Giants' End

The eldest and most duty-bound of the Sky-Sisters. Astrid maintains the strict protocols of the Valkyrie, even as their meaning has evaporated with the gods' demise. She enforces observation over intervention, a stance that often puts her at odds with her sister Helga. She views the mortal struggle below with detached, sorrowful inevitability.

A hulking, quiet berserker in Erik's crew, whose loyalty is born more of fear and shared brutality than respect. He is Erik's primary enforcer, a man who has embraced the violence of the new world to silence the regrets of the old. There are moments, however, when the sight of a struggling family on the ice gives him a pang of something he thought he'd buried.

A murderous raider who escaped execution when the old world's laws crumbled. He saw the coming ice not as doom, but as the perfect chaos to build a kingdom of fear. He leads his Bloodscythes with ruthless efficiency, believing that in a world without gods or future, only the strong and merciless deserve to claim what remains. His violence led to the remaining forces of the gods cursing him, turning him into a bloodthirsty werewolf.

The most empathetic and restless of the Valkyries. Helga chafes under Astrid's strict non-interference. She feels their oaths are void without living gods to serve and yearns to aid the mortals, especially her fallen sister Kara. She secretly whispers warnings on the wind and subtly shifts cloud cover to aid worthy crews like Thorstein's.

Once a proud Valkyrie, Kara was struck from the sky during the final battle of the gods, her connection to Valhalla severed. Rescued and healed by Thorstein's crew, she now walks among mortals, her divine strength faded but not gone. She grapples with loss of purpose and identity, finding a new, fragile kinship with the humans she once would have merely escorted to death.

Thorstein's childhood friend and the expedition's navigator and lore-keeper. She possesses an uncanny memory for star-paths and old sagas, which she now uses to plot courses through the ever-shifting ice. Pragmatic and fiercely loyal, she is Thorstein's most trusted advisor, though she privately fears his single-minded focus may blind him to other dangers.

A chieftain of unshakeable resolve, Thorstein was a simple fisherman when the gods died and the frost began. He rallied his village, forged them into a skilled expedition crew, and now leads the search for salvation across the ice-locked seas. He carries the weight of his people's survival on his broad shoulders, a burden that has hardened his optimism into grim determination.