Korsa Frost-Ear

The eldest of the Rime-Skinners, half-deaf from the blast that first woke it — she keeps the den's one rule, never dig toward the shard, the way the scarred keep a promise.

She came up the ice-throat a debt-jumper forty winters ago and never went back down to the Vale. She skins rime-stalkers, renders the cold-glands under their jaws, and trades the pelts to outfitters who don't ask where they came from — and she rules the warm deep of the Frostmaw by one rule only: never dig toward the shard. She dug toward it once. The ice let go all at once and the noise of it took one ear clean; what she came back with in the other was worse — dreams that aren't hers, and the certainty that the thing in the blue ice is awake and patient. The young ones think the rule is superstition for an old woman. She has buried enough of them to know it is not, and she is too old and too deaf now to go down after the next fool herself.