Today we’re going to get a look at another region of the world: snowy Firnfeld, long known to residents of Burren as simply “The Frozen North.”
The world has changed since the years of war, and as the skies darkened and the climate grew colder, the polar ice cap expanded and descended to cover over what once was a temperate region in the old world with permafrost and snow, burying its cities and their secrets and driving out all but the most hardened survivors.
Western Firnfeld is a barren landscape of ice and snow where nothing grows, and its inhabitants eke out a living from fishing and seal hunting along the coast in calm inlets sheltered from the wild, unnavigable sea that thrashes around the icebergs of Melting Firth. Sailing ships cannot brave the waves, but Anglean pirates from the icebound island to the west often come flying over the firth in their airborne warships to raid the scant wealth of the isolated Firnfeld homesteads. The towns warn one another of impending attack with the rumbles of their watchtower signal drums, which in happier times beat out news and announcements or summons to regional councils.
In the east, the sparkling sheets of unbroken ice give way to the jagged, forested mountains of Altwood and the scrubby, snowy tundra where the free-range reindeer are driven by the hardy Ulavaaran herders.
In South Firnfeld, at the edge of the ice fields, sharp-eyed travelers flying north from Burren may glimpse a cluster of lights shining out through the dark night and whirling snows. They will have discovered Kian, the ex-military base, ex-pirate hideout that now serves as a scientific outpost inhabited by the descendants of the fallen city of Tura.