The council of the snow tribe its a piece of work. it is a massive crystal mountain, that seems to be glowing like a sun in these frigid lands. Well, it would be wrong to call it a crystal since the entire mountain is made up of a special kind of ice, though why the material is special has been withheld.
The mountain barely shows any pulsation of mana which would have calmed anybody else. No mana leakage is often a sign of mana efficieny and only a good formation mage is able to create formations of that variety. It would be easier to find a bad formation mage using only good materials for whom such wastefulness won't hurt them but much harder to find a formation mage that would be able to make complete usage of a formation.
it is doing it's work amazingly well. The instant that the mountain came into view, I could feel the wind around me stabilize almost stopping now that we are much closer. Only very powerful formations should be capable of something like this and i personally cannot imagine creating such a thing. Also i can say with quite a bit of confidence that this is not formation magic, something similar to it but not formation magic.
it is supposed to be the grandest work of the council and the greatest proof of the council's ability to work together, though I would say the better proof would have been the thousands of tents containing shops next to the mountain. i can better explain once you know of the history of the tribes.
The truelands is a unforgiving place and just surviving in this place is a torture that most people can barely handle. It takes years of training for a person to even enter the truelands safely and not return with disabled limbs. For the folks that are not able to do so, they have to live in places heavily modified by magic. The children's, the parents and any person without the talent to cultivate would be a part of this list which is almost the entirety of the population.
These people would literally not be able to take a step beyond whatever city, village they originate from unless they want to become a statue of ice. If whatever magic that was protecting them failed most would die unless they managed to reach a sledder and even for a small village, the number of sledders needed would be astounding. The council must have a absurd number of sledders as a reserve.
What magic they use I do not know. Cloak is very tight lipped about that but they are called as a dome. Regardless, whichever method of protection they have environmental manipulation is legendary for how easily it tends to fail. There are just so many things that can go wrong that each second that this formation runs is a gamble.
Even with formations, environmental modification is not something that can be guaranteed for places the size of villages, let alone cities. Heck most of them tend to not work in the airships (as I can tell on basis of recent experiences.) and they are the safest method of doing so in all the magics that we have discovered.
So you can imagine these people need a backup for any emergency that might occur. Suppose a dome of their fails, not many people would be able to survive unless they are removed in a prompt manner. Something like that cannot just be managed by the people of single village or even city. every village will have to coordinate and that requires one more thing.
They need a overarching group that will co-ordinate all of this. The process of redirecting people into different villages such that each village has optimal number of people( as I imagine farmland will be very hard to find here.), to provide people with sledders to facilitate such moves and a bunch of managerial work of that nature. Without this the number of losses one would be facing would be astounding. No, it would be more accurate to call it scary.
Essentially, the people here need a kind of central government managing all of these tasks without which most people would be quite fucked. According to cloak, such a thing is nearly impossible to setup though. All the sub tribes of the snow tribes have been trying to do something like that for millenias. Some tribes even manage it, setting up a kingdom but it has never lasted. Most do not even tend to pass the first generation after its inceptions. That doesn't stop the fact that these people still need management.
The only solution that has worked is the council. There have been five tribes that have setup a kingdom, but failed to maintain it. The five tribes combined all their knowledge together to create the council and the mountain it has come to represent. It is an alliance of all the tribes that exist in the truelands and their work is quite straightforward and important. nothing else would work to be honest. Even the council has been barely functioning, it seems.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
First is the maintenance of all the domes and prevention of any unnecessary collapse of domes. Second in case of an attack, they are charged with providing sledders that will be used to escort these people back to safety. Third would be to act as a place where all the tribes can fight each other under the supervision of the other tribes.
A hidden fourth I assume would be the maintain the council. The council is an attempt at environmental magic at a nation wide level. Such crazy attempts at environment manipulation can be counted in a single hand across the continent after all. It would not exist without infusions of a crazy amount of resources. I know of a man in the black mountain that would do anything to come to this place and study the thing.
Regardless, at the moment I have more immediate worries than a piece of experimental magic that might explode ten years down the line. After all i am sure that my corpse would not care if this place exploded the second after it has been killed. If anything I am sure my soul will enjoy it as i go to hell.
There are five tribes that hold a seat at the council, the very five tribes that are supposed to have constructed the council. Among them I have the support of two tribes who I should be describing now. First is the tribe of wolves. They are supposed to be experts of beast taming and are the people that are charged with providing the snowlords with their hordes. Other than that, I have no idea why they are supporting me. It has something to do with cloak, I feel.
The second tribe is the tribe of blood, a militant tribe that seems to practice the art of strengthening their bodies with the usage of blood. This group is a bit more easily understood as they seem to always oppose the popular opinion of the council. For every decision that the majority makes in the council, the blood tribe is always the sole exception. Again I do not understand why that is the case except that it is the way of that tribe. Cloak is always careful not to give too much information about the tribes especially related to the politics of the place.
That means that there exist three tribes that are opposing me. The first is the tribe with the complain. That would be the tribe of tattoos, whose abilities are strongly linked with the tattoos in their flesh. It is supposed to be quite easy to see the power level of any person of the tattoo clan since they literally show it off in the tattoos that they wield. Other than that, they are supposed to be the most egotistical in all the tribes. Insulting them always leads to a bunch headaches according to cloak.
Anyway to speak of the other two tribes, the first is the tribe of spear. Their entire magical abilities are supposed to have originated from the spear that they use which is supposed to be passed in their families. I assume it is some kind of a contractual magic, something similar to what the warlocks use. They are a neutral tribe that have no opinion on either the sages nor the legion but they seem to be supporting the tattoo tribe for now. Making them shift sides is our goal at the moment.
The last tribe is the tribe of ice, who seem to be experts of ice magics. Their ice magics are stuff of legend, though the disadvantages of using them is even more popular. These magics are supposed to make the flesh more susceptible to the chill, though the people here have a more poetic name for it. They call it the blue death and that is the state that most people will be in if any of their defenses fail. Naturally, the chill is even more worse here.
Anyway this should be enough to describe my present situation. To discuss about more harmless matters, at the moment i am walking through a market. The council also seems to act as a center of trade based on the amount of merchants that I can see in this place. I can see hawkers selling everything from weapons to food. I can see more permanent structures in the place, where i am sure more precious items are traded. I certainly wont be getting the permission to visit any of these places. After all, it is not rare for most black mountain people to be blindfolded, their hearing blocked when they are captured. This is especially with the scholars, who can learn quite the bit just from looking at a place for quite the bit. They say let a scholar live in your city for a month and he can cause a civil war, let him live there for a year and he can land an army into your city.( To be frank, even the scholars claim this particular ability of theirs to be an unexact science, but they have a reputation to maintain.)
The area outside of the council seem to exist as a city of its own, An independent city that might be the closest thing these people have to a capital if what cloak claims to be true. The number of people here are enough for me to actually disappear among them. Granted I would be discovered among them almost instantly. Compared to them, I am really very different. Firstly, I am so short compared to the average height of the people here. The embarassing thing is that i seem to be shorter than most kids in the place. Other than that, I am dressed so differently from them. I am still wearing the clothes that I had at the fortress while the people here seem to like to wear clothes made up of animal skin.
All of this while i have been walking to the mountain, almost since the moment that I started this log. I must admit simply walking has been quite relaxing to me. I have been staying in cramped places for quite the bit of time and that is something that will allow nobody to remain calm.
Regardless, my mind has been wandering. It is time for me to focus. I going to be under quite the bit of pressure after all. I am entering a den of wolves and the mountain does a good job of reminding me of that. Well time to convert my certain death to a nearly certain death.