Jekinusk Shattered Glaciers

Place

Place Name:

Jekinusk Shattered Glaciers

Biome:

Shattered Glaciers

Size:

Unknown

Continent:

Unknown

Subcontinent

Unknown

Geography

Jekinusk is a land of icy mountains — literally mountains of ice. It’s a glacier. There is precious little stone and even less wood, and almost no living creatures whatsoever. And the land is constantly growing, as the new ice age grows stronger, colder, harder, more threatening. Still, the glaciers don’t seem to have formed properly. A glacier moving south would be a mostly smooth affair, with maybe a few jagged cliff sections where the sheets of ice crashed into each other or fell down an incline. Or so you’d think. Jekinusk isn’t smooth whatsoever.

Maybe it’s some chemical in the water, or something really weird in the air, but for whatever reason, the icy tops of Jekinusk’s glaciers are fragmented in every place possible. It’s like a pile of geometric crystals, rolling in super slow motion down a hill. Except the geometric crystals are covered in frost spikes. Anything built on the glacier itself, you can expect to be gone within five years, no matter how secure its foundation seems right now. The Traessbel clan didn’t build their city on the glacier. Hathvor specifically selected this particular mountain that their city is built on.

Because the stones behind it would deflect the glacier and keep them from plowing through the city. Still, ice is indeed what the Traessbel used to build their city — the City of Death, as it’s come to be known as. There’s probably some dozen or so cities called the City of Death, but perhaps the Traessbel deserve the name more than anyone else. The towers of the City of Death are carved from solid chunks of ice, as are the walls and floors. The Traessbel cut enormous chunks of ice from the neighbouring glaciers and brought them here.

In the middle of the City of Death is a gigantic statue of a serpent, carved from ice, of course. The Traessbel seem to revere this statue, and they have it always under guard. The City of Death technically goes all the way to the end of the jagged, shattered glacier. The buildings aren’t quite so grand or well-defined here — some of them are crushed by the swift-shifting glacier — but it’s enough for the Traessbel to brag that their city spans all the way to the end of their territory. They have ropes, to get up and down the towering, jagged mountains of ice, but these ropes are generally not left out.

It sometimes happens that a Traesbell kin’toni will have to climb the cliffs himself — always a dangerous enterprise, even with the proper tools. Looming in the distance, even further north, perhaps at the north pole, are even larger glaciers. They don’t seem to move, but they do seem to be sourcing the glaciers — water seems to be flowing out there, freezing into new sheets of glacier. Except then the sheets become jagged. It’s likely that the secret of what makes the glacier so jagged could be found there, if you really wanted to look for it.

Plants

If you look into the clearest portions of the glacier, wish the glacier was a little less jagged and a little more clear, and then use your imagination, you can pick out the black, twisted forms of things that might be trees, down there in the ice. Perhaps they’re not really black; perhaps the light just can’t break its way through the many layers of shattered ice that exist even in the clearest portions of Jekinusk. In some places — not the clearest places — some of these black trees are crawling up through the ice, in a last, desperate attempt to get to the light and survive.

None of them has made it very far. But some of them are still growing, with maybe one green, resilient leaf hanging from the very tip of a single branch, trying to give the dithe everything it’s got, trying to get the tree to grow higher and higher… maybe it’ll get to the top before the glacier shifts and snaps its black trunk. It probably won’t, but maybe, just maybe… Obviously, the Traessbel do not farm, or do anything with plants, other than destroy and leave to rot the ones they see. They don’t dare set anything on fire, though — one touch of flame and they’re basically done for.

Something about their biology makes their icy flesh extremely inflammable, bursting into flames at the slightest touch. Maybe that’s part of the reason why they came to the Deep North, where there is no fire. Sometimes, in the winter, the snows come and the trees of the Shallow North fall within the borders of the Traessbel clan. The Traessbel hate these trees — they’re mostly ordinary pine trees, but even ordinary pines are bad enough. Pine sap burns quite hot and long. The other trees are even worse. There’s the eccentric Grenadier Tree. If this sap of this tree even so much as touches fire, it explodes.

Not much good as a proper explosive, due both to its instability in storage and also to its lack of actual explosive power — but it does frighten the Traessbel, and they’re careful to destroy every Grenadier Tree that they find. They’re likewise careful as they chop it down, since when the tree hits the ground it’s bound to detonate. Little do the Traessbel know that they’re only helping the Grenadier Tree to spread its seeds. Grenadier Trees spread their seeds by exploding, after all. How else would they do it? And then there’s the less eccentric but still threatening ddah'ki.

These conifers are mostly notable for the sheer amount of time that one log or pile of branches will burn for. It’s a lot, nearly twice the average length of time. It’s especially treasured by smiths, since something in the ashes of the ddah'ki will get into the forged metal, and prevent it from glinting in the sunlight. Good for stealth missions. On the downside, it does produce a ton of smoke — or maybe that’s actually an upside, if you’re a skilled tactician.

Animals

The Traessbel systematically kill every animal they see, except for one. Nobody’s quite sure what the borotorins used to be, before they became whatever they are now. They look a bit like some kind of horned livestock, but they’re far less energetic, and need much less to eat. In fact, they don’t need to eat anything — they just need to drink. In fact, they just need to drink blood. That’s all. And they’re not picky about where you got it, either. Borotorins are one of the few animals affected by the kin’toni plague. Most animals either shrug it off entirely or straight up die when they catch it, but borotorins… are different.

These animals still breed, it’s true, and they still sometimes die of cold, when they’re not stored properly, but otherwise, they’re almost exactly like the Traessbel themselves, in terms of adaptations to the environment but also in terms of kin’toni symptoms. Like Traessbel kin’tonis, the flesh of borotorins is extremely insensitive; bits and pieces of it fall off in the bitter cold and they don’t even notice. As already mentioned, borotorins feed on blood, though they don’t seem to prefer zu’aan blood above any other kinds. borotorins also don’t move, if they can help it.

Despite this last trait, the borotorins make for — well, if not excellent pack animals, at least they make for functional pack animals. It’s impossible to get one to drag a cart, no matter how you encourage it or whip it, but the encouragement of a male seeing a female ahead of him or of a female seeing her baby ahead of her seems to be enough to get one to walk with some loaded bags, at least. But apparently a female or a child isn’t encouragement enough for a borotorin to drag a cart. And of course, the whip isn’t much of an encouragement either, because borotorins can’t feel pain.

There aren’t any roads in Jekinusk to drag carts along, anyways. The Traessbel don’t even have carts. And they destroy carts whenever they see them, because carts are made out of wood, and can burn. borotorins do not share their masters’ fear of fire; they’ll walk straight into fire and past it without flinching, even if they can’t ever walk afterwards because of that little excursion through the flames. Their muscles are only mortal, after all. The lifespan of a borotorin is quite long — around fifty years — but most of this time is spent in childhood, before maybe ten years of use as a pack animal.

Before getting so old that they can’t move. The gestation periods of the females are also quite long, but fortunately the window of fertility is a little wider than the window of use as a pack animal. When you serve a borotorin a dish of blood, they stick out their tounges and lap it up, like a dog. They lap it up very slowly, however. Whether this is because they’re lazy or because they’re enjoying it, is anyone’s guess.

Historical Timeline of Ages

Age Name	Dates	Controller
Stone Age	Before 1E 0	Unknown
Copper Age	1E 1–1E 2200	Unknown
Bronze Age	1E 2200–1E 4400	Unknown
Iron Age	2E 0–2E 700	Unknown
Ancient Age	2E 700–2E 2200	Unknown
Middle Age	3E 0–3E 2050	Unknown
Early Modern Age	3E 2050–3E 2600	Unknown
Industrial Age	3E 2600–3E 2700	Unknown
Machine Age	3E 2700–3E 2800	Unknown
Atomic Age	3E 2800–3E 2850	Unknown
Space Age	3E 2850–3E 2875	Unknown
Information Age	3E 2875–3E 2900	Unknown
Genetic Age	3E 2950–3E 3000	Unknown
Awakening Age	3E 3000–3E 3415	Unknown
Twilight Age	4E 0–4E 500	Traessbel Kin'toni Clan

Place

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Jekinusk Shattered Glaciers

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This article is written by Xerxes Worldweaver. Copyright 2026 Xerxes Worldweaver. All rights reserved.