The door groaned open on hinges that hadn't tasted movement in centuries, a sound like grinding bones that echoed into a profound, unsettling silence. Gray, his hand still on the cold, ornate handle of the wood-forged door, could only stare, his mind struggling to comrpehend the weird sight that unfolded before him. It was… a scrapyard. That didn't make any sense. That simple, almost mundane word felt grotesquely inadequate for the reality before him.
'A scrapyard...here? Is this some joke?'
It was massive, a cavernous void stretching out for what had to be miles, vanishing into a gloom so deep it seemed to swallow the very concept of distance. The sheer scale of it was a physical pressure against his chest. This wasn't a room; it was a manufactured landscape, a world within a world, all carved from the eternal ice of Glacierfang. And it was filled to bursting with… junk.
A low whistle escaped Renn's lips, a sharp, human sound that was instantly devoured by the overwhelming quiet."By the gods," he breathed, his voice barely a whisper, yet it seemed blasphemously loud. "The volume… the sheer amount…"
Gray shook his head, the initial shock giving way to a prickling, bewildered curiosity. He took a careful step forward, his boots crunching on a fine, glittering powder that coated the ground like metallic snow. He knelt, his knees pressing into the strange grit, and reached for the nearest object. It was a gear, about the size of his palm, its teeth perfectly machined. But it wasn't made of steel or iron. It was ice, a crystal-clear, impossibly hard ice that felt more like polished glass or ceramic to the touch, yet with a shocking, deep-cold weight to it. Not like the ice they had seen on the surface. Something else entirely.
He turned the object over in his hand. It was intricately carved, its design both alien and eerily familiar, reminiscent of the complex clockwork he'd seen in ancient surface-world museums, but clearly not of human manufacture.
He reached for a larger piece nearby, a curved segment that might have been part of a housing or a shield. His fingers brushed its edge, and with a soft, sighing sound, a corner of it simply dissolved, collapsing into a pile of the same glittering, metallic dust that covered the floor. This entire sea of discarded marvels was ancient, fragile, slowly returning to the element from which it was born.
Renn looked around before speaking. "Think of it, Gray. They built those bunkers, those entire cities, buried deep within the ice. They had to put the excavated material somewhere. They didn't just dump it; the people who lived here before were artisans, engineers. They used the best of it, the purest ice, to forge their components. their gears, their pipes, their structures. And the rest… the flawed blocks, the shavings, the mistakes… they brought it all here. This is the midden heap of a civilization."
Ahead of them, Aurelle moved with a predator's silent grace. He reached the summit and stood silhouetted against the faint, ambient light that seemed to emanate from the distant ceiling itself.
"Aurelle?" Gray called out, his voice not quite echoing but feeling thin and small in the vastness. "Do you see anything?"
He didn't turn. His focus was absolute. After a long moment, his voice floated back to them, clear and cold. "Nothing moves. But I do not need eyes to see what is here. The air is thick with it. Old traces. Lingering. The scent of unpurified Vyre… monsters. This place is not empty. It's become a hunting ground.
Gray swallowed hard, a dry, painful click in his throat. His imagination, usually his enemy, now conjured horrors of razor-sharp limbs and silent, scuttling things moving just beyond the edge of sight, hidden within the labyrinth of frozen waste.
Renn, meanwhile, was looking up, his head tilted back. "Gray," he said, pointing. "Look."
Gray followed his gaze. The ceiling was high, incredibly so, perhaps a hundred feet or more, but it was undeniably a ceiling, a vast, smoothed-over dome of dark ice. And descending from its center was a massive pipe, easily twenty feet across, made of the same clear, reinforced ice as the gear in his hand. It was a breathtaking feat of engineering. But it was what was inside the pipe that stole his breath.
It was a frozen waterfall. A torrent of water, mixed with countless discarded ice-components, gears, rods, unrecognizable fragments, had been caught in a single, instantaneous deep-freeze. It hung there, a spectacular sculpture of arrested motion, a moment of violent dumping preserved for eternity. Pieces of the metallic ice were suspended within the clear ice of the waterfall, glittering like a galaxy of dead stars.
"The waste chute," Renn murmured, his face alight with revelation. "That's how they did it. They funneled everything down from the city above. All of this…" he gestured to the endless scrapyard, "…rained down from there."
Aurelle descended from his perch, landing silently beside them. His eyes, too, were fixed on the frozen cascade. "That conduit," he said, his voice devoid of Renn's wonder, sharp and practical. "If it could be climbed, if it is still passable, it would lead directly to their source. To an actual city of the Ancients."
Gray's mind reeled. An entire city. Not a bunker, not a tomb, but a living, breathing metropolis preserved in ice. The historical significance was staggering. The knowledge, the technology, the answers to a thousand questions about Glacierfang and the people who first braved its depths, it was all there, waiting at the top of that impossible, frozen river. The temptation was a physical ache, a siren's call to abandon everything and try for glory.
But Aurelle was already turning away, his senses tracing a different path. "We are not here for ghosts," he reminded him, his tone brooking no argument. "We are here for the living. Your group, scent, it is faint, but it is here. And it leads that way." He pointed a finger away from the magnificent pipe, towards a narrow, meandering path that had been carved or worn through the valleys of scrap. It was a far more humble road, one that spoke of recent, furtive travel.
Gray looked from the glorious, unreachable promise above to the dark, treacherous path on the ground. He was right. Every second they spent is crucial. With a final, longing glance at the frozen waterfall, he nodded, his jaw set. He opened his hand and let the ancient ice gear fall. It hit the ground with a soft puff, adding a tiny bit more dust to the mountains of it. "Let's go," he said, his voice firm now. "No more time to waste."
The path was long and winding, the air grew closer, heavier, carrying a strange, metallic tang that was unlike any rust he knew, it was the smell of old, cold magic, of energy long spent, of ozone and frost. It coated the back of his throat. And the sound...the sound, although distant, of scraping metal. Everything he heard it he shifted uncomfortably.
Eventually, the path began to slope downward, twisting sharply around a particularly large mound of shattered crystalline shards.
As they rounded the turn, the grand sighy of the scrapyard vanished, replaced by a much more immediate and mundane sight. Another ice pipe, this one not descending from the ceiling but set into the floor of the cavern. It was smaller, accessible, a sewer outflow perhaps five feet in diameter. Unlike the magnificent frozen waterfall, this one was clear. A thin, trickling stream of meltwater ran through its center, disappearing into the dark tunnel beyond.
Gray stopped, and Aurelle was immediately at his side. He didn't need to kneel; he simply stared into the darkness, his nostrils flaring slightly. "The trail converges here," he stated. "The human scent. And the other… the unpurified. They both lead into this passage."
This was it. The end of their little scavenger hunt.
'Wish it was a bit longer...' he sighed and gave a sharp nod, unsheathing his katana. The shing of the polished steel leaving its scabbard was a welcome, solid sound in the realm of whispering decay. He crouched low, holding the blade at a low guard, and moved into the tunnel.
The passage was narrow and short, forcing him to move in a half-crouch. The only sounds were the drip of water and the soft scuff of their boots on the slick ice. The light from the scrapyard faded behind them, replaced by a faint, phosphorescent glow from the ice around them.They walked for what felt like an age in the claustrophobic dark.
Then, the tunnel opened abruptly.
They exited not into another grand scrapyard, but into a small, secluded ice chamber. It was unremarkable, a bubble trapped in the glacier. Gray straightened up, his eyes struggling to adjust, his mind expecting another puzzle, another ancient wonder.
He didn't see it at first. Then his brain registered the shapes. Not ice. Not ancient machinery.
Trucks.
The familiar, blocky shapes of the rough-terrain vehicles used by the Nyxterra convoys. They were encased in the walls of the chamber, frozen deep into the ice like insects in amber, their cabins dark and empty. And there, in the center of the room, lying on its side like a beached metal whale, was another. Its windows were shattered. Its hull was bent and broken. Its familiar markings were scarred by deep, savage gashes that had torn through the reinforced metal as if it were parchment.
"Gray?" Aurelle's voice came from the tunnel mouth, tight with impatience. "Is it a dead end?"
He couldn't find the words. He just stared, his heart hammering against his ribs. "Come see," he managed, his voice hoarse.
Aurelle crawled out of the tunnel, his weapon still held high in a perfect guard, his eyes scanning the shadows of the chamber for immediate threats. Renn crawled out after him, blinking in the dim light. His academic curiosity melted into pure horror as he took in the scene. He walked slowly to Gray's side, his eyes fixed on the wrecked truck.
"That's…" Renn began, his voice trembling. "It's ours,"Gray finished, the words a snarl of fury and grim satisfaction. He ground his teeth together, the pressure aching in his jaw. His knuckles were white on the grip of his katana. The mystery was over. The trail had ended. "They're here...somewhere..."