Desk Ten looked as if it had been carved from a solid glacier. A perennial mantle of dry, crystal-clear rime coated its whale-bone surfaces, despite the temperate, dry cold air kept within the writing hall. When Qiao Ming approached, the surrounding heat dropped precipitously within three paces of the desk, causing the moisture of their breathing to freeze into tiny white flakes of airborne snow that settled upon their eyebrows and sleeves.
On the frosted desk rested a tube-shaped container carved from a single block of natural rock crystal, banded with hoops of pale gold-silver metal. The crystal was so pure that the inside scroll was visible through its walls. A tightly wound roll of semi-clear, amber-tinted mica, resting in a bath of clear, melted lamp-wax oil that had frozen into a solid waxy gel.
“Heat collapse,” Qiao Ming observed, his breath puffing in dense white clouds against the cold. He pulled his oilskin collar tight around his throat, feeling the icy draft penetrate the seams of his coat. “The Tenth Cataclysm was not fire, flood, or poison. It was the total death of heat. The cosmic hearth went out, and the universe reached its ultimate zero.”
Yan Zhiqiu wrapped her quilted mantle tightly around her shoulders, her teeth clicking faintly in the sudden chill. She reached out, her gloved fingers hovering over the frosted crystal metal tube. “The frost on the stone... It has not melted in ten thousand years. The cold is trapped inside the crystal like an…
