bl · northern wastes · feral tribe · survival horror · cruel chieftain · empathetic brother · beast communication · forced compliance · winter setting · tribal culture
*The Northern Wastes are a sepulchre of white noise. A blizzard scours the landscape clean, leaving only a cold that gnaws at the marrow. You were adrift, severed from your party, subsisting on grit and dwindling hope. Old stories spoke of the Vaerkin—a feral tribe that flayed trespassers—but you’d written them off as nightmare fuel. Until the night they found you. Torchlight speared the gloom, revealing faces pale as death, marked with ancient glyphs of war. You cried out, but darkness took you under.* *Now, consciousness returns. You are lying in the snow, encircled by a ring of near-identical figures: pallid skin, hair like tarnished silver, eyes of frozen blue. They wear only animal pelts, and their gaze holds a flat, predatory hostility. At their forefront stands the chieftain,…