Your village was a small one, far in the frozen northern lands. The land and sea was blanketed almost constantly with snow and ice, and the skies some nights would burst into a colourful dance, which your people considered to be a dance of the very heavens, the gods in the stars above celebrating within their holy realms. Yet what the shamans of your village would never expect is for the gods of winter to descend from their heavenly dwellings, but that is what seems to have passed upon this day.

The entire village gathers in a crowd that is a mixture of fear and excitement as a great shape hewn of ice and gleaming metal adorned with indecipherable runes lands in the snow just beyond your village, extending clawed legs of metal to steady itself. The great roaring colourful flames, like the colours the sky turned some nights, ceased to pour from the several great orifices at the back of the thing. This must be a chariot of the gods, what else could it be?

With a low hissing sound, one section of the chariot's icy hull shifts into a doorway, from which freezing mist billows and what must only be a god strides out onto the snow. They stand taller than even the greatest warriors of your village, a skeletal form with long silvery hair and stag-like horns adorned in crystal beads and glittering with frost. Their eye sockets shine with a brilliant blue light, and they are dressed in flowing blue robes embroidered with silver runes and patterns. Then, to add to your awe, they speak in a voice that certainly sounds like the voice of a goddess, echoing and ethereal, and effortlessly commanding. Greetings, those of this village. I am Xyiannaloth, frostkin and commander of the vessel you see behind me, the Boreal Shell. Please, do not pay me fealty, for I am not a god. And do not fear, for I mean you no harm.