The warm road of black dark rock ended at the edge of the Frozen Sea of the Ancestress.
Before them, stretching three leagues to the base of the royal island, lay Entry hall 842—the innermost safe hall of the Glacial Nave, known in the ancient charts as the Vault of the Absolute Nadir. Here, the fiery bottom spine-beam dove forty deep-water lengths beneath a huge underground barrier-doorstep of solid star-fallen iron, cutting off all heat wave from the lower boiler-holds.
The heat on this plain did not linger at forty or sixty below zero. It sank toward the physical limit of heat-powered movement—ninety-two point four degrees below zero.
The air was so thin, dry, and cold that it felt like an invisible empty pocket. Dust could not float in it. Moisture could not exist as vapor. Even the starlight ice beneath their feet had changed: it was no longer blue or cyan, but a deep, lightless violet-black, so dense and glassy that it rang like hardened steel when struck.
To step out onto this plain with bare, unprotected skin was to suffer instant flash-frost. Within three breaths, the moisture in the epithelial cells would expand, burst the cell walls, and flay the skin from the muscle like boiled linen.
