The Rime Wyrm's Long Trail

If you climb a hill in the Frostlands on a clear morning and look down, you'll see long, glittering lines drawn across the snow, curving round the rocks and looping between the pines. Nils the Snow Hare, who keeps the trading posts there, will tell you what made them, if you buy a pine cone or two first.

"That's the Rime Wyrm's trail," he says, and his ears go flat. "She's been going round and round the ice fields since before my great-great-grandmother was a leveret."

The Rime Wyrm is old, older than the pines. She is a long white serpent with frost growing on her scales like fur, and wherever her tail sweeps, the ground freezes into a shining path. In the old days, the hares say, she was the one who made winter tidy. She drew her trails so that travellers could find their way between the villages when the snow came down thick. Follow a wyrm trail, the hares used to say, and you'll always get home.

Deep in the ice fields, the story goes, she also guards something: a glacier heart, a lump of ice so old and so cold that it glows blue from the inside, holding the memory of every winter since the world began.

When the Gloom drifted north, it found the wyrm curled round her glacier heart, and it sank into her frosty scales. Now she still draws her trails, but they don't lead anywhere. They wind in circles, and anybody who follows one finds the wyrm at the end of it, swinging her tail in a great freezing sweep. Her touch leaves you slow and shivery.

"The only thing she's ever been afraid of," Nils says, "is a warm fire. Hold a torch up and she'll shrink back like a snail in salt. Fire magic, flame arrows, anything warm. And stay behind her when she winds up that tail. Always behind."

He'll lower his voice then. "Calm her properly and she leaves bits of her frost behind. Crystals, shards, scales. And once in a while, they say, a piece of the glacier heart itself."

Then he'll sell you some hot cocoa, because you'll need it. And if you ask about the biggest trail of all, the one on the far side of the Frostlands that is as wide as a river, he'll only say one name, very quietly: Frostmaw, the Rime Matriarch, mother of all the wyrms. "Her breath freezes waterfalls in the middle of falling," he says. "Don't go alone."