When a star dies, not every ember seeks flame. Some choose silence. Veyros’s star did not descend in fire but in stillness, falling into the white heart of a glacier where no bird flew and no river ran. The heavens split, and for a moment the northern lights flared, brighter than day. Then the sky hushed, and the spark sank beneath a mile of ancient ice.

The glacier closed around it. Centuries passed, and the world forgot the fall. Yet in the belly of the ice, the spark endured, listening. It listened to the groan of frozen stone, the crack of frost widening in silence, the slow hymn of snow compressing into crystal. It took the language of cold into itself until the shell of ice and ore shifted, hardened, and grew.

Thus the ember of silence coiled into an egg — a sphere of blue crystal veined with frost, cold enough to freeze breath, clear enough to catch the auroras above. It pulsed faintly, a beat so slow it seemed a mountain’s dream. Snowstorms raged above, carving ridges and filling valleys, but the egg did not move. It only waited, remembering a star.

When it cracked, it did not flare but whispered. Shards fell like sleet, and from within rose Veyros: horned, white-skinned, vast of shoulder, his hair long as drifting snow, his eyes twin hollows of frozen lakewater. His breath clouded the air into frost, and his first exhale carried the weight of winter. Around him, the glacier stilled — not in fear, but in recognition.

He stood, beast-broad, his skin traced faintly with lines like frozen rivers, his chest heaving with breath as heavy as avalanches. His arms bore the memory of icebergs — unmoving until they move, and then unstoppable. He lifted his head and heard no echo, for even sound bent and slowed in his presence. Silence clothed him as firmly as hide.

Veyros pressed one hand to the glacier’s wall and felt its memory. He pressed the other into the drift and understood its patience. In that moment he knew: cold without weight is wind; weight without cold is stone. Joined, they are dominion.

So he made his first vow in a voice like cracking ice:

I will be the winter that remembers. I will keep the stillness that devours haste.

The vow sank into the ice, and in answer the aurora bent low, crowning his horns with light. His steps marked the permafrost, each one etching silence deeper into the land.

After His Awakening

Veyros walked from the glacier into the mountains, and the mountains listened. Valleys froze where he passed; rivers turned to glass beneath his feet. Yet among men, he was not curse but omen. He taught hunters to track by silence, to wait longer than prey could bear. He showed herdsmen how to read the snows and know when the thaw would betray them. In villages built against the wind, they remembered him as the Keeper of Stillness, the one who taught that patience is not weakness but survival.

When he vanished into the peaks, his name lingered in the hush before snowfall, in the creak of ice on winter nights, in the breath that smokes from the chest of those who endure.

To this day, in lands of white horizon, hunters whisper his vow before they loose an arrow:

From the death of silence comes its dominion.

From waiting, its endurance.

From the star, a beast that teaches you to survive by stillness.