The beasts of the frozen north — five invented species, all fan lore.
Pack hunters the size of small horses, fur pale blue-white, icicle spikes along the shoulders, eyes like struck matches in the dark — ice-blue and unblinking. They hunt the deep Reaches in silence and have an old, wary truce with the Wardens: the passes are the Wardens’, the deep snow is the wolves’, and both sides remember it. Skarn — Soren’s companion, see Allies — is the exception that proves the rule, and the rule’s favorite story.
Serpentine burrowers that swim through glacier ice the way eels swim through water, leaving glass-smooth tunnels the Wardens sometimes repurpose as cold storage. A wyrm’s rib — single, curved, cold-proof — makes the finest bow in the Reaches. Kaelis’s bone-bow is wyrm rib. The wyrms themselves are shy, blind, and — the trainees’ joke — better at Blizzard Step than most trainees.
The Reaches’ postmen: big, black, frost-rimed birds that nest in the Wailing Spires by the hundred and carry the Wardens’ messages — including Old Maren’s scolding letters. A raven’s croak is the first sound of an approaching thaw, and the last sound before a whiteout. Soren feeds the Citadel’s rookery personally, which Brynja cites as evidence for her long-standing claim that he’s soft.
Tiny, luminous, harmless — and the reason the deep ice glitters at night. Mites gather in the millions along crevasse walls, and travelers learn to read them: where mites cluster thick, the ice is old and trustworthy; where they thin, it’s new and treacherous. Soren checks the mite-glow the way sailors check the sky.
The one the tablets won’t confirm and the storytellers won’t drop: a serpent of living aurora, green and vast, said to swim the sky over the deep Reaches on the longest night of the year. Soren claims — once, at the watchfire, after Brynja’s third cup — to have seen it. Kaelis says he believes him. Brynja says the third cup explains everything. The fan theories have thoughts.