Sleeps beneath the furnace-hills and wakes only for the forging of a true blade.
Ignis
When the smiths of Vale ran short of coal, they walked into the mountain and asked the mountain for heat. It answered with a single eye opening in the dark. Ignis is not a dragon so much as a promise: that every fire worth keeping was once given freely, and must be returned someday.
tap to return
She keeps the drowned bells of nine cities and rings them on the longest night.
Undine
Sailors say the trench is so still you can see your own reflection two hundred fathoms down, and that the reflection is not always yours. Undine collects what the surface forgets: coins, prayers, the names of ships. She is not cruel. She simply never lets anything go.
tap to return
Arrives a heartbeat before the storm and leaves a heartbeat after the news.
Sylph
No one has seen the Sylph twice, because no one is sure they saw it the first time. Shepherds on the steppe leave a ribbon tied to the tallest post; by morning it points where the weather will go. The Sylph is less a creature than a rumor the wind tells about itself.
tap to return
Has never lost a wager, because it has never agreed on when a wager ends.
Gnomon
The road-builders found a stone they could not move and built the road around it. Three centuries later the road is gone and the stone has moved four inches toward the sea. Gnomon keeps time by erosion and considers a human lifetime a rather short afternoon.
tap to return
Exists for one nine-thousandth of a second and remembers all of it.
Fulgur
Every bolt that has ever struck the earth is the same bolt, returning. That is the heresy of the Tower astronomers and the plain fact of the Fulgur, who is born and dies in each flash and carries the memory forward like a letter passed hand to hand across a burning room.
tap to return
Belongs to no one, but has been wearing you since the day you were born.
Umbra
The Codex keepers argued for a century over whether to include Umbra at all, since it cannot be caught, drawn, or described except by what it is not. In the end they printed the card with a hole in the middle. Hold it to a lamp and you will see the only true portrait of it that exists.
tap to return