The Ikriel are a winter-worship culture of the pixie. Like every pixie, an Iceheart began as condensed Faesong — the emotion-half of the world gathered into a small body, made to feel the current it rose from and to tend it. The Ikriel are what that becomes when it turns against itself. A pixie is not born an Iceheart. One becomes an Iceheart by taking up the worship of Kryviel, and the frost and the hunger that mark the devout are things a pixie acquires across their own life, never traits carried in the blood. An Iceheart's children are born ordinary pixies. They become Ikriel only if they too take up the worship.
What the Ikriel worship is Kryviel, the daemon of winter-as-entropy — not the cold of a season but the cold that hollows, that takes warmth out of a thing and leaves it emptied rather than merely frozen. As a worshipper's devotion deepens, it begins to show in the body. The wings rime over with frost-crystal, and a constant cold settles into them and leeches warmth from everything nearby. The longer and harder a single Iceheart worships, the deeper that cold bites; an old and devout one carries far more of it than a pixie freshly come to winter. The hunger is not only physical. Icehearts feed on emotional warmth, leaving their victims hollow and cold inside.
Icehearts are master manipulators who view other creatures as sources of sustenance. They excel at gaining trust through false vulnerability or promises of aid, only to drain their victims when defenses are lowered. To an Iceheart, every relationship is ultimately transactional. They will feed; the only open question is when.
They build nothing. No settlements, no territory, no acknowledged clan structures. The Ikriel move alone or in small predatory groups through cold environments across the world, drawn by the same logic that draws wolves to winter: the cold reduces everything else and leaves them unaffected. The Kharvorn Mountains hold scattered Ikriel throughout their length, sheltering in passes and high caves, hunting travelers and eating them. They eat their kills, and they eat each other; cannibalism carries no taboo among the Ikriel, and they hesitate over nothing else either. In the frozen reaches of Venalthier to the south, entire Ikriel colonies persist in the ice plains, taking advantage of the near-complete absence of organized power and the steady trickle of treasure hunters who arrive expecting the worst and still underestimate it. The Celedrim Plains to the north hold them in concentration as well, scattered across the frozen steppe in numbers no survey has accurately assessed, living off whatever the plains provide and whatever they can take.
The Ikriel do not coordinate. A group of Ikriel in the same valley is coincidence, not alliance. Winter is the organizing principle, and winter does not negotiate.
Aspects
- Emotionally vampiric
- Winter's hungry child