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The Cursed Blue Rose
The Polar Dwarves are a branch of dwarvenkind that went north and stayed. Where their mountain kin learned metal and stone, these learned ice — and not as a material but as a correspondent. They do not command the frozen world so much as consult it, listening before they shape, and they hold that ice used for personal gain or for wanton ruin is ice misused.
Their craft has one secret at the centre of it. They alone can work Eternal Frost, an ice that does not melt and that carries the whispers of the frozen world inside it, and they alone can commune with the Great Spirit of Ice — the primordial force from which all ice magic in the world descends. From that communion they can borrow the smallest fragment of its essence. It is with that fragment that they make the Valkyries.
The rite is devotion as much as craft, and only the most gifted Iceforgers may attempt it.
The material comes from the Heart of the Frozen World, deep in the oldest glaciers, where the ice has never once been touched by heat. The dwarves sculpt it into the form she is to hold — a warrior maiden, exact and unhurried work. Ancient Elehath runes are then cut into the ice, the enchantments that will let her wake at all.
The last step is the one that cannot be practised. Through their communion the dwarves offer her a fragment of the Great Spirit's own essence, and she opens her eyes.
It matters to say plainly that a Valkyrie is alive. She is not a statue that walks and not a mindless guardian. Each carries her spark, and through it every Valkyrie is joined to every other and to the Spirit itself, so that what one knows is not long in reaching the rest.
Each is beautiful in a way that is difficult to be near — an ethereal, cold elegance, her form shimmering, her eyes lit from within by a frostfire, her armour not worn but grown, flowing seamlessly out of her body. Each carries a Frostblade or a Glacier Spear, weapons that freeze even chaotic flame and smother Demon Fire on contact. Wings of glacial mist carry her over the tundra. The air cools where she is.
They exist to hold the frozen lands against the demons of Azcaloth and against everything else that would unmake ice. They rest in sanctuaries among the highest peaks and come down when the Polar Dwarves summon them or when the need is great enough to need no summons.
They are also the personal sentinels of Glacya, whom they recognise as the living daughter of Ice itself. Her presence strengthens the Spirit that binds them, and their regard for her goes past duty into something the dwarves have never quite found a word for.
There is one thing the Iceforgers do not like to discuss, and it is what would happen to a Valkyrie who was corrupted rather than broken. It has not happened. The care they take suggests they do not consider it impossible.