The frost realm beyond the Shivering Sea had always seemed untouchable.
Glaciers rose like walls of glass, valleys slept beneath unbroken drifts, and the sky was a sheet of steel-blue that seldom changed.
The demi-humans of the Fox clans who called it home endured not by defying the cold, but by becoming part of it.
Wolves ran with men, white bears were yoked as beasts of burden, and fire was a luxury kept behind stone walls carved into the ice itself.
At the heart of it all lay the Winter Court, seat of the queen who was older than dynasties, older perhaps than even the first Architect ruins.
She appeared to her people as a woman in pale silks, with skin like new-fallen snow, eyes burning like glacial ice beneath the northern lights.
But behind her delicate frame trailed nine vast tails, each shifting with its own restless will, their fur glimmering like frost-laden starlight.