The Rimefold

Overview

The Rimefold is the far north beyond the cradle-web: snow plains and black stone running down to a coast of ice cliffs and frozen fjords, where the sun hangs low all summer and does not rise in the dead of winter. Its clans hunt seals and whales from the ice edge, keep their dead standing in clear ice and go to them for counsel, and live in the shadow of halls cut into the glaciers by hands larger than theirs.

The old world knows it only as an absence. The giant roads of the Stormcrown run north past the last hold, past the last Edgeway cairn, and on into the snow, and nobody who has followed them has come back to say where they go. Dwarven grandmothers say the north is where the stone sleeps cold. It is one of the four lands beyond the old world's maps (see the extent of the map).

Lay of the Land

The Rimefold lies north of the Elderweald and the Ironspine, beyond the unmapped northern end of the belt. North of the last forest and the last hold, open snow country runs on for weeks to the ice coast. The Long Tread of the Stormcrown comes down out of the mountains there and runs north across the snow to the sea, where it ends at the White Stair, a colossal flight cut into the coast cliffs. From the last gate hold of the northern Ironspine to the coast is perhaps two months in summer, and no one walks it in winter. How far the shore runs east and west, and what lies across its frozen sea, is unmapped. See The Lay of the Land.

What Happened Here

The giant roads came first. During the Withdrawal of the Upland Colossal World (c. 198,000-c. 160,000 BR), when most colossal communities drew inward into the hidden basins of the Stormcrown, some lines did the opposite. In the Long Tread North (c. 190,000-c. 165,000 BR) they followed the ridge roads north, past the end of the mountains, to the ice, and built the White Stair and the ice-cut halls behind it. Over long ages in the cold they grew smaller, nearer the size of Humans than of their forebears, but they kept the craft. They are the Rimewrights, a lesser line of the Giants, and the last people on Caeldon who still build at the colossal scale.

What Is Known

To the old world, a road into the snow and a few cold tales. To canon, the broad strokes.

• The ice coast. Ice cliffs and fjords frozen nine months of the year; pack ice that moves with the tides and the storms; winds off the frozen sea that freeze a careless hunter where he stands.
• The shore clans. The Human clans of the coast live in turf-and-bone houses along the fjords, by the hunt and by the ice.
• The Rimewrights. Behind the White Stair, the Rimewrights keep their halls in the glaciers: vaults, stairs, and galleries cut at a scale no smaller people needs, with the colossal craft of their forebears kept and taught inside them.
• The colossal craft. In the deepest halls stand works the Rimewrights carried north or made after: lifting frames, cutting engines, and stone dressed so fine that a thousand winters have not cracked it.
• What reaches the old world. Almost nothing.

Settlements

The shore clans live in fjord villages of turf-and-bone houses beneath their Asking Halls, and the Rimewrights in their ice-cut halls behind the White Stair. None of them is named in the old world. On the cradle side, the northernmost gate holds of the Ironspine face the snow country, two months and more from the coast.

The People

Perhaps twenty to forty thousand people live in the Rimefold, nearly all of them Humans of the shore clans, spread thin along the fjords. How many Rimewrights keep the halls is not known to the clans, and is left open. Their dress, lifespans, and naming customs are left open, except that a clan child takes the name of an ancestor in the ice.

What Is Not Known

The shore is left open on purpose: how far it runs east and west, and what lies across the frozen sea; how many fjords and clans there are; what the Rimewrights call themselves, how many they are, and whether they remember the Stormcrown and the Giants who stayed there; what lies in their deepest halls and what the colossal works can still do; what the stone figure in the glacier is; whether the dead in the Asking Halls truly answer; whether the Mountain-Father, Haurûm, is honoured here as well, or some god of the cold; and what became of the caravans that went north of the Ironspine.

Tensions

• A lie in the Asking Hall. A clan headman is said to have lied before his own grandmother in the ice, about a hunt in which a rival's son died.
• The tools that never break. The clans want more of the Rimewrights' tools than the Tall Ones will make, and a fjord that has them hunts better than one that does not.
• The glacier above the fjord. A glacier is moving down on one of the oldest fjord villages, Asking Hall and all.
• Southward. A young Rimewright has gone up the Long Tread alone, towards the mountains her people came from, meaning to find the Giants who stayed.