Artar—a world of artifacts. Everything in it hinges on artifacts, objects imbued with magical power. I could picture it: an ordinary feather that’s anything but ordinary. Touch it to a piece of paper, and words straight from your mind appear on the page. A simple bread knife? It’s one too: you’ll never cut your hand with it, as it’s enchanted to slice only bread, bouncing off skin. And magical heaters… Well, I could go on forever.
They say in the civilized world, there’s not a single thing left that isn’t an artifact. They also say every inhabitant of Artar is born with magical power. “Mage” and “human” are one and the same, right? Magic everywhere, civilization, convenience. Magical creatures stroll past your window, carry you on their backs. Floating lights illuminate your path…
But all of that… Oh, all of that is a fairy-tale, an unseen world! The Polar Wastes, though—that’s the harsh reality. So what are these cursed Wastes I keep ranting about? Of course, I’ll tell you.
The Polar Wastes are the land of exiles, of this savage rabble. And they’ve gone feral because magic—the foundation of everything!—passed them by. No matter how much you insist that Artar is a world of mages and artifacts, who can deny the existence of the exiles? These wretched outcasts, these barbarians, couldn’t wield artifacts, the pinnacle of civilization. To activate an artifact, you need even a drop of that strange power—and they didn’t have a single drop.
And somehow, it came to be that the mages grew disgusted by these limited beings. They banded together and banished them to the Polar Wastes, a land of eternal snow. Then they erected the Great Wall to ensure no one could return. They say the temperature difference across the Wall is dozens of degrees. The mages don’t like the cold seeping from the Wastes, so they artificially heat the bordering lands!
Oh, yes. While we fight for survival every minute, the folks beyond the Great Wall bask in all the comforts of civilization. And there’s just one chance in a thousand to escape this icy hell: once a year, a delegation of mages arrives. That day could rightly be called the Day of Magical Testing, but its official name is the Day of the Blue Star. I suspected that was the name of the artifact they brought with them.
The ritual itself was called initiation, and everyone turning eighteen that year had to go through it. The subject would step into a special circle and place their hand on a particular artifact—a gleaming orb. Not blue in the slightest. If there was even one mage among their ancestors, if even a speck of that strange power showed up, everything was supposed to light up. Just a little. Even a tiny spark would do.
And if it did, the subject would leap for joy: they’d be taken from this icy hell and whisked away to the civilized world. But the problem was… you had to live to eighteen first.
I remember that night as if it were today. It’s called the Night of Green Eyes—the greatest tragedy of the Polar Wastes. And what came before? That’s already shrouded in fog. Or rather, a snowstorm, because no resident of the North has ever seen fog—just snow, snow, and more snow.
A few exile settlements were scattered across the icy valleys. People banded together, clung to one another, because it was easier to survive that way. Together, they decided where to set up camp when following the reindeer herds, built igloos, hunted beasts… Some refined souls might say this wasn’t living—but it was life.
Still, I remember the happiest fragments. Bitter cold isn’t torture, just a habit when you’ve known it your whole life. But it’s hard to explain what cold really is… We didn’t measure it with anything. I guess cold is when you spill a drop of water, and it freezes before hitting the ground. Brutal cold is when a bowl of water does the same, turning to ice and clinking against the ground like a bell. A thaw? That’s when it freezes a second later.
Blessed times of thaw! That’s when Net and I would run out and play snowball fights.
“Ow, you got me in the ear!” Net would squeal.
“And you dumped snow down my collar! Take this, you jerk!”
“I’ll get you for that!”
He’d knock me off my feet, and we’d roll around in the snow together. Those are the happiest fragments of childhood, echoing in my memory with warm laughter. And all of them were erased by a single night.
The ten years when the leopards forgot the path to our settlements are known as the Great Stillness. By the way, among the proper nouns of the Polar Wastes, the word “Great” is pretty common: the Great Wall, the Great Water, the Great Stillness… When you live in a space of just a few feet inside an icy shelter, everything outside seems great.
As you know, the Great Stillness ended with the Night of Green Eyes. That dead silence still rings in my ears… But why is it so “dead”? Because in Ingvar’s igloo, everyone was dead. And not just in Ingvar’s igloo…
“But why?! Why?!” the questions scream in my mind.
If those leopards were covered in impenetrable armor, if they were three times the size of polar bears, then it would make sense. But they’re so easy to stab with a knife! The blame lies with the Great Stillness. The Barren Nights had become mere ghost stories to scare kids. Ten years without a sign of them! Everyone thought they were gone.
The Barren Leopards crept toward the settlement while Mira sewed a coat. Dozens of other women were sewing coats too. Dozens of kids bickered with each other, while dozens of men lay back with their hands behind their heads, dreaming of hunting trophies… Only Atrik and a few other grim souls checked their weapons, listening to the darkness of the night. Year after year, they prepared for an attack, because they remembered the horrors before the Great Stillness.
And then the Barren Leopards began their hunt… while only a handful of men had a knife at hand.
Still, that was just a test raid. Later, the Barren Nights would last a week, sometimes even a week and a half, but that time, the leopards tore through for just a few hours. And it wasn’t immediately clear that Ingvar’s little rascals would never hide his hat again… that Mira would no longer sew coats for the future.
People changed so much they could hardly be called human anymore. It was every man for himself, and they’d kill to take survival supplies—and they did kill.
“We have to get rid of it,” Mira said, her voice trembling.
Pale, with sunken eyes, she stared ahead. Net and I were too scared to make a peep. The final word belonged to Atrik—the unyielding pillar of our family.
“Better to toss it,” he confirmed.
During the Night of Green Eyes, only three leopards were killed, two of them by us. That second one… Atrik didn’t rush into Ingvar’s igloo for nothing.
And when a hunter defeats a beast, it’s custom to take a trophy. Skin it, pull out its fangs, or cut off its ears. In the following Barren Nights, it became clear: the nightmare predators avoid places where the hide of a slain kin lies. From then on, people started killing for a Barren Leopard’s hide.
“And we need to toss it so everyone sees we got rid of it,” Atrik forced out.
The family with the third hide had already been slaughtered.
The settlements vanished too. No one trusted anyone anymore. People stuck to their families, always expecting a knife in the back… Because they didn’t just kill for the legendary trophy: weapons, clothing, food—everything was fair game. Only a few held on to their old honor. People like us, or maybe a bit better.
But traditions couldn’t be preserved. If a girl once had a single role, now everything had changed. Atrik trained me the same way he trained Net. Defend myself? Oh, no. Only to kill.
“Lousy strike. The dagger got stuck, and I’ve already slit your throat,” he’d say.
I’d dodge to the side, slip on the ice, strike again—not for real, but hard.
“Lousy strike! You wouldn’t have hit any organs, and I’ve got a clear shot at your heart.”
After a hundred such critiques, I knew by instinct: where the most blood would spill, where to strike so an arm or leg wouldn’t move, so a lung wouldn’t breathe. I saw it through a wall of snow: it howled, stung my eyes, whipped my cheeks… In those conditions, I trained to fight—there were no others.
It’s almost funny to think who I’d have been if I’d been born ten years earlier. A keeper of the family hearth! Even that image has changed.
Mira—the same cheerful, carefree Mira who loved sewing coats—became a true woman of the North. No, she didn’t stop sewing. After all, warm clothing is one of the key factors in surviving the Polar Wastes. But whether she was making boots, tanning hides, or cooking seal meat, a bow was always within reach.
By the crunch of snow, Mira could tell if it was friend or foe approaching our igloo. And no stranger ever made it inside.
Net—that little punk—remained the only one unchanged.
“Eyvi, if you keep going like this, you’ll be the only woman of the North who can’t sew,” he’d mock.
Instead of firing back with a decent comeback, I just got mad and pricked my finger. My hands just weren’t made for sewing, no matter how hard I tried.
“Easy, Eyvi,” Mira would soothe. “All it takes is desire and persistence.”
“Come on, Mom!” Net wouldn’t stop laughing. “She’s got as much desire as the eye of that needle!”
I growled something very witty, but Net just burst out laughing even harder.
How many years have passed since that night I’ll never forget? Tomorrow, I turn eighteen. And in a week, it’s the Day of the Blue Star. If there’s even a drop of magic in me… Mira, Atrik, and even Net—they all believed there was. Yeah, right! Net, two years older, had already gone through initiation. Like nine hundred and ninety-nine exiles out of a thousand, he was a complete zero. I’ve gotta say, that shook my confidence that I definitely had magic in me.
Right in the middle of these gloomy thoughts, Atrik poked his head into the igloo.
“Alright, you ready? We’re going after a bear,” he commanded.