The Korl

The big folk of the high passes — a head and shoulders over any settled man, slab-muscled and frost-skinned, older stock than the Imperium that tried to wall them out. Cold doesn't touch them; fine spellwork mostly defeats them.

The Korl come down off the Northern Rampart and the Frostmaw, giants by lowland reckoning, with skin the blue-pale of old ice and frames that crack a doorway. They are older than the Vallen Imperium — which built its northern rampart partly to keep them out, and failed — and they keep to the high country between hiring their backs and their reach to House Vandahl's lances, the Marrow Lances, or no one at all. Frost is home to them and never bites; the fine, fiddly work of spellcasting mostly slides past a Korl mind built for weight and weather. The barrows of the high passes are thick with Korl dead, and the wights up there swing like their living kin. Plain-spoken, literal, and dangerous to crowd.