World of "The Wall"- short introduction

"There is a wall at the edge of every map, a slab of black stone colder than iron and older than memory. It stretches from the ocean’s edge to the heart of the mountains and perhaps beyond.

Nobody knows how long it is, and nobody dares to follow it too far. On the warm side, crops grow, fires burn, and children even laugh at times. It is a good life, simple but good.

On the cold side, the sky is always grey. The wind cuts the skin like glass. People say that monsters live there- creatures made of bone, ash, and the regrets of humankind. No one argues. Because sometimes, late at night, you can hear them howl.”

There is a Wall at the edge of the known world. Or perhaps it is not at the edge, but is the edge? A slab of black stone colder than iron and ancient beyond reckoning, it stretches across the earth in a line so impossibly long that no one has followed it from end to end. No one is even certain it has ends.

On maps, it appears as a jagged scar, but to those who live near it, the Wall is not merely a feature of the land- it is the boundary between everything they know and everything they refuse to imagine.

On one side, people live. On the other side, something waits.

The Warm Side

Life on the warm side is not easy, but it is recognisable. Crops grow and fires burn. Communities scattered like fragile islands along the Wall’s length, mostly unaware of the others' existence, each believing, perhaps, they are alone in the world. What unites them is not trade or culture, but the looming presence of the Wall, and the rules it imposes. These communities face the Wall with different beliefs, shaped by generations of proximity to something that never moves but never leaves them alone.

One known community treats the Wall with reverence and fear. They speak of it in low voices. They build altars of stone at the base of a narrow fissure they call the Crack, and send forth solitary figures known as Searchers- not to explore, not to conquer, but to recover what has been lost. Sometimes they return. Often, they do not. And when they do, they are almost always changed.

Another place, far from the first, is a settlement called Eron Hollow, where the Cold is not mythic but tactical. There is no worship here, only training, obedience, and a mission that has endured longer than anyone living remembers. They refer to their passage through the Wall as the Blade, and those who cross it, as Edges. There is no ceremony, no farewell. There is only protocol. Their reason for sending men and women across is clear, if grim: “If we don’t understand what lives beyond the Wall, we won’t see it coming when it decides to understand us.” They do not believe in waiting for danger to arrive. They believe it is already en route.

Deeper into the warm lands, weeks of travel and away from the Wall's shadow, there exist other settlements, perhaps larger, certainly more prosperous, for whom the Wall is merely where cartographers stop drawing, the place where every map ends and speculation and stories begin.

The Cold Side

What lies on the other side of the Wall is not simply snow or ice. It is cold in a different sense: a presence, a pressure, a will. The terrain is hostile and shifting: black ice fields, forests of petrified trees, and rime-choked valleys beneath a dark sky that never clears. The wind cuts not just the skin, but the voice from the throat. And in the quiet, things watch.

The Cold does not kill with the weather- it presses, it listens. It tries to understand you and then unmake you. It speaks in voices you know. It mimics your regrets. It loops your memories until they fracture. Time folds in strange places. The Cold is not only a landscape- it's a question with no answer.

Far from the Wall, deep into the brutal cold and unknown to the communities from the warm side, there are also the Rime-Kin, a unique tribe, Children of the Cold. They are not merely survivors but true masters of this world, having forged a symbiotic relationship with the Cold itself. Their existence is a testament to extreme adaptation and a profound understanding of their harsh environment. They are not remnants nor are they corrupted. They are something else entirely. The Rime-Kin are the Cold’s children, not by blood, but by adaptation.

None who cross to the cold side leave untouched. The longer you remain, the more the Cold presses on thoughts, emotions, and will. Those without protection may succumb to the malign spirits that live within the Cold like viruses in a mind. These spirits do not rip; they erode. They mimic. They echo voices of the lost and offer warmth, but only if you stop thinking clearly.

There are those who do not return at all, and those who return wrong. These twisted beings, once human, now serve something else. They are not undead, nor possessed in the classical sense—they are realigned, remade in the image of the Cold's will. Their bodies break symmetry. Their movements are off. But sometimes, their voices still sound human."

Some few know how to guard the mind. Among the Rime-Kin, and among rare warm-siders, there exists the practice of carrying Ward-Bones: small, carved talismans made from the remains of ancient Cold-born creatures, Kraelgs. These bone-made objects do not block cold physically, but act as psychic anchors, preventing spiritual interference and identity erosion.