.

 

Within these spaces, stalactites of ice and stone mingle. Fungi cling to warm cracks. Blind fish and crustaceans swim in mineral-rich pools. Frostborn horticulturalists cultivate pale mosses and heat-loving lichens on the walls, feeding cave-herds of six-legged, woolly reptiles whose meat and hide sustain life below.​

 

Kryathor and the Cold Flame:

 

It is impossible to speak of Vludria without speaking of Kryathor.

 

The Frostborn say Kryathor the Stillborn Flame is the last of Gaea’s elemental children, formed when the planet tried to birth another heart of fire and instead birthed a paradox: a Titan whose heat cooled. In their telling, Kryathor rose in rage, drew heat from the world in a single convulsion, and collapsed back into the mantle, its body fused with stone under what would become Vludria.

 

The Lyceum’s geomancers, for their part, chart unusual heat-flows and magnetic anomalies beneath the continent’s crust. They concede that something immense lies below, something that pulses with a slow rhythm not fully explained by tectonics.

 

Whatever Kryathor is, its presence shapes Vludria’s ley network.

 

The Dragon Vein of the Dawn, which runs beneath Krioslos and Haeslios, loops northward into the polar crust but does not pass directly under Vludria. Instead, smaller arterial leys arc out and curve around the Fire Vein. Where these intersect the mantle plume’s warmth, Cryopyric Nodes form: points where heat and cold, motion and stillness meet and can be coaxed into doing impossible things.

 

The Ember Well beneath Svarheim is one such node. Lava bubbles unseen far below; the rock above hums. To stand near the Well is to feel warmth that does not burn and see light that casts no clear shadow. Ritualists of the Order of the Silent Flame spend years learning to breathe in time with its pulse.

 

The Anvilheart is another node, a wound where Kryathor’s cooling body brushed close enough to melt rock. Here, fire and stone remain in constant negotiation. Metal forged in this place—heartsteel—is neither wholly hot nor cold. It holds an internal tension that makes it extraordinarily strong.

 

The Heartmirror lake atop the Auralis Glacier sits above yet another intersection. There, heat from below travels up a narrow chimney and meets the killing cold of the polar surface. The lake remains frozen year-round, but the ice that covers it has unusual properties: it reflects more than light. Those who gaze into its depths alone see a flicker of flame that looks uncomfortably like their own soul, stripped of pretence.

 

The Froststone Arch in the Northern Waste is a crevasse where a once-molten dyke cooled so slowly that its crystals aligned in long, resonant bands. Above it, the aurora lingers, forming shapes that resemble runes. The Free Tribes’ shamans read wind through that arch as Vethra’s whispered commentary on Kryathor’s dreams.

 

To the Frostborn, the aurora itself is Kryathor’s breath made visible: heat that cannot become fire, escaping as light instead. When the colours brighten and dance wildly, drums fall silent in Svarheim, and even the boldest Forgeseers hold their hammers and listen.​

 

The Frostborn:

 

The peoples of Vludria are known collectively as Frostborn. They share a handful of traits shaped by generations under aurora and ice.

 

They are tall, not by Haeslian standards but by Krioslan: long-limbed, spare, with muscle packed dense for endurance rather than brute strength. Skin tones range from pale ash to deep bluish-grey, often mottled faintly along the veins. Under moonlight or strong auroral glow, fine traceries beneath their skin emit a soft luminescence: bioluminescent channels that the Frostborn believe to be Kryathor’s lingering fire in their blood.

 

Hair runs silver-white, coal-black, or iron blue; eyes are stark: ice-blue, pale grey, or dark as obsidian. The light in those eyes is what outsiders remember: a steady, reflective gaze as unhurried as glaciers and as potentially dangerous.

 

Clothing is layered: inner garments of soft cave-wool, outer wraps of tanned frost-beast hide, cloaks lined with silken fur. Armour, when worn, is a patchwork of obsidian scale, heartsteel plates, and hardened ice in clever lamination.

 

Culture revolves around two axes: endurance and paradox.

 

Endurance is obvious. Simply surviving Vludria’s winters requires skill, will, and communal discipline. Children learn early to read snow for hollows, to distinguish safe ice from treacherous, to find the voice of a vent before stepping into whiteout. Stories of ancestors almost invariably include long journeys, sieges beneath the ice, or hunts that lasted through months of polar night.

 

Paradox is subtler. Every Frostborn grows up with fire that does not thaw, ice that burns to the touch, fumes that freeze, metals that stay warm in gloved hands yet never melt snow. They worship a Titan whose birth froze the world and whose potential reawakening might save or destroy it. Their gods embody contradictions: Eira the snow-maiden of memory, whose kisses burn like frostbite; Surtan the fire-lord whose destructive eruptions allow new life to thrive in their wake.

 

They have words for this in Vrudic, none easily translated. The closest the Lyceum can manage is “Still Flame”: motion within stillness, heat in deep cold, life at the edge of death. The Path of Still Flame is both philosophical track and spiritual practice.​

 

Realms of the Frozen Crown — Seven Polities:

 

The Lyceum recognises seven major polities in Vludria. None is an empire in the southern sense; each is a cluster of holds, clans, and orders shaped by its particular relationship to Kryathor’s gifts.

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The Kingdom of Svarheim

 

Svarheim is Vludria’s closest analogue to a capital, though its queen insists she rules only “where the ice listens to my voice.”

 

The city lies within a hollow glacier above a geothermal basin. Imagine a bubble in the ice cap tens of miles across and hundreds of feet high, its walls of blue-white ice shot through with veins of stone, its ceiling studded with ice-stalactites like frozen teeth. The floor is not smooth but ridged, sculpted by meltwater and humans alike into terraces.

 

Stone domes and obsidian spires rise from bedrock outcrops, connected by bridges carved from ice and lined with heartsteel railings. Light comes from three sources: magma-fed glow rising through grates in the floor, oil lamps and crystal globes in Frostborn dwellings, and the ghostly luminescence of the ice itself, lit by aurora shining faintly through the glacier above.

 

Queen Eir Skaldyr holds court in the Hall of Inward Flame, a great chamber carved into a buttress of rock at the glacier’s lowest point. At its centre lies the Ember Well: a wide vent over a magma pocket, covered by a grate of heartsteel bars. Warmth radiates up in slow pulses. Frost mist rises and falls in rhythm with some deep beat from below.

 

Svarheim’s culture is a balance of craft and song. Poetry is not hobby but duty. Each notable event—birth, binding, oath, battle, volcanic eruption—is recorded first in verse, then in glass. The Ember Scribes sit cross-legged at the edge of flowing lava, dipping styluses into molten stone, scratching letters into sheets of cooled obsidian as the ink freezes beneath their hands.

 

Artisans here specialise in contrasts: ice-carvings set into black stone, sculptures that seem to flicker between solidity and translucence, jewellery combining frost-crystal and hammered heartsteel.

 

Svarheim’s symbol—a flame within a snowflake—appears on banners, armour, and the queen’s own circlet. It is also carved above the main gates into the lower caverns, a reminder that all who come here are expected to honour the paradox that keeps the city alive.

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The Free Tribes of the Northern Waste

 

If Svarheim is Vludria’s heart, the Free Tribes are its lungs.

 

They range across the surface, their shelters never in one place too long. Tents of layered hide and bone go up and down swiftly; sleds bear them over ice at surprising speed, pulled by six-legged frost-hounds bred for stamina and uncanny footing. When the snow hardens to armour, they jog beside their sleds, wrapped in silence save for the hiss of runners.

 

Leadership is fluid. At each seasonal gathering—held at sites like the Froststone Arch or certain nunatak camps—elders nominate champions for the Trial of Storms. Candidates must spend a night outside shelter in a blizzard, carrying only a shard of ice carved with their name. Those who return with the shard intact, their will unbroken, are granted voice in the next council. Those who do not return are sung into Kryathor’s dream.

 

Free Tribe shamans—Wind-Readers—interpret auroral runes and the feel of air through fur. Their law is unwritten but strict. No one hoards heat when another freezes. No one kills a frost-beast for sport. No one steps onto a river of black ice without first listening for the groan of moving water below.

 

Above all, no one calls themselves “king” of the Waste. Vludria’s surface belongs to Kryathor and the storm, and the Free Tribes travel as guests.

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The Forgeholds of Aegyrfell

 

Where the Fire Vein breaches ice, the Aegyrfell smith-lords have built fortress-cities around raw fury.

Lord Borun the Red Anvil rules from the Anvilheart itself. His hall is a ring of stone clinging to the crater’s inner wall, stairways spiralling up and down. Below, lakes of molten rock bubble and surge. Above, smoke escapes through natural vents, its shape studied by Forgeseers who read Surtan’s moods.

 

The Forgeholds stretch along a chain of vents and calderas. Each is built differently, adapted to the quirks of its volcano. Some descend deep, their workshops stacked like the levels of a bell. Others spread sideways through lava tubes, forging lines of apartments and barracks along once-molten corridors.

 

Aegyrfell culture values secrecy: formulas for alloys, balances of heat and cold, chants sung to heartsteel while it is still glowing. Outsiders may purchase weapons and tools—at steep cost—but they do not learn how such things are made.

 

Yet Aegyrfell is not merely a factory. Around every forge, shrines to Surtan and Skeldyr stand, lit by coals in carefully tended braziers. Heartsteel blades are named in verse before they are ever drawn in battle. When a master smith dies, their final work is often broken on the Anvilheart’s lip and returned to magma, unfinished.

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The Monastery of the Silent Flame

 

High atop the Auralis Glacier, the Monastery of the Silent Flame sits where wind never ceases and snow never fully settles.

 

Its structures are not added to the glacier but carved from it. Tall, narrow towers with window-slits face the aurora; long halls tunnel through ice, their walls carved with reliefs of flames and snowflakes. Underfoot, floors are a patchwork of ice and imported stone, arranged into mandalas.

 

Archsage Valenn Snowfire leads the Order with an expression more felt than seen. His face is hooded, his eyes half-lidded, his breath visible even indoors in the form of faint steam. Within his body, he and his adepts practice Kryathra: the discipline of inner heat.

 

Monks of the Silent Flame learn to raise and lower their body temperature at will. They stand barefoot on ice until it melts under their soles; then they meditate in near-freezing water until their breath no longer fogs. They chant in tones that match the aurora’s flickering frequencies, believing these harmonies soothe Kryathor’s slumber.

 

The Heartmirror lake lies a short, treacherous trek from the monastery, across wind-scarred ice. A frozen oval sunk into a shallow depression, it reflects sky with unnerving precision. Monks use it for self-examination; would-be initiates kneel beside it and stare until they see the flame they fear most: not some external inferno, but their own capacity for destruction.

 

Though withdrawn, the Order is not ignorant of the world. They receive envoys from Svarheim, Aegyrfell, even from the Moonfury Barracks of Haeslios. They listen. They rarely advise; when they do, their words have the weight of a glacier’s slow movement.

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The Icebreaker Clans of Skalfjord

 

Along the western fjords, where the ice meets stormy sea, the Icebreaker Clans maintain a tenuous foothold between two hostile elements.

 

Their main harbour, Skalfjord, is a long, narrow inlet whose entrance is partly blocked by a natural rock sill. Over generations, the Frostborn have carved ice-docks into its sides, tunnels into its cliffs, and tunnels from there into under-ice caverns that connect eventually to Svarheim.

 

The Icebreaker Clans trace descent not from a particular ancestor, but from ships. Each great vessel—long-hulled breaker, wide-bellied cargo barge, swift seal-chaser—is treated as a totem. When a ship finally breaks beyond repair, its heartsteel ribs and carved prow are mounted in a hall, and its “line” continues in new craft named for it.

 

They live close to Torran, lord of hunt and wind. Their hunts follow frost-whales, iron-finned sea-serpents, and great seals that rest on floes. They honour every kill with libations poured into the sea and with songs taught to them by Whale Priests from farther south.

 

When pack-ice retreats, Icebreaker captains sometimes sail far enough to glimpse the coasts of other continents. They rarely land; Vludria is home, and other lands seem too loud, too warm, too careless about the relationship between fire and snow. Still, trade happens, quietly, beneath the northern lights.

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The Vethran Deep Court

 

Not all of Vludria’s inhabitants welcome sky or surface.

 

Deep below the ice, at the junction of several under-ice rivers and a broad geothermal cavern complex, the Vethran Deep Court keeps its own counsel. There, the ice above is so thick that no light filters down. The only illumination comes from bioluminescent fungi, crystal clusters heated from within, and lamps of whale-oil.

The Deep Court takes its name from Vethra, the goddess of silence, shadow, and dreams. Its nobles are called Veil-Bearers; they wear masks of carved ice or lacquered obsidian in public, never showing their faces to those beyond their closest circle.

 

The Court’s power rests on three pillars: its control of certain crucial under-ice passages, its mastery of dreamcraft unique to Vludria, and its role as repository of secrets no one else can afford to hold.

 

Veil-Speakers—Vethran oracles—practice a dangerous form of divination. They sleep floating in warm pools fed by Kryathor’s heat, their bodies motionless, their minds drifting through dream-currents. When they wake, they speak what they have seen once and never repeat it. Ember Scribes record such utterances on glass and seal them in vaults, accessible only with the consent of multiple guilds.

 

From time to time, Svarheim or Aegyrfell send ambassadors bearing questions too fraught for open council: whether to begin a war, whether to risk a new form of Cryopyra, whether Kryathor is stirring for good or ill. In the Deep Court, those questions may be answered—or replaced with more unsettling ones.

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The Auralis Aurora Compact

 

The sky has its own realm.

 

On ridges and nunataks surrounding the Auralis Glacier, a loose society of sky-worshippers has coalesced: the Auralis Aurora Compact. They are not as cloistered as the Silent Flame nor as numerous as the Free Tribes, but they have carved out a niche as interpreters of the heavens.

 

Their settlements cling to exposed rock where the aurora seems brightest: small clusters of stone huts and ice-domes, lookout platforms hung with chimes and mirrors. During long polar nights, they remain awake for days, recording shifts in auroral patterns, cataloguing colours and forms.

 

They are drawn particularly to Skeldyr, patron of balance and fate, and to Auralis, goddess of light and compassion. To the Compact, the aurora is a dialogue between those two and Kryathor: a visual chronicle of whether the world’s paradox remains in harmony.

 

Members of the Compact travel widely despite their small numbers. They accompany Moonfury patrols, serving as guides across deadly white; they go south with Icebreaker ships to stand on other shores and compare foreign skies. They send copies of their charts to the Temple of Elements in Eagren, whose sages in turn share whispers of global balances.

 

Unlike the Monastery, the Compact has no single leader. Decisions are made in ring-circles beneath open sky, voices kept low out of respect for Vethra’s silence. It is said that when they speak unanimously, even Kryathor listens.​

 

Gods of Cold and Flame:

 

To understand a Frostborn’s choices, know their gods.

 

Kryathor is not worshipped in the conventional sense. There are no temples set aside solely for the Titan. Vludrians consider themselves inside Kryathor already. They speak of the Titan with a mixture of reverence and wary familiarity: the dangerous relative whose moods affect everyone.

 

Eira, the Snow Maiden, presides over winter, purity, and memory. She is pictured as a figure in white fur, footprints filling with frost-flowers behind her. Her touch can erase tracks and sins alike, but only if the penitent accepts the pain of forgetting. Shrines to Eira are simple: carved ice-fronds, bowls of fresh snow, whisper-stones where names of the dead are spoken once and then never again.

 

Surtan, the Red Father, governs fire, destruction, and renewal. His images decorate forges and volcano rims: a broad-shouldered figure wreathed in ash, an iron halo floating above a stylised flame. Surtan’s priests in Aegyrfell begin each casting with a small, intentional break: a chip in the mould, a crack in the slag. They say it is to remind the god that destruction has its place.

 

Vethra, the Veiled Night, guards silence and secrets. Her symbol—a black crescent on white—appears most often around the Deep Court and in the meditative chambers of the Monastery. Vethra’s worship is less about prayer than about withholding: choosing when not to speak, what not to reveal.

 

Torran, the White Stag, embodies hunt, wind, and survival. His antlers crown the lodges of the Free Tribes and the prows of Icebreaker ships. Before every major hunt, a poem to Torran is spoken not to ask for success, but to promise restraint.

 

Skeldyr, the Twin Flame, patron of poets and judges, is invoked whenever two opposites must be weighed. In Svarheim’s law-halls, his quill-and-sword emblem hangs behind the high seat. Trials are often accompanied by recited verse: arguments laid out as competing stanzas.

 

Auralis, the Dawnfire, holds light and compassion. She is honoured at glacier edges and under open sky, wherever the first and last rays of the pale sun strike. Her votaries tend lamps in dangerous crossings and leave beacons for strangers: small kindnesses against immense indifference.

 

To the Frostborn, these gods are not separate from Kryathor but facets of its dreaming mind. When Kryathor dreams brightly, Eira’s snows shine with cruel beauty; when it dreams angrily, Surtan’s fires run too hot. The work of monks, smiths, and kings alike is to encourage the dream to remain balanced.​

 

Ages of Ice and Ember:

 

The Lyceum marks three great eras in Vludria’s history, though Frostborn songs slice time more finely.

 

In the Age of Ash and Snow, before 40,000 BGF, Vludria was not yet wholly frozen. Volcanoes erupted frequently; ash fell like dark snow. Lava fields cooled slowly, leaving behind obsidian flats and basaltic towers. Early humans and other mortals huddled around geothermal springs, building simple stone walls against wind.

 

Then—whether in a single cataclysm or a chain of them—the stillborn Titan rose. Frostborn myth puts it simply: Kryathor tried to be born, failed, and in failing, exhaled a breath that stripped warmth from the world. Glaciers surged outward from the pole, seas froze, and the Great Freeze began.

 

In the Age of Sleep, from roughly 39,000 to 25,000 BGF, the Frostborn learned to live inside winter. They drove their settlements underground or into volcanic regions. They discovered that ice could be carved as stone if cold enough, that certain crystals sang when struck, that one could steer heat from vent to hall with channels and stone-glazed pipes.

 

The Monastery of the Silent Flame traces its founding to this period: a group of surface-dwellers who refused to flee entirely below and instead sought a way to stay on the edge. Their early teachings of Kryathra were practical: how to keep fingers from freezing, how to sleep in snow without dying. Over time, these became metaphors for the soul.

 

The Age of Awakening began around 24,000 BGF and continues. Seismic quakes increased in frequency. Auroral storms intensified, sheets of light occasionally descending so low that their crackling could be heard. Icequakes opened new fissures, revealing warmer rock and new Cryopyric Nodes. Svarheim, once a cluster of small caverns around a single vent, expanded as more heat-channels were found and tamed.

 

In this age, the outside world discovered Vludria properly.

 

The Moonfury Barracks of Haeslios—originally a cadre of elite winter soldiers—established watch-stations on Vludria’s fringes. Officially, they aid the Frostborn in monitoring auroral anomalies. Unofficially, they keep careful record of Kryathor’s pulse, fearing that a full reawakening might trigger another planetwide freeze or something stranger.

 

Their presence is tolerated, even valued, in places like Skalfjord and certain Free Tribe camps. In the Deep Court and among the Silent Flame, opinions vary.

 

Now, subtle changes worry and intrigue scholars alike. Some glaciers retreat slightly, revealing stone that has not seen sky in epochs. Certain song-metres practiced by the Silent Flame produce responses in the aurora that did not occur in earlier records. Frostwyrms—mythic creatures of frozen fire that patrol the ice near Cryopyric nodes—have been seen more often, not less.

 

Vludria stands at the edge of something. Whether that edge overlooks thaw, deeper freeze, or a third option, no one yet knows.​

 

Cryopyra, Guilds, and the Fire That Freezes:

 

Vludrian magic, Cryopyra, revolves around one insight: heat and cold are not enemies but directions on the same road. To practice Cryopyra is to step sideways off that road and walk between.

 

A simple Cryopyric working might involve drawing warmth out of a person’s fever into a bowl of freshly fallen snow, leaving both body and snow at a comfortable cool. A more complex one might freeze a section of lava into obsidian without cracking it, preserving flow-lines in glass. The greatest masters can kindle a pale blue fire that burns away fatigue or sorrow without touching the flesh.

 

To learn Cryopyra, one must first learn stillness. Monks of the Silent Flame stand waist-deep in slush until they can calm their pulse enough to stop shivering. Forgeseers of Aegyrfell meditate over Anvilheart’s crater, regulating their breath in time with belches of lava. Frostguard initiates sit atop bare ice in blizzards, channelling just enough inner heat to survive without wasting energy.

 

The Frostguard are Vludria’s elite defenders. Their armour is a marvel: heartsteel plates laced with orichalcum veins, lined with insulative mats. When properly primed, those veins carry warmth from the wearer’s core outwards, preventing frostbite while leaving the plates themselves cold to the touch. To an attacker, Frostguard armour feels like striking stone that refuses to share heat.

 

Each Frostguard cohort is sworn not only to a realm but to a node: one protects the Ember Well, another the Anvilheart, another the Heartmirror routes. They train as much in meditation as in weapon use.

 

The Forgeseers, as noted, combine smithing with augury. They watch ash-plumes, slag cracks, even the way frost forms on unused anvils. In their view, Surtan and Skeldyr both speak through metal. When they predict something dire, even Eir of Svarheim listens.

 

The Ember Scribes occupy a strange place: part priesthood, part bureaucracy. They record treaties, prophecies, poems, and technical treatises on volcanic glass. Their script curls like frost-ferns. It is designed to freeze, literally, as soon as it is written: molten rock cooling into words. They are conservative in what they write. Spoken stories can change with tellers; obsidian does not.

 

The Order of the Silent Flame has already been described. Less visible but equally important are the Moonfury Barracks. Trained in Haeslios, hardened in Vludria, they serve as a bridge between southern sensibilities and northern realities. Their compound near Skalfjord is half-buried stone, half imported engineering. They run patrols across dangerous pack-ice, share icecraft with Krioslan allies, and secretly draw ley-maps that the Lyceum dearly wishes to see.

 

All these guilds share one unspoken understanding: Kryathor is not to be prodded carelessly. Cryopyric experiments that touch too closely on the Titan’s core are rare, controversial, and usually monitored by multiple orders at once.​

 

Seasons, Hazards, and Travel:

 

For Myth Keepers, it helps to think of Vludria not as a static sheet of ice but as a machine with very slow, very heavy moving parts.

 

In high summer, the sun circles low around the horizon without setting for weeks. On the surface, snow softens; thin ice over coastal waters begins to fracture. Meltwater streams tunnel beneath the snowpack, appearing as sudden sinkholes. Whiteouts remain a risk whenever wind picks up fine crystals.

 

In deep winter, night presses down like a weight. Temperatures plunge. The air itself feels brittle. Sound carries oddly across flat ice: a shout may seem to come from behind instead of ahead. Clear nights belong to aurora and the creak of slow-moving glaciers.

 

Year-round, icequakes can strike without warning. A glacier’s internal stresses shift, and what seemed solid ground shudders, drops, or cracks open. Caverns widen. Ice bridges vanish. Routes known for generations change in an instant.

 

Frostwyrms—immense serpent-dragons whose bodies seem carved from blue ice with a core of pale fire—patrol around Cryopyric nodes. They rarely attack Frostborn unprovoked; many songs portray them as Kryathor’s immune system, eradicating imbalances. Outsiders wielding raw fire or careless magic, on the other hand, draw their attention quickly.

 

Travel in Vludria is an art.

 

On the surface, sledges, skis, and snowshoes are standard. Sky is watched constantly: not just for weather but for auroral patterns that signal stress in the ice below. Nunatak chains act as waypoints. Free Tribes and Moonfury both use low, rhythmic chants to maintain pace and to test echo, listening for hollows underfoot.

 

Below the ice, ropeways and marked tunnels connect major vaults. Some under-ice rivers are navigable by boat—narrow, low craft lit by hooded lamps that reflect on damp rock. In certain places, the Frostborn have carved spiral stairwells through ice, ringing them with heartsteel rails. All travellers on such stairways know the rule: one hand on the rail at all times.

 

Communication between realms relies on runners, signal-fires under ice, and auroral codes worked out between the Auralis Compact and the Monastery. Sometimes, when urgency is great, a Cryopyric ritual can flash a message along a leyline as a brief, localised change in auroral colour—a language only a few can read.​

 

Using Vludria in Your Tales:

 

Vludria is excellent for campaigns about endurance, balance, and secrets too heavy to tuck into saddlebags.

 

If you want survival horror and stark beauty, start with the Free Tribes in the Northern Waste. A simple task—escorting a caravan between nunataks, hunting a frost-beast, rescuing a lost child—can unfold into encounters with auroral phenomena, undead frozen from earlier ages, or the slow revelation that the ice itself is listening.

 

If you want political intrigue with lava-lit halls, drop your players into Svarheim or Aegyrfell. Let them navigate between Forgeseers who want to test a new form of heartsteel, Ember Scribes worried about what should never be written, and Moonfury agents quietly measuring Kryathor’s pulse. Every forge they pass is a possible catastrophe waiting to happen.

 

If you want mysticism and introspection, walk them up the Auralis Glacier to the Monastery. Make them face the Heartmirror, and show them flames that reflect not just who they are, but who they might become if they tip too far toward either fire or frost.

 

The Deep Court and the Auralis Aurora Compact are excellent vehicles for meta-plot. Through Vethran dreams and auroral charts, players can learn of threats far to the south: Atlantean experiments cracking leylines, pantheons fraying, gods going silent. Vludria can then be cast not as remote curiosity, but as early warning system.

 

Most of all, use Vludria to remind your table that Gaea is alive and layered. Here, more than anywhere, the planet’s inner workings are close to the surface. Cryopyric magic, auroras, thunderless quakes, frostwyrms moving like thought beneath the ice—all are ways of showing that mortals are living atop a sleeping giant’s chest.

 

Archivist Vayne, in a rare moment of unguarded awe, wrote:

“In Vludria, the world puts a cold hand on your heart and asks:
‘Can you be still and burning at the same time?’
The Frostborn answer yes.
The rest of us are still thinking about it.”

Let your players decide how they answer.