Jadis Chillwind
The howling wind crept hauntingly over the plains in the valley beneath Jadis when she spotted the movements of a certain wolf. “Blast!” she cursed under her breath as she immediately moved into a run downhill to approach the animal. This was the third time in a full moon her companion had returned wounded. She hissed as she moved her fingers through the fur and found the marks of a blade cut into Frostfang’s back leg. “Adventurers again,” she soothed her wolf by numbing the bleeding wound with summoned ice and while she carried the animal to the peaks, she thought about all the horrible things she would do to the ignorant adventurers who dared enter her territory in the coming days.
She had barely been a child when the giants attacked and wrecked the entire village apart. Jadis had been separated from her parents, but as with most nightmares, she vividly remembered the screams and corpses filling the streets of Nashkel that day. Her escape had only been successful because she knew the city so well and within minutes managed to reach the outskirts of the woods, a haven of undergrowth and shadows to hide in. Watching her homeland being torn apart by gigantic, monstrous humanoids hadn’t exactly been pleasant, but she never felt the need to mourn over her loss. She had always been known as the frigid, strange child.
Her first years in the wild had been more than dangerous. While she never really came close to starvation, she had been close to death multiple of times in unfortunate encounters with the true inhabitants of the woods. Wolves and boars had forced her to retreat further and further south until she reached the cold, bare plains before the spiked mountains. Facing either being hunted down in the woods or starve to death in the empty plains, she had decided to find sanctuary in the eerie Cloud Peaks.
Centuries passed and Jadis had grown slowly fonder of the cold, frosty surroundings she now considered home. She often travelled downhill to hunt and kill prey with her crafted bow and arrows, and it had been during one of her monthly trips down the peaks she came across the wolf Frostfang. He had been left bleeding in the snow by his pack and while her heart had been hardened by the years in solitude, she found no reason to not take him in. With him by her side, she could manage to bring down even larger foes and she soon posed a cruel threat to the local tribes of giants.
However something ruined her wicked fun with the giants. More than often, strangers guised as adventurers entered her territory and killed her prey. Yet these unwelcome people wouldn’t just kill a few giants, they would bring down entire tribes and leave parts of the mountains deserted from all life. Angered by the devious, ignorant actions of the adventurers, Jadis decided to change the aim of her bow and began hunting down humans, elves, halflings instead. She felt a wry satisfaction whenever the snow was covered in thick, humanoid blood and with it, she suddenly felt pride in being who she was. Jadis, archer and guardian of the Cloud Peaks.
A grim smile covered her lips as she followed the frame of yet another unknown figure in the mountains. The peaks had been covered in a blizzard the entire day, and while the young ranger wondered why anyone would be stupid enough to defy the weather, she slid back and forth between the shadows, hunting down her prey. The figure she was about to kill stopped upon the hilltop and raised her arms in the air. Jadis pulled an arrow from her quiver and moved it to her bow. She released the bowstring and moved behind a boulder to hear the swirling sound of the wood shooting through the air and awaited the scream.
Nothing. Nothing came. Not even the thud of an arrow hitting its target. Jadis peered out from her hiding and was surprised to see the figure standing with its arms raised as if nothing had happened. She launched another arrow, this time watching it work through the air with a sharp sound. She gasped in disbelief as the arrow hit an invisible wall and immediately shattered into tiny fragments. This time, the female figure turned and walked through the howling wind toward Jadis with a dignified grace, her body covered in a white, ceremonial dress and a snowflake formed pendant hanging from her neck.
Her expression was calm and as she raised her hand nothing but a sudden, weak quirk of her eyebrow suggested annoyance. At an instant, a solid beam of pure, white ice shot from the tips of her fingers and struck Jadis directly in the chest. The ranger gasped for air, feeling her entire body growing numb as she was lifted into the air by magical force.
The last thing she saw, felt and heard was the raging blizzard embracing her entirely.