The Frostspine waits.
You wake in Coldhollow — a hearth-town huddled under mountains that do not care whether you climb them. The town is warm. Nothing past the gate is.
The fountain square where Eilwen the empath takes strangers' hurts onto herself. The Chapel of the Undying Flame, where the fallen walk back into the light. Market Row, the inn where training happens over a paid bed, the town hall, the locksmith, the herbalist, the banker who remembers your balance and the urchin who remembers your face. Town is sanctuary — no fight can start inside it, and nothing hostile can follow you in. It is where you rest, spend, gossip, and let your mind absorb what the trail taught it.
Weather that arrives
A day turns in roughly 96 minutes, seasons roll in the far-north pattern, and outdoor rooms genuinely change — snow glazes the switchbacks, and running heedless on ice is a decision your footing will grade.
Small lives, lived
Roosters, patients, porters, clerks — the town runs on schedules of its own, whether or not you're watching. News travels: do something worth telling and the gossips will tell it.
People who remember
The living NPCs carry memory and relationships. Greet them, help them, cross them — they hold onto it, and their words change with what they hold.
An economy with hands
Skinning, fishing, foraging, fletching, cooking, enchanting, consignment, work orders, a bounty desk with a weekly ledger. Silver is earned, not printed.
The trail west of town is fraying: kobolds bold enough to raid in daylight, and the hunters muttering that something in the warren is pushing them out. Follow it — first blood on the trail, then up the Frostspine Climb, then into the dark where the scrappers hold ground and a shaman's fetishes smoke. At the warren's heart waits the chief: half again the size of any scrapper, and he fights like nothing you've faced. Watch his body, not his blade.
Chapters land in order; what lies ahead stays ??? until you reach it. How it ends is yours to discover — and permanently yours to wear when you do.
The Frostspine has higher roads and older troubles: the fells and the thawlands, the delvings and the catacombs, Kingsholm and its deeps, the skerries and the western pass — a world of over a thousand rooms that keeps growing. Saga I is the front door, not the house.