Skaldek - The Ice Troll
“Don’t watch the gate—watch the stones. The wall grows fingers in this cold.”
Role in Its Society:
Skaldek is Hrokan’s night-climber—the shock trooper that makes parapets unsafe. Ice trolls like him scale blue-ice and dressed stone as if it were bark, appearing where ladders aren’t and turning crenels into meat-grinders. He scouts by scent of mortar and wet iron, marks weak courses with claw-scores, and teaches tribal warriors where to plant the first ladders. Orog crews call him the bell-thief; sentries who spot him rarely live to ring anything. He is released when the horn blows once for wind and twice for silence.
Appearance Description:
Tall and rangy, 12 feet of gaunt sinew wrapped in glacial blue-green skin so cold it’s faintly translucent. You can see darker “ice-veins” threading his forearms and a dull glow where marrow runs hot through cold. A mane of icicle-like spines bristles along his neck and shoulders. Arms hang too long; hands end in onyx-black hooked claws rimed with frost. The jaw juts forward with pale tusks; the tongue is slate-gray and steams in the air. Chips of stone and frozen mortar are embedded across his chest like trophies.
Backstory:
Born on a calving floe, Skaldek learned early that cold knits faster than care. He survived a fall from a cliff by pressing himself into snow and freezing shut. Hrokan’s scouts found him sleeping vertical on a keep wall, fingers sunk into mortar lines. Since then, he’s been trained with black salt, blue rope, and silence: three scratches for a ladder lane, four for a loose course, five for a ready fall. He hates bells, loves hinges, and keeps pebbles in his throat-pouch to spit as warnings for other climbers.
