When the long dark first settled over Ynys Môn, the standing stones on Llanddwyn Island answered. The island has always stood slightly apart from the rest of the land — a narrow tongue of rock and sand open to the sea, where the sky is wide and the light arrives differently. In the stones there the power that rose was not heavy or rooted. It was swift, and it carried colour.
From those stones Ungorn was formed. She rose with a single horn of pure light already set on her brow, and the first thing the horn did was take the faint colours left in the air after rain and shape them. Where others would have seen only mist or the last edge of a rainbow, she drew the colour together and made it solid enough to stand upon. The clouds she builds are not weather. They are temporary paths of light, spun from whatever brightness remains in the sky, and she alone can climb them.
She uses them to reach the hidden magic that lies above the ordinary ground. On the long dark night much of the island's older power had been pressed flat or driven into places no foot could find. Ungorn climbs the clouds she makes from the rainbow's edge and gathers what the dark has lifted out of reach. No other light born that night can follow her there. The horn carries what she finds. It does not merely shine. It holds the light she has gathered and keeps it pure, so that when she descends she can set it back onto the land without the long dark being able to stain it.
She is made of that light and nothing else. There is no hunger in her and no desire to remain. She exists only to keep brightness moving across Ynys Môn and to return what the night has tried to take. On the open ground near Llanddwyn she is fastest, but her true reach is upward. When the dark presses hardest she does not only run. She draws colour from the air, builds a path no one else can see, and climbs until she finds the magic that has been hidden above the island. Then she brings it down again, carried in the horn, and lays it where it can spread.
Later, when she first met the others, the light in her eye flared brighter the moment she saw them. She understood at once that the stones had not made her to work alone. The clouds and the horn were her gift, but the long dark covered more than the sky. The others had been raised from different stones for different kinds of reaching, and together they were meant to be the single answer Ynys Môn had given to the night.
Ungorn in The Long Dark
In our free game The Long Dark you can play as Ungorn herself. Just as in the story, she is the fastest of the five beasts on open ground, and she alone can build shimmering cloud paths to reach magic that floats above the island — the exact gift the stones of Llanddwyn gave her. Choose her at the start of a run and you will cross Newborough Warren to her home island, where her cloud-building is at its strongest.
Meet the other four beasts in our lore library, send someone an Ungorn e-card with this artwork, or walk to Llanddwyn yourself on our free Anglesey walking trails.