Dicember 2021 – snow

For all the pale chill darkness where the snow runs deep — for all the fleetingness of summer and the long cold grip of the winter nights — it is not as if nothing lives, no one lives, in the Brilliant Lands. Far from it.

Be it fellow travellers or fair terrors, who might you meet?

01. A lordling in sable-trimmed finery, out for blood-oath payment with a retinue of spear-masters
02. A rimewalker, frozen heart exposed horribly, blackened talons caked with crimson ice
03. A ghost lion, shoulder-tall and snow-smoke-pelted, in search of prey or den
04. A gnarled puck bent beneath a pine-bough basket’s weight, offering dreams for wishes
05. A snow-witch, wrapped in icy finery and crowned with glittering thorns, singing a storm to life
06. A small herd of caribou, spooked and fleeing or, rarity of rarities, standing to stare in wary curiosity
07. A foxfire racing across snowy drifts and frozen bog, its tail flagging like a blue-white flame
08. A hunter, clad in verdant wool and heavy leathers, with a brace of snowhounds snuffling the drifts
09. A delicate iceknight, promises of eternal comfort falling from pale thin lips as they approach
10. A sleigh pulled by shaggy-coated horses, loaded with bales and bundled pelts and a traveller or two
11. A winterdrake, all coils of blue-frost scale and ice-splinter fangs and dark whispers of winter night
12. A family fleeing calamity, everything they have in the bundled packs lashed to their backs

Dicember 2021 – ice

It’s a long cold trek, in the Brilliant Lands, from sunken sod hamlet to briar-walled village, from clusters of longhalls to lonely roundhouses; and the wind wails cold and icy through dark forest boughs, across frozen bogs, piling the snow and the spars of ice.

There’s strange and beguiling things to carry away from the Lands, mind, if one cared to dare the cold —

01. A slender bone phial of eternal snowflakes
02. The trimmed, smoke-like pelt of a ghost lion
03. Birch-staff, spiked and hooked, incised with spirals of dead-wardings
04. Blue-golden shard of frostflame, death to the frozen ones
05. Small pine box, polished with tallow, with a frozen dream inside
06. Blessed caribou sledge-blanket, meant to warm the life back into the lost
07. Pair of snowhounds, golden-eyed and white of fur, and their harnesses
08. A handful of winterdrake scales, blue and frosted and sharp as ice
09. Icerune etched into a pale birch pendant, glowing faintly blue
10. Swan-bone flute, to charm blizzards and snow-witches
11. Curved knife honed from a ghost lion’s great fang
12. Three wax-sealed polished horns filled with tingling ice-honey