Hadrik Wyrmchill - The Berserker
Drown your flames in snow and bare your necks. The Glass Crown keeps what burns.
Role in Its Society:
Hadrik leads the Fire-Takers—human zealots who march in Irdryth’s name to tax heat and hope. They patrol tribute routes, crash village hearths, and stage night processions that demand brazier-fires be surrendered to the dragon. Guard drakes clear lanes for his charges; mephits fog the approaches; ogres haul away seized fuel and steel. To the dominion he’s a sermon with an axe: fear converted into orderly tithe. To the Frosted Wilds, he’s winter in a man’s skin.
Appearance Description:
Broad-shouldered, raw-nerved, late thirties. Frost-bitten lips, pallid eyes like skim ice, beard crusted with rime. A white-drake-scale mantle rides his shoulders over chain and boiled leather laced with blue cords. Twined at his belt: wyrmchill phials the color of glacier light. His greataxe is iron-black and nicked, its edge lacquered with frozen breath. A cold-lamp brazier hangs at his hip—blue fire that gives light, not heat.
Backstory:
Hadrik was once a coast hunter whose family starved when a whiteout devoured the seal season. Irdryth’s drakes found him half-frozen; the dragon’s breath did not burn him—it numbed him to pain and doubt. Mephits dosed him with wyrmchill until his veins learned the taste of cold obedience. He took a new oath: No heat thrives without the Crown’s consent. He never looked back. Villages that kneel keep their lamps; those that defy see him again at the next new moon, and there are fewer doors to knock.
