The Pale Maw
Where the Ice Opens and the World Ends
At the very crown of the Sphere, beyond the fjords of Gravaskar and the wind-wracked cliffs of the Kaldurreach, lies a sea of shifting ice and ancient dread known as The Pale Maw. Neither wholly land nor sea, this frozen expanse stretches across the northern edge of the known world like the gaping jaw of some great primordial beast — still and white, but always watching.
The Maw is not navigable in the ordinary sense. Its surface is a chaotic quilt of icebergs, broken floes, and razor-edged ridges of pale blue that rise and split without warning. Beneath the ice churns a black and freezing sea that hungers for hulls and lives alike. The water is said to be unnaturally deep, as if something vast and hollow gnaws at the roots of the world below. Stormthane skalds say that the Maw was not always there. In their oldest verses, it is told that during the sundering of the League of Stars, something fell from beyond the sky — a thing not of this world — and shattered the northern pole with its impact. In the wake of that cataclysm, the ice never healed. The wind never stopped. And the sea began to whisper.
Those who dwell in the north believe that the Maw is more than a sea — that it is alive. It's ice shifts in patterns too deliberate for weather, and its crevasses moan like beasts in pain or warning. Entire expeditions have vanished without a trace. Others return with tales of ghost-ships locked in crystal tombs, of glacial towers humming with impossible runes, or of colossal bones embedded in the ice, so large they cannot be anything born of this age. To the Galdurkin, The Pale Maw is a place of profound taboo — the end of the wind-path. No rites are performed here. No offerings are cast into the sea. The Maw is unclaimed by spirits, and even the boldest seers will not look too long upon its horizon. It is said that during the first Moonsway Pact between the Clans and the Reach, a druid of Clan Faolán dropped a raven’s feather into a crack in the Maw — and it never touched the bottom.
Still, there are those who test its edge. Kaldurreach whalers and ice-hunters ride their storm-forged skiffs into its southern reaches to harvest bale oil and crystal-horn. Clan scouts from the north climb the frozen cliffs that line its maw-like inlets, seeking ancient signs carved before memory. And once a generation, a fool or a prophet sails north, seeking something more profound than glory, and never returns.
What lies beneath the ice is unknown. But the Maw waits. And it hungers.
“In the Maw, even the dead keep walking. But they make no footprints in the snow.” — Old saying among Kaldurreach ice-hunters
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