The Rimeward
The alpine north: glacier-carved valleys, cold that kills the unprepared, and air thin enough that even Faerie wings struggle in it. This is Dwarf country, and it is the only Faerie homeland openly hostile to its own inhabitants. Everything the Leprechauns have, they built to survive the place.
The Land
High and steep, with permanent ice above the working valleys and a handful of geothermal vents that make settlement possible at all. Altitude is the governing fact: there are elevations here at which a Faerie can barely fly, and elevations above that where they cannot fly at all.
Everything about the Rimeward is a consequence of thin, cold air. Wings that work in the Heartland generate a fraction of their lift at height; a Sylph courier who tries the passes without acclimatizing stalls, drops, and is a statistic. The Leprechauns solved this with machinery — cable lifts, spring-catapults, geared funiculars, and the prosthetic wings they are famous for — and every one of those solutions is a thing that can break.
- The cold. Frostbite in minutes on the ice fields. Everything is heated, everything is insulated, and heat is the province's true currency: rooms are rented by their proximity to a vent.
- Snowfall. A snowflake at this scale is a dinner plate of ice falling slowly, and a heavy fall is a barrage of them. Beautiful, and it will break a wing.
- Avalanche. Whole valleys go. The Winterworks maintains a listening service of Basekin crews with better ears than any Faerie, who are not permitted inside the shelters they warn.
- Vent-country. Where the geothermal vents run, there are meadows: hot springs, moss, flowering ground, insects, an absurd green pocket in the middle of the ice. These are the most valuable real estate in the province and every one of them is owned.
- The thin. Above the working valleys, unaided flight simply stops. This has made a class of people — high-guides, cable-runners, ice-walkers — whose entire livelihood is being able to go where wings do not.
Subregions
The Crowns. The high peaks, too thin and cold to fly in, where the Leprechauns cut their halls into the rock and keep the forges lit around the clock for warmth as much as industry.
Edelweiss. Alpine valleys of chalets, funiculars and festivals, once simply the High Valleys. The Wichtel make watches, jewellery and the best beer in the realm.
The Misted Fjord. Sea-inlets and misted forest where the Singing Sea reaches the mountains, home to the Fossegrim, who make instruments and teach anyone who will listen.
Flora and Fauna
| Feature | What it is | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Vent-moss | Thick green growth around geothermal steam | Food, fodder, and the reason anyone lives here |
| Ice-lichen | Grows on bare glacier; slow, tough, edible in extremity | Emergency ration and a working clock — it grows at a known rate |
| Frostbloom | Flowers once, at the first hard freeze, at altitude | The Winterworks' finest lubricant comes from its oil |
| Springsteel wood | Dense shrub timber from the sheltered valleys | Bows, springs, and the mechanical heart of Leprechaun craft |
| Voles | Large; wool-warm pelt, poor temper, good milk | The province's herd stock, and its winter clothing |
| Snow fleas | Fine; springtails that swarm on the ice in thaw | Harmless, disgusting, and a reliable sign the ice is moving |
| Ptarmigan | Colossal; white, ground-nesting, seasonal | Not a predator. Simply enormous, and it does not look where it steps |
| Ice-mites | Fine; live in the glacier itself | Nobody knew for centuries. They have been down there having a civilization |
| Stoats | Huge; white in winter, kill far past hunger | Enter any hole a Faerie can. The reason shelters have inner doors |
The Winterworks
A fortress-manufactory bored into the flank of a peak, heated by geothermal vents and never silent. It is the Kingdom's industrial heart — clockwork, springs, gearing, pressure vessels, rockets, prosthetic wings — and it is a company town in every respect, with rank following craft and apprenticeships running for decades.
Other Settlements
Bellowsgate (6,000) — the lower works, where ore from below and scrap from the Rustlands is sorted, smelted, and sent up the cable. Filthy, hot, and the least-regulated place in the province.
Thawmeadow (4,500) — the largest vent-meadow settlement: hot springs, green ground, orchards under glass, and the province's only agriculture. Owned outright by three Winterworks families, worked by everyone else.
Cablehead (2,000) — the high station, where the lifts end and the ice begins. Guides, rescue crews, and the observatory that watches the glacier. Nobody is born here.
The Sinks (uncounted) — service warrens cut behind the Winterworks' vent shafts, where the works' Basekin labor lives: warm, unlit, unregistered, and structurally integral to the mountain in a way the Chancery's plans do not show.
Factions
The Works Council. Foreman-Ascendant Coilbrass and the master-crafters: the province's government, its employer, and its landlord, in that order of importance to them and the reverse order of importance to everyone else.
The Apprentice Bond. Twenty thousand apprentices on indentures running twenty to forty years. Legally they are students. Practically they are the workforce, and they have recently discovered that the bond documents contain a clause nobody has ever tested.
The Cable-Runners' Lodge. High-guides, lift-tenders, and rescue crews — the people who go where wings do not. Fiercely independent, unbuyable, and the only organization in the province the Works Council genuinely cannot replace.
The Scrap Trade. Bellowsgate's traders and their gremlin counterparts, running salvage up from the Rustlands under an arrangement the capital has decided not to look at. It is the Kingdom's only real commerce with the Wilds and it is entirely undocumented.
The Frostbloom Syndicate. Whoever controls the high frostbloom harvest controls the province's lubricant supply, which means the province's machines. Four families claim it. Two of them are at war in a way that involves no soldiers and a great many avalanches.
Sites of Interest
The Wing Vault. Deep in the Winterworks, a hall of prosthetic wings: four centuries of designs, prototypes, failures, and the current issue, racked and catalogued. The Kingdom's official doctrine is that wings are the mark of a Faerie's nature. The Wing Vault is a room full of wings that can be bought, and it is the quiet reason the Chancery has never been comfortable with Leprechauns. The oldest rack holds six pairs sized for no Faerie anatomy anyone can identify.
The Glacier Face. A two-mile wall of blue ice above Cablehead, moving four feet a year and grinding out everything it has swallowed. Things come out of the bottom of it: tools, timber, worked stone, a boundary marker with a name on it that appears in no Kingdom register but does appear in the Hollow Marches. The Works Council buys glacier-finds at a fixed price and does not resell them.
Thawmeadow's Glass Orchards. Fruit under blown glass in the middle of an ice field, heated by vent-steam, beautiful past reason and producing about enough to supply the noble houses of the Eternal City with novelty. The families that own them are richer than the Works Council and considerably less careful.
The Deep Vent. Below Bellowsgate, a shaft following the geothermal source down. It is hot, it is loud, and at about a mile the workings stop being Leprechaun — the cut changes, the tool-marks change, and the shaft continues. Coilbrass has sealed it three times. It has been unsealed three times, and not from above.
Hooks
- A cable-runner is killed on a route she had run for thirty years. The Lodge says the cable was cut. The Works Council says metal fails in cold. Both are technically correct, which is the problem.
- An apprentice has read her own bond properly and found the clause. If she is right, twenty thousand indentures are void. Three factions want her found and they want very different outcomes.
- The frostbloom harvest fails on the high slopes. Without the oil, the works run dry in a season, and the only other known source is a valley in the Bloodmoors.
- Something came out of the glacier face intact: a sealed case, Faerie-made, ancient, and warm to the touch.
- A gremlin factor at Bellowsgate offers the party a Winterworks pressure vessel, brand new, still crated — which is impossible, because the works have not shipped one this year and their inventory balances.
Relations
The Kingdom's nobility adores Leprechaun artifice and looks down on Leprechauns for making it, a contradiction the Leprechauns have monetized ruthlessly. The Winterworks also holds the Kingdom's only real trade relationship with the Outer Wilds: ore up from the kobolds, scrap in from the gremlins, and nobody at court inquiring too closely so long as it ticks.