Martial Boon: 1 Str, 1 Con

Age. Boryushka are incredibly long-lived and slow-moving. They reach maturity at age 50 and can live for 300 to 400 years. Their perception of time is as vast and unchanging as a glacier.

Alignment. Almost always Lawful Good or Lawful Neutral. They are bound by an unbreakable sense of honor, oaths, and the preservation of communal memory.

Size. The largest of the mortal races, Boryushka stand between 5 and 8.5 feet tall. Their massive frames are covered in dense, insulating fur, making them nearly immune to the biting cold.

In the ancient songs of the north, the Boryushka are the "Mammoth-Folk." They are the children of granite and ice, a race born of a god’s loneliness and abandoned for their own ambition. Once the guardians of the Poseian glaciers, they are now the silent sentinels of the Naplican tundra.

I. The Carving of the Children

Born of Granite and Wind. In the dawn of the world, the god Velygor sought a people who could survive a world without mercy.

• The Divine Craft: Velygor took the ice of glaciers for their eyes, the granite of cliffs for their bones, and the fur of the great beasts for their skin. He breathed the biting north wind into their lungs, creating a race that was as unyielding as the mountains themselves.

• The Pride of Velygor: He taught them the arts of bone-carving and the wisdom of the blizzard. For aeons, they lived in silent obscurity, a perfect reflection of their creator’s stoic nature.

II. The Call of War

The Choice of Purpose. When the Zhuyang empire threatened to drown Naplica in obsidian and flame, the gods of the east begged Velygor for aid. He refused to risk his children, but the Naplican gods were cunning.

• The Temptation of Song: They bypassed the father and spoke to the children. They offered the Boryushka a "Song that would be sung across the world"—the promise of Purpose. Driven by a desire to test their strength against a worthy foe, the clans chose to leave the ice.

• The Breaking of the Span: They marched across the "White Span" to Naplica. When the war ended and the Zhuyang were subdued, they found the path home closed. Velygor, wounded by their "betrayal" of his silence, turned his gaze away. The Boryushka were heroes of a foreign land, left with nothing but the frost.

III. Legacy of Endurance

The Silent North Abandoned by their creator and distant from the gods who used them, the Boryushka have built a civilisation on the edge of the world.

• Hearth and Bone: They live in close-knit communities, herding great tundra beasts and carving their history into ivory. Because they have no god to guide them, they rely entirely on one another.

• The Unbroken Oath: To a Boryushka, an oath is the granite of the soul. To break one is to lose your "Song"—to be erased from the oral history of the clan, a fate they consider worse than death.