The Winter King

The tribes of the cold northern lands of Caenar live in a harsh and unforgiving region. The frozen tundra, mountains and expansive pine forests do not allow the weak and unprepared to thrive and only the strong will survive. Those the tribe deems weak and a liability will be cast out lest they become a burden to the whole.

Or they will become an offering to the Winter King, their flesh and blood a sacrifice to assuage his rapacious hunger.

The Winter King is a creature both ancient and mysterious. It is corporeal and incorporeal. A being that travels the cold lands of northern Caenar and those of other realms too, always within great blizzards. His coming is heralded by the blizzard and the mournful howling of the damned audible over the wind.

Those who are in his presence feel their lungs fill with a dreadful cold, their breath frozen. He reveals himself, coalesing out of the snow. A towering emaciated figure clad in rotting fur, crooked aysemtrical antlers crowning its head, eyes white and cold and a jaw so wide it can consume a human whole.

The Winter King can be reasoned with, to an extent. Though it is the embodiment of Winter and the primorial cold, it can be appeased through sarafice. Those tribes whom pay it homage thus find the winters more forgiving, the cold less severe. For these people who call the frozen northern lands home, regardless of realm, the sacrafice of those who would have not survived anyway is worth it.