Skjarn is one of the eight Primordial Powers: an enormous winter being, or winter itself behaving like one. Where it passes, heat drains away, sound fails, and every living thing grows still. Its home is the White Beyond, the frozen country past the last fjords of northern Skeldheim. Few who have stood in its path can describe it.
What witnesses describe
No one has seen Skjarn clearly, and no two accounts agree. Most begin with the weather rather than a body. The wind stops. The light turns white and flat. Then the snow begins to fall upward. Somewhere behind the haze a shape larger than a mountain range moves, white on white and without hard edges, so that people only know where it is by where the snow is thickest.
Northern hunters speak of a lowered head as long as a fjord, crowned with something like frosted antlers or broken ice, and eyes as pale as the sky before dawn. Others saw only a slow wall of snow that walked. On the silence, every account agrees. Breath freezes in the middle of a word. Fires shrink to embers without any wind. The sounds of the world go out one after another until only a low, frozen hum remains.
The four stillnesses
The Skeldr say Skjarn brings four things. Silence: horns, drums and voices carry only a few steps, then not at all. Cold: warmth leaves fires, bodies, hot springs and metal. Stillness: animals lie down, rivers stop beneath the ice, and people grow heavy with a sleep that is hard to refuse. And quiet in the deep workings: whatever hums with hidden power, old wards and new devices alike, goes dark in its presence.
Skjarn does not seem to hunt, and it does not seem to hate. If it hungers, the hunger is for warmth and motion.
How it is read
To the Skeldr it is an old power of the far north and one of the omens of Ragnar, the breaking of the world, among which is a winter that wanders outside its season. Their hunters have a simple rule: when a glacier falls silent, leave it. Some seers link Skjarn to the very old ice of the White Beyond, which seems to hold memories that are not its own.
Where Skjarn came from, no one knows. Like every Primordial Power, it is older than the songs about it, and the fragments that speak of the first gods offer only hints.