#thraeposting

There would be no palace of industry, no global eyes on long-overlooked Hyperborea, and no winner to the rat race that would go on to stain the snowfields for the next several years. Seventy-four starry-eyed men and women from every place conceivable, surnames from every dialect and tongue, would set out northward with teams of shovel-wielding laborers and vast pools of gold at their command. By the end of the first winter, only three would remain.

To understand the depth and depravity of the events that would play out there, one must first understand the depth and depravity of Hyperborea herself. None can match her beauty, and none can match her wrath. Poets wax and dream of her frozen shores, of rivers cutting through endless glittering fields of snow, of secrets untouched by time within the beating heart of shining glaciers- and yet the reality of fair Hyperborea, the Frozen North, Hell on Ice, Glacale, the Last Rise before the Abyss, is a cold and cruel one. The country, and the vanishingly few brave souls who live in it, seem balanced on a knife-edge. Every death and birth, every successful hunt, every chunk of coal burnt to ashes, every grain taken from food stores in the unfathomable depths of winter, is kept in perfect, metered record. Because the truth of a land like Hyperborea, so much further North than anyone should have gone, is that it will snatch everything that is good and warm from you, force its frostbitten fingers into every crack in your plans, your shelter, your safety, and tear it from you like freeze-thaw through a boulder, and leave you, hypothermic and broken, upon the burning snow. There are nights that last days. There are blizzards that last months. There are villages that disappear into the snow and are never seen again.

Perhaps this provides some clarity, then, as to why so many were gripped with such an acute madness when the news broke- perhaps this elucidates even further why so few of them would live or remain to see it through. For whichever upstart could reach out and grab it first, there was liquid gold beneath the ice- the question remained, however, if he could still hold onto it as the impossible North began to eat away at everything he held dear.

They came, in desperate masses, to the city of Fell. Fell was not the largest city in Hyperborea, it was not the most important, and it was not the capital- but it was further northward, pressing deeper into the ever-darkening cold, than any other city in the world. The blistering, maddening hostility of Fell cannot be understated. She stood teetering on the edge of the world, in stark defiance of her limits, a monument to both the deep hubris and undying determination of her people. A wrought-iron giant, magnificent and blazing, clinging to the white tundra like a stubborn grease stain; Fell was a young city, aching for industry, half a million people thronging through her streets, fighting against the elements. Smog pours from chimneys, forges run hot deep beneath the city, and fires blaze all along the streets, keeping intransient Fell smoldering, staving off the great freeze, sealing cracks as the ice splinters through them, just barely grasping her existence from the jaws of the North. 

Through the center of Fell, along the high streets where black facades rise stories-high, a river cuts the city in two. This is the Corione, a paradoxical beast flowing inland from the Ocean, which joins with the Stoll and the Sea to the West, and races screaming up from the South, where the waters are calm and blue and beautiful, through jungle, woodland, plains, and steppe, before tumbling over the cliffs into the tundra and slicing through Fell like a jack-knife. Its frigid waters arrive bearing gifts- dead fish, ships with metal faces, and news of warmer lands. Three dozen miles to the North, the Corione reaches its terminus, an impossibly deep and desolate lake. Within the walls and streets of Fell, it is bludgeoned by the streets into the rough shape of a canal, and is constantly at war with itself in much the same way that Fell is constantly at war with Hyperborea. The casualties of this war are the shattered ice sheets it carries with it; as each one crystallizes, it is rent asunder by the ceaseless currents, or the ice-breaking boats, or the streetlamps and hearths burning alongside it. The waters of the South, against the cold of the North, against the fires of the city- the Corione can never rest. The city of Fell can never rest.

And so, in droves, up the Corione and the Stoll and along the vast frozen plains, the big-city oil magnates, sleazy news-hawks, and leaden-shovel laborers came to Fell. The truly inconceivable seclusion of the promised bounty must be emphasized here- Fell, by all accounts is an incredibly remote city. The next major hub is almost two hundred miles to the South; some say her sheer septentrionality is bordering on blasphemous. And yet, any man hoping to sink his talons into the treasure trove waiting out there in the snow would have to journey one hundred miles deeper into perilous Hyperborea, into the far reaches of the world where lakes hide beneath kilometers of ice and your breath freezes in your lungs. 

This nightmare did not trouble the minds of the fools in their boats and chariots as they pressed Northward, the promise of oil money so lucrative and all-consuming it struck any inkling of concern or forethought from their minds. No, there would be no time for consideration, no time to pause and think how quickly and thoroughly Hyperborea was going to flay the cashmere greatcoats and fine lambskin gloves from their flesh- only gold glistens behind the eyelids of the wealthy businessman as thundering black stallions carry him upward, to the wonderland of infinite profit and shining snow that he dreams of.  At the end of the road or the river, icy damnation waits hungrily for him with open arms.