In the towering silence of the ancient northern ranges—those ageless citadels of stone and storm that stretched beyond the reach of any empire—there once thrived a constellation of highland peoples whose existence has long since been buried beneath frost and folklore. These were no ordinary mountain dwellers. Known in scattered oral traditions as the Starbound Tribes, they were artisans, mystics, and wanderers of the peaks, who carved their legacy not in stone, but in ice, bone, and rare starlight-infused crystals that fell only during nights when the aurora whispered in forgotten tongues.
Though little remains of these mountain civilizations, save for the occasional frostbitten carving or shard of impossible luminosity buried deep in glacier-split caverns, tales persist—carried on the wind and buried in the snow-slick dreams of northern storytellers. At the center of these tales is one enigmatic figure, a shadow wrapped in myth, whose name was spoken with reverence and fear: Yetithejewelwer.
The Frost-Smiths of the Skyvault Peaks
To understand the legend of the Yetithejewelwer, one must first unravel the fabric of the Starbound Tribes themselves. These peoples—known by names lost to all but the echoes of mountain ravens—believed that the world was born from a marriage between ice and fire, between the Moon-Giant Lunokh and the Flame-Wyrm Ashundra. From their union came the winds, and from the winds came the bones of the earth: the mountains.
The Starbound Tribes saw themselves as the children of this sacred union. Their shamans, draped in robes of snow leopard hide and feathered with glacial kestrel plumes, charted the stars not for navigation, but for the timing of harvests—not of grain, but of skymetal and crysglint: crystals that only formed where moonlight kissed the breath of sleeping gods. These luminous gems were said to house starlight itself, and were used in rituals of binding, vision, and elemental communion.
It was from these raw and divine materials—carved ice from sacred melt-pools, the bones of mountain beasts, and rare starlight-crystals—that the Starbound artisans crafted amulets, necklaces, and totems imbued with powers both healing and harrowing. Chief among these artisans, whispered to be the first and last of his kind, was the Yetithejewelwer.
The Legend of Yetithejewelwer
In most tellings, the Yetithejewelwer was not born, but awakened—breathed into life by a frost spirit known only as Nyss the Pale. She, a wandering spirit of longing and hunger, sought a companion to fashion beauty from her endless silence. She gathered the last breath of a dying aurora, the memory of a dream from a sleeping mammoth, and the echo of a snowflake’s fall—and from this weave, she sculpted him.
Yetithejewelwer had no face, only a shimmer where a visage might be. He did not speak but sang in resonant tones that could bend ice and coax stone to crack in reverence. With hands of ice-cured bone and fingertips tipped with starlight, he wandered from tribe to tribe, never staying long, but leaving behind ornaments and talismans of impossible craftsmanship.
The most famed of his creations were the Four Season Amulets—each said to hold dominion over a portion of the year. Thawmorn, the spring pendant, bloomed frostflowers wherever it was worn. Solspire, the summer crown, warmed even the coldest caves. Leaffall, the autumn ring, summoned winds of memory. And Winternail, the winter brooch, could summon blizzards or calm storms with a thought.
These artifacts were gifted to the chieftains of four sibling tribes. It is said that so long as the amulets were worn in unity during the solstice rites, balance would prevail across the lands. But envy, as it often does in tales of old, found its way into the heart of men.
The Betrayal and the Cursed Icefall
A lesser-known legend speaks of a fifth chieftain—a sister exiled to the crags for daring to marry a frost spirit. Her name was Ilyra Veinbound, and she bore no amulet, only bitterness. One night, during the celestial conjunction known as the Skystitch, she climbed to the Hollowed Horn, a mountain said to pierce the heavens, and called upon the Yetithejewelwer.
But he did not come.
So instead, she summoned Nyss the Pale herself, trading her name and voice for a single shard of sunfrozen starlight. From it, she crafted her own jewel: the Mirror of Endless Winter, a charm so powerful it stole warmth from the air and froze hearts in jealousy. With it, she laid siege to the other tribes—not with armies, but with storms.
The Yetithejewelwer, bound by the cycle of the seasons he himself had helped forge, could not intervene directly. But he offered a final creation: the Tear of Dawn, a single droplet-shaped gem cut from a falling star, which he gave to a child born under the light of both moons. This child, Kaelor of the Windspine, would go on to broker peace, shattering all five amulets in a ritual that locked their powers into the land itself—dividing the seasons eternally and sealing away the Mirror deep within the Icefall Ruins.
Some say that Kaelor was the Yetithejewelwer’s final apprentice, others whisper that Kaelor was the Yetithejewelwer, reborn in mortal form to end the cycle he began.
Echoes in Ice and Bone
To this day, mountaineers and frost-guides claim to find relics of the Starbound Tribes: beads of impossible iridescence buried in glacier folds, bone charms with inscriptions that still glow under moonlight, and the occasional frozen corpse gripping a frostbitten amulet. Some even claim to have seen the Yetithejewelwer—a flickering figure who appears on the longest nights, near starlit summits, crafting ephemeral jewelry that vanishes with the dawn.
Whether he was spirit, god, man, or myth, one truth remains: the legacy of the Yetithejewelwer lies not in his ornaments, but in the idea that art could shape nature itself—that the forces of winter and time might be not only endured, but worn.
And so, in forgotten mountain songs sung in dialects lost to frost and time, his name still echoes:
“He carves the season, binds the snow,
A jewel of starlight’s ancient glow.
One breath, one gem, one cry unheard,
The world reshaped with not a word.”