Glace

“Is there something you need?”

Cold, cutting, calculating, brutal.

What exactly was horror? Being left for dead by all those you loved? The nightmarish conjuring of every dark fear, deep despair—all your demons brought to life by vivid hallucinations? Knowing you lay at the threshold of death—unready, unworthy? Mind-shattering pain? Losing everything and everyone you had ever loved, when you could have stopped it?
She had known horror—intimately. Inexorable. Inevitable.

It had been the death of her. Everything she was; everything she might have been. There would be no revival. But she was not done yet. Survival meant killing all the parts that had made her feel alive—until there was nothing left to ruin. All that was left, intrinsic in her continued existence, embodied in her visage, the last remnant—was horror. And not her own.


Glace was a true child of ice. When she was hardly more than a hatchling, she was separated from her family during one of the most severe blizzards of the century. Certain she was dead, her family mourned her loss and continued on. Suffering severe hallucinations and frostbite in the depths of hypothermia, Glace stumbled mostly dead into a Wintermane clan. Instead of leaving her to die, they strangely decided to save her life. It was a long, difficult struggle back to health, but once she had recovered Glace adopted her new family as quickly as they had adopted her. She passed many years in their midst, protecting them from beasts and rival clans. She was a natural fighter, sharpened by hardship and bitter cold, honed by harsh terrain and adversity, steeled by ice. She was brutal, elegant, and deadly.

Glace had passed many years with the clan, content and comfortable in the warfare and comradery. And then the fire dragons came, raiding the countryside—annihilating beasts, beastclans, and dragons alike in their wake. One day while she was on patrol with her friend Annilhus far too the north, their village was murdered by such a war party. Glace came back to find everyone dead, brutally slaughtered to the last.
It did not take her long to hunt the perpetrators down, and what she did is not spoken of. But they say there is glade in the mountains where the ice is opaque with blood, where nothing grows, where no beasts wander out of fear or respect to the hunter that wrought it.
After the massacre, Glace left on a self-imposed exile up into the fortress of ends, accompanied only by Annilhus. She wandered there for many years, slaying all the monsters that strayed into her path, scaring away the others. But something in the mountains led her back to the crags, and chance led her upon Tor and Gilead.