Icegaard

In the far north, where the maps go vague, there is a nation southern textbooks barely mention. That's not an accident. The Ulvkin prefer it.

Wolf-blooded. Pack-bonded. Stronger in the cold that kills everyone else. The myths got them half right — yes, they shift; no, they never stop being themselves. What the myths missed completely is why a civilization of shapeshifters stations itself at the edge of the habitable world, generation after generation, in rotating watches that change the people who serve them.

The Ulvkin guard something. A place where the sky has a crack in it.

They call it the Wolf's Mouth. The sentries who watch it come back quiet, and flinch at corners, and some of them stop shifting altogether. The breach has been stable for centuries. Lately, the watchers report, it's growing. And one young sentinel keeps drawing the same figure in her journal — something on the far side of the crack, standing still, looking back.