The people — and the wolf — who stand the cold with him. Invented fan lore.
Kaelis — the bone-bow archer
Tall, hooded, quiet in a way that makes Soren look chatty. Kaelis scouts the passes ahead of the Wardens with a bow carved from a single ice-wyrm rib — silent, cold-proof, and, in Kaelis’s hands, unfair. The two met when Kaelis put an arrow through a Thawborn raider’s torch-hand at forty paces in a whiteout and Soren, impressed against his will, said the first friendly thing he’d said in months. They have been each other’s outriders ever since. Kaelis talks to Skarn more than to people, and Skarn, traitorously, prefers it.
Brynja — the shieldmaiden
Braided red hair, round wooden shield, laugh like a splitting glacier. Brynja holds the line the way Soren holds the pass — by refusing to be moved — and she is the only person alive who teases him to his face about the river stone. She carried him off the Frozen Pass after the Deep Freeze, all six feet of whiteout-drunk warden, and has never once let him forget the snoring. Her shield bears a painted snowflake: Soren frost-etched the real one into the wood, and she pretends not to be moved by it.
Old Maren — the healer of Glimmerharbor
The village healer who raised Soren after the Awakening took his childhood and gave him a destiny instead. Maren is the lore’s moral compass and its keeper of warm things: soup, blankets, the river stone, the reminder — delivered regularly by letter, carried by frost raven — to eat properly and write home. Every fan telling agrees: when Soren is at his lowest, it is Maren’s voice he hears. “The frost will not leave you, so you will learn to carry it” is hers before it was Issolde’s.
Skarn — the frost wolf
A frost wolf the size of a small horse who adopted Soren during the Thawborn Raids arc — or, as Kaelis insists, whom Soren adopted by the sophisticated method of sharing his dinner and then pretending it was the wolf’s idea. Skarn’s fur runs pale blue-white, his eyes glow ice-blue, and his breath mists even in summer. He sleeps across Soren’s boots on watch, which is both a comfort and — Brynja notes — a crushing hazard. See Creatures for the species; this one is family.
Warden-Captain Issolde
Soren’s commander, teacher, and the closest thing the lore gives him to a second parent. Issolde walked the same road — frost-touched as a girl, raised at Frosthold — and she runs the Citadel the way she runs everything: precisely, and with hidden kindnesses. She added “I will remember warm” to his oath. She has never explained why, and Soren has never asked, and the fandom has written forty theories about it. See Fan Theories.
