Norrheim: Part II

The waterfall was the first thing I saw. Or what remained of it.
Once, it must have thundered down the black cliffs of Norrheim, feeding the valleys below with mist and life. Now it hung frozen from cliff to stone, silent and unmoving, with Frost Drakes coiled across its ice like sentinels.

The cold was not weather. It was a presence.
The forests stood white and brittle. The soil rang beneath my boots like iron. Most living things had died where they stood.

But not all. Some had adapted.

Crystalcrushers moved through the ravines, their bodies grinding softly beneath plates of frozen stone. Snowstalkers crossed the drifts without sound, seen only by the shimmer of frost where their claws had passed.

And then there were the dead.
They walked the valleys in rusted mail and frozen flesh, their faces locked in the terror of their last breath. Some still bore the crest of Faloria. The king’s lost company had not vanished.
They had been claimed.

Something beneath the island had called them back, not to life, but to service.

The orcs had survived too, though not by strength alone. Against the undead masters, they stood no chance. They had been spared. Or perhaps the attempt to erase them had only made them stronger.

At dusk, the chants began again, rising from beneath the frozen waterfall, deep enough to tremble through the cliffs and into my bones.

That was when I understood.

Norrheim had not been abandoned.