The sovereign had died trying to burn down the winter.
He sat cross-legged upon a raised dais of hard black rock in the center of Entry hall 838, ten paces off the eastern margin of the dark rock road. He wore the billowing, nine-layered ritual robes of an Azure Firmament Grand Elder, woven from gold-threaded sky silk and stitched with nine coiling cloud-dragons. In his lap rested the handle of a broken void-sundering broadsword, its blade snapped off four inches from the guard.
He wasn’t bone; he wasn’t stone-hard stone.
He was pure, glass-fused glass.
When he had breached this hall eight thousand years ago. He carried high-grade true-fire magic charms and a core of tightly packed solar flames, the total zero of the Third Epoch had not engaged in a gradual heat-powered contest with his spirit. The cold had acted with the instant, crushing finality of deep ocean water breaching an airlock.
The extreme heat differential had inverted his spiritual fire. He drove the flames back into his dantian, where his nascent soul had flash-frozen into a crystal-clear lump of azure glass. The cold had then propagated outward through his spirit veins, turning his blood, his flesh, his organs, and his marrow into a single, seamless sculpture of brittle quartz dust.
