Jak of the Rime

It wasn't Jak's fault, what happened with the Blackberry River. Okay, it was, but it's not like one can be held responsible for casting a spell while a leyline shift is in progress. Besides, do you know what you have to do to get rid of a shard of Living Ice?

— Jasper Cameron, Leader of The Bronze Ravens.

Contrary to popular tales, Jak of the Rime was not born to a tribe living in the Rime. He never even visited the remote region, and he was not from a particularly hot region. He was born in the Swordsparrow Bay region around 1970AF, give or take a year or two. It's not like most people kept track of these things, especially trappers or other nomadic groups.
Jak grew up loving the winter months and relished the cold. Unlike many other kids, he dreaded the summer months. He overheated quite easily but never seemed to so much as shiver in the cold. It was noticed by one Alucard Magmatalker (grandson of the late Thranebella) that on particularly hot summer nights he would often be covered in a thin layer of frost crystals while sleeping. After talking with the tribe, Alucard was permitted to start training the boy to see if he had magical potential (for the shaman agreed that having control of this ability would be a boon). As such, at the age of somewhere between 4 and 6, Jak was taken under the wing of a fire-caller, and around 6 months later ended up at Highmoore Academy of Specialized Magics and Arcane Traditions.
As this was before some of the more modern magics that allowed for Highmoore's unique teaching style, Jak spent the better part of the next decade learning, and then unlearning various magics while his instructors forced him to rely only on magics of frost and ice. The unlearning was... usually an unpleasant experience, by all accounts. Imagine watching someone else cast a simple spell, like mage hand, or light, and then being punished for copying them because the hand you made wasn't a hand of ice, or the light wasn't emanating from frost creeping along the wall and floor around you.
However, once he understood that any magic not related to ice, frost, and cold would get him punished, Jak began to thrive. According to Alberich, he had a knack for seeing a teacher or student practicing a spell of their own, and then finding a way to adapt those spells principles into his own unique magics. A bolt or sword of fire could be made just as easily out of ice, and Jak proved that they could be even more effective, given the actual physical weight that ice brings with it. The only things that were beyond Jak were "dexterous" spells, as ice, similar to stone, does not naturally shift without a spirit or elemental inhabiting it. Still, a fine chain works as a whip, and while ice can't gently grab something, it can grow around it.

Living Ice

Of course, ice has one fatal flaw even it if has been magically created. It will melt. This is something that bugged Jak. It bugged him incessantly, especially since Alucard would routinely visit to check up on how Jak was doing, and then promptly summon magma which has the heat of flame and the mass of stone, to undo or counter whatever spell Jak could come up with. He started reaching deeper and deeper into the aether trying to make his ice colder. Eventually, he had learned all he could at Highmoore, and upon graduation set out into the world at large to "learn lessons that only life could teach."
That was 2 years before The Blackberry River Incident. We don't know what exactly happened leading up to the incident, but we do know that Jak came upon the Blackberry River in a presumed rush. Maybe he was being chased, maybe he was chasing someone, maybe he was trying to prevent some prophesized disaster, as every hedge witch and senile forset hermit had a doomsday prophesy back then. Regardless of why he was in such a rush to get across the river, the show was rather easy for an ice mage. Jak of the Rime made an ice bridge. He made a bridge so cold that at its heart, in the middle of the river, a shard of living ice was created. While relics like this have been found in Storm Giant strongholds or the hordes of white dragons, this is the first recorded instance of a mortal mage making True Ice.
True Ice has the fortunate, or perhaps unfortunate, property of being self-propagating Ice. Well, not truly self-propagating, it will cool and freeze any water within a given radius around it if not contained in some way or another. And in the case of the Blackberry River, there was nothing to contain it. The entire river froze, though it was only 40 yards wide where Jak crossed. Jak, not knowing what he had conjured, continued on his way, expecting the ice to melt after a couple of hours behind him no doubt. Instead, the bridge turned into a dam, effectively cutting off the river's flow. As the water backed up, the dam grew bigger and wider. Towns upriver were flooded, while those downriver had water cutoff and were thrown into drought. It took nearly 70 years for this dam of ice to be destroyed.
The problem was in trying to get to the shard of True Ice. Trying to carve through from the dry side or the top, the more one carved into the dam, the colder it got. Water freezes solid, as do even the strongest alcoholic spirits, making hydration a concern. Food also freezes solid, so even if you were to pre-cut it into small enough pieces to swallow whole doing so would lower your body temperature. On the other side, the water from the new resivoir just repairs any damage made. Actually, we still dont know who successfully removed the shard of True Ice from the dam, or how. After just over 70 years, a small hole was bored through the bottom of the dam at the sight of the original river bed, and the hole never froze shut. It still took a couple of years for the dam to melt, but the hole allowed water to flow, returning water and life to the lands downstream in a mostly controlled manner. The upstream land was never quite the same, but eventually some normalcy returned.

Current Status

Deceased

Life

1970 AF 2026 AF 56 years old

Circumstances of Death

Unknown

Birthplace

Swordsparrow Bay

Place of Death

Unknown

Gender

Male

Height

6'1"

Weight

180lbs

Aligned Organization

Highmoore Academy of Specialized Magics and Arcane Traditions

What Happened to Jak?

No one really knows, the last recorded sighting of Jak of the Rime was walking onto the ocean west of Ironstead. "I'm going to walk across the ocean, not even The Edge of the Map will stop me. I'll prove it can be done."