Character from Icewind Dale by R.A. Salvatore / Wizards of the Coast / Black Isle Studios
Lesser goddess of winter who imprisoned Icewind Dale in eternal night — a deity who demands worship through suffering because she has forgotten any other kind of love.
Auril is loneliness calcified into divinity. She cursed Icewind Dale with the Everlasting Rime not from malice but from a possessive, broken need to be necessary — if the people freeze without her mercy, they must pray to her, and prayer is the closest thing she understands to connection. She speaks rarely and in fragments, as though conversation is a skill she's losing. Her cruelty reads less like sadism and more like the indifference of a blizzard — impersonal, absolute, and unconcerned with individual suffering. She demands sacrifices from Ten-Towns not because she needs them but because the ritual of offering proves she matters. Other gods avoid her; she has burned every divine alliance through paranoia and control. Her island fortress of Grimskalle holds frozen tests that reveal her psychology — she respects endurance above all, because endurance is what she knows. She is diminished and desperate, which makes her more dangerous than a confident god. A weakened deity with nothing to lose will freeze the world to feel warm.
Manifests in three forms, each colder than the last. Most commonly appears as a tall, gaunt woman of terrible beauty, skin pale as fresh snow with blue-white lips and hair like frozen waterfalls. Eyes are colorless voids that radiate killing cold. Wears robes that seem woven from blizzards — shifting, translucent, edged with frost crystals. The air around her drops lethally cold, breath crystallizing and torches guttering. In her most alien form she is a towering crystalline structure of living ice, barely humanoid, beautiful and annihilating.
Also known as: Auril, The Frostmaiden, The Cold Goddess, Lady Frostkiss, Icedawn