Snowfall on the Edge of the World

4 - THE CAVERNS OF ICE

The caverns were enormous. Shelves of ice coated with a thick layer of frost lined this place, glimmering flickers of reflected light illuminating the tomb within. The place was deathly cold, but not quite in the way that I would normally attribute to temperature, there was something fundamentally wrong about this place. Something fundamentally, dead.

Was that the proximity to the edge at work? The Bearded (not mandatory!) Scholars thought that the Edge was the entrance to the Hells, but I didn't put much stock in that. Hell was much too alive, and I'd always imagined it to be hot. If Hell was the apotheosis of Sin, then this place was of Death.

Not that I was afraid of Death, mind you. Any self-respecting knight of Hypatia wouldn't fear anything quite so common, I'd dealt enough of it that the visage of the reaper was a friendly one now. Old Man Bones and I would meet as old friends when that time came. Was I rambling, delirious? Maybe my arm was worse than it looked, if that was possible.

My fur-lined boots scraped dully across thick carpets of frost, occasionally kicking over stalagmites that might have been standing for centuries. I crunched across history itself, I thought. After an hours of wandering the caves without purchase, I realized how right I was about history.

Thunk.

I looked down, the odd light of my Lamp illuminating the floor in strange detail. My eyes struggled to take in the strange shape underneath my foot, despite the environment this thing looked unusually... man made. I gingerly picked up the object and took a closer look.

-meyer's Hair Emporium

-air done for sixpen-

-ney -ack guarantee-

I frowned, not exactly sure what to make of this, it was a portion of an oaken sign with long since faded paintwork. Seemed to me to be a barber's shop, but this deep in the ground? Rumor had it that it was possible for whole towns, even castles to disappear in disasters, if memory served natural philosophers believed that the Citadel of the Dragon would eventually sink beneath the ground in a few hundred years.

Was there a whole town down here? A whole civilization that sank beneath the ice, frozen forever in the embrace of the frosted earth? Possibly untouched in all that time?

I would be lying if I said I didn't find it exciting.

I replaced the relic back to the sodden ground and took in my surroundings in greater detail. What I had previously taken as a natural wall of ice, I now realized was far too... regimented. Scraping away snow and ice I revealed the form of a frozen doorway, snapped nails consistent with the sign on the floor. With mounting excitement, I heaved the door open and stomped inside.

Dark, barely lit by the nauseating light of my lamp, the building was clearly at one-point a barbershop, a frozen chair sat surrounded by glassy cobwebs from which no spider yet span. I didn't expect that any spiders would be spinning webs here ever again.

No bodies in the building, interesting. I had thought that they wouldn't rot in a place this cold, the only possibility is that the residents left before the place sank beneath the soil.

Or something ate the corpses.

My breath misted in the chill, soft clouds of vapour floating in uneasy swirls within the clammy air. My excitement once enflamed by the promise of adventure was now giving way to the innate and most terrible of fears. It starts as a little tickle on the back of your neck that spreads with glacial certainty, scraping every nerve and instinct inflicted upon the deepest recesses of your mind. As I felt my blood turn to ice, a thought entered my head that all who experience this fear think.