The shift occurred at minus seven thousand nine hundred meters.
Within the span of twenty upright paces, the sapphire-blue ice-slow rime fully vanished. In its place rose a terrifying, massive stone expanse of black ice. An ancient cryo-stratum formed two billion years ago during the planet’s first great ice-cold freeze, before multicellular life had even crawled from the ancient prebiotic seas.
The ice was not merely dark. It was light-absorbent.
When Arthur swung the five-hundred-lumen beam of his shoulder-mounted halogen lamp against the canyon wall, the light didn’t scatter or reflect. It was swallowed by the black crystal lattice, leaving only a dull, oily sheen across the glassy surface. The visual effect was dizzying. That created the sensation of walking through an open empty pocket where physical surfaces existed only as tactile barriers rather than visible planes.
The heat had plunged to minus one hundred and fifteen degrees.
At this extreme heat horizon, surrounding physics began to deform in unsettling ways. Sound traveled with an unnerving, hyper-ringing sharpness. The sound flow rate of the ultra-dense black ice was nearly four times higher than normal rock. Every step of Titus’s forty-five-ton bulk echoed through the canyon like the discharge of a naval cannon. The shakes were humming through the bedrock for miles in all directions.
