The Northmen of the Endless White

The far north of Masada is a land unmapped and half-imagined by southerners, a waste of white horizons and horizons that never end. Here the sun dies for months at a time, and the wind is sharp enough to strip skin from bone. Yet in this desolation the Northmen endure. They are goliath clans hardened by a thousand winters, a people who measure wealth not in coin or conquest, but in survival itself.

Life in the White

The Northmen live in sod-roofed longhouses dug half into the permafrost, their walls braced with whale-bone frames and hides stretched taut against the wind. Villages are strung along the coasts or perched against glaciers, lit by whale-oil lamps that never go out. A single settlement may move three or four times within a generation, following the migration of caribou or the shifting of sea ice. To be born here is to understand motion and scarcity.

Children learn early that silence is a weapon. Their games are tracking drills and hunting lessons, each mistake punished by cold or hunger. Yet there is joy, too: drum-circles in snow caves, stories carved into ice, feasts where the entire clan gathers around a single boiling cauldron of seal meat. The White does not forgive waste, but it does not forbid celebration. To endure is sacred, but to endure without song is unthinkable.

Oaths to the Titans

The Northmen’s faith is not a doctrine but a pact. They do not pray to distant gods but to the titans of the tundra: the ice giants who stride the horizon, the glacier drakes who coil beneath the ice, and the frost-wyrms whose breath freezes rivers. These are not gods in the Antiochene sense. They are living forces, larger than life but not beyond reach.

Each clan binds itself to one of these titans through ritual oath. An oath might demand tribute in hides, in labor, or in lives. In return, the titan offers protection: a giant may divert a blizzard, a drake may cull wolves that grow too numerous, a wyrm may leave a hunting ground untouched. These pacts are ancient, carried forward not in written record but in song and scar.

The most sacred of these obligations is the Deepmarch. Once every hundred years, the giants demand that champions walk into the eastern white, where no maps exist and the stars themselves are said to falter. Few return. Those who do bring tales that no one repeats plainly, ruins that shift when unlooked at, skies with too many stars, echoes of voices that are not their own. The Deepmarch is not punishment nor quest. It is debt, paid forward by each generation.

Customs of Survival

To be Northman is to be oath-bound. Oaths are not contracts but breath itself. Two warriors seal a vow by exhaling together into the freezing air, their breath intertwining until it vanishes. To break such a vow is not sin but suicide: a clan whose word is false will not survive a single winter without allies.

Memory is carried in song. Children can recite twenty generations of lineage before they are considered adults. Battles, hunts, and storms are all remembered through chant, so that no mistake is made twice and no sacrifice is forgotten. Their greatest treasures are not jewels but drums, each carved with the names of those who endured.

Tensions in the White

In recent years, the titans have grown silent. Ice giants pass villages without stopping. Wyrms ignore their traditional feeding grounds. Even the glacier drakes vanish beneath the ice for seasons at a time. Some elders whisper this is punishment, that the oaths have been broken. Others claim the titans are dying, their strength waning as the world itself unravels.

Among the younger hunters, doubt spreads. Why march into the void for a debt to patrons who no longer speak? Why bleed for giants who may already be gone? Yet to break the cycle is to abandon the very identity of the Northmen. They stand at a crossroads: either continue to pay the debt of the Deepmarch, or admit that the White no longer answers. Neither choice is without peril.

The Northmen in the World

To outsiders, the Northmen are myth made flesh: hulking goliaths draped in furs, speaking in voices like cracking ice, emerging from the horizon like specters. Traders of Antioch sometimes meet them on southern coasts, bartering for whale-oil and furs in exchange for steel and spirits. Concordant councils value their word, for Northmen do not lie, they cannot afford to. Yet neither power holds sway over them.

What they think of the south is simple: weak, hurried, too eager to consume. They cannot imagine living in a place where hunger does not bind, where oaths are broken without consequence, where fire is not feared but tamed. They respect strength, but strength without stewardship is nothing.

The White will endure. Whether the Northmen endure with it is another matter.