To the north-most part of Infernum is the Northron Wastes - a wilderness of ice, snow and shattered rocks. Nestled between the forests of Inferum to the south and the dark ridges of the Glacier Shelf to the north, the wastes are freezing cold, with temperatures so low that during the night it weather can freeze the blood. It is here, deep amidst winds of snowflakes and sunlight that reflects off the snow enough to cause sunburn, that after thousands of years of subjugation under the heel of the Norn that the First Men tribes still live.
The Northron Wastes are like a desert - a desert of ice, snow and blizzards. They are flat, cold and unbearable. During winter it is cold, certainly, but the Wastes also get less than a handful of hours of light. During the summer, however, the Wastes only gain a few hours of night and whilst the days are still cold, the light is intense due to the vast expanses of white. The equinoxes are perhaps the few times when the First Men can remember why they came here and why they remain - for the Aurora extends far enough south that the dazzling midnight lights are seen from all the Northron villages. But like all places in Infernum, Beyond the Wall, there is a madness to the Wastes. Parts of the Wastes seem to move at different times to other places - not by years but by only a handful of hours or so. Some parts of the Wastes experience weather before or after others that should experience climates at the same time. There are fractures in space and time, where roads do not meet. Do not make the mistake in thinking that the Wastes are a convoluted place - they are not. Most of the time such fractures are barely noticed; though it is enough to make many uncomfortable, especially if they had not been born in the Wastes.
This is not to say that the Wastes are entirely desolate, for vegetation does grow here, and herding animals is a common practice. These Wastes can be quietly fecund, and plants that one would normally find on a mountain side do grow in plenty in the valleys and plains of the Northron climes. This has lead the First Men to have a culture made to travel from place to place in tents made of hide and skin, with the few stationary buildings - such as temples to the gods - being made of hardened wood and stone. Machina also exists here - though ancient, decaying and extremely rare - mostly used as meetings places, where tribes can draw upon the heat of their internal furnaces as the Machines draw power from deep in the earth.
The First Men were the first Humans to encounter Sithi and the other races, and it from the First Men that all modern Human cultures and races have descended over the past tens of thousands of years. It was the First Men that first attacked the Sithi - perhaps out of jealousy, perhaps out of spite - but it is the nature of Humans to mistrust. It was the First Men that were pushed back beyond the Wall, the First Men that inspired the Dacians to war. Thousands of years ago, long after the First Men fought the Sithi, they moved to the Wastes. The Wastes were not fractured then as they are now, but the bitter, biting winds and the great expanses of cold desert protected the First Men tribes. They found refuge amongst the glacier ridges, the broken black stone of the earth. Hundreds of years after this retreat, entire First Men villages went missing - deserted over night. Reports to the tribal leaders spoke of pointy-eared beings - beings with the golden eyes of cats and pale skin. They called these beings the White Foxes, a name that is still used to refer to white spirits in the night. They also aptly named these beings the ‘Norn’ - a name whose connotations in Old Norsh imply controlling the fate of Men and all Humankind. Sin against the gods, it is said, and the Norn will carry you away to a fate worse than death.
Over the last few millennia the tribes of the First Men have come close to outright worship of the ‘Norn’ and their pale-faced assassins. They believe the ‘Norn’ have kept them strong - for they only carry off the weak and let the strong to live. The term ‘Valkyr’ is still used to mean the specific ‘Norn’ that carry the slain from the battlefield and also those that seek out villages of the weak to slaughter, maim or disappear. The First Men, like the Maesians, their immediate offspring, cling to the Old Religion and still tell dark stories of their gods - Udun of the One Eye, Dror the Strong, Tya the female Ever-Champion and the others - though they do not confine themselves to the Six. Unlike many Maesians, however, the First Men still worship Lokki, the Lord of Misrule, openly and He is worshipped as perhaps their favoured god in many ways.
Like the Maesians, the First Men live in tribes, and tribes live together in villages - or settlements - which are moved periodically. Unlike the Maesians, if one member of a family changes tribe then the entire family is outcast from the tribe, and is forced to move with them. In a similar vein, priests belong to a tribe instead of all tribes, and mages are guarded closely by their family members. Many settlements can belong to a given tribe at a time and this differs from the Maesian convention too - First Men tribes are lead by kings. In this way the First Men actually operate quite a sophisticated feudal system.
