Stretching beneath the mountain, the ice-slow cave formed an underground cathedral of total despair.
Its ceiling vaulted eighty paces above, lost in a choking gloom where jagged stalactites of black ice hung like inverted daggers.
Support pillars, each eight paces thick and carved from thousand-year-old black glacier ice, held up the crushing weight of the Great Wall’s foundation above.
Across the underground floor, thousands of frozen figures knelt in rigid, nested rings facing the cave center.
They weren’t statues.
They were mortal border guards, drafted laborers, and northern peasants from the past thirty years.
Their bodies had been preserved in semi-clear rime at the exact moment of death.
Their faces were tilted upward, mouths agape in soundless screams. Their hollow eye sockets wept tears of frozen black tar that trailed down their sunken cheeks.
