Gray's hand clenched so hard around the katana that his knuckles throbbed white. The ruined truck stared back at him like a corpse with its ribs torn open. The markings were unmistakable, Nyxterra convoy issue, same as theirs. The shredded hull, the twisted frame, the broken glass, it all told a story too familiar. A cold knot tightened in his gut. This wasn't just a wreck; it was a message.
Aurelle stepped up beside him, his presence a silent pressure. His eyes, pale and analytical, narrowed as they traced the violence done to the metal. His voice was low but edged. "Is it yours?"
Renn joined, already nodding, though his face was pinched with something between awe and disgust. He ran a hand over a set of deep grooves in the truck's flank, his fingers hovering just above the torn alloy. "Yes. But look at the damage. It wasn't this bad before, it was dismantled by something. "
Behind it loomed an immense ice wall, a vertical cemetery embedded with other trucks, older models, newer ones like theirs, all frozen in layered strata like offerings to the mountain stacked through decades, or perhaps centuries. Renn's whisper trembled beside him, filled with a historian's horror. "By the ancients… How many convoys? How many have died here?"
Gray forced himself to turn from the sight, his jaw tight. He could feel Renn's scientific curiosity warring with his fear, and he had no patience for either. "Can you still sense it, Aurelle? The trail? Or is it lost here?"
The taller boys head tilted slightly, nostrils flaring as if he were tasting the air itself. He looked upward, eyes cutting through the darkness where the chamber's ceiling dissolved into an impossible height. "The trace of Vyre is faint. A whisper. Almost lost beneath the scent of oil and rust." He went perfectly still, a predator listening to a distant frequency. "But yes, it rises. Upward. Following this wall."
Renn followed his gaze, a slow shake of his head. "All the way up? That's… impossible. Even if we tried to climb, the ice is sheer. It's a vertical sheet. We'd fall before we got fifty feet."
"We won't." Gray's voice was flat, final. The thought of attempting that climb, of feeling his fingers numb and slip on the ice, sent a cold shiver down his spine that had nothing to do with the temperature. "Not this way. There has to be another path. Another pipe or something."
Renn bit down whatever reply was forming, his shoulders slumped a little in a mixture of relief and resignation, and he gave a silent nod.
A grim, stubborn hope made Gray turn back to the broken truck. Maybe they'd missed something. He hauled himself onto the warped frame, boots scraping against metal that groaned in protest. He tugged at the rear compartment's latch, his gloves slipping on the frost. The back ramp were already gone, blown outward. The benches inside were shredded, the stuffing looking like dirty snow. The storage lockers were pried open, their contents long since washed away or scavenged. He jumped down, landing hard enough for the impact to jar his teeth. "Nothing," he muttered, the word tasting like failure. "All of it's gone."
They quietly slipped back through the pipe into the scrapyard's vast stillness. The air seemed even colder now, the silence more profound.
"Follow the wall." Gray ordered, his voice softer now, wary of echoes. "Where one chute opened, others might."
He set the pace, his eyes constantly moving, scanning the surreal landscape of frozen technology. They walked for what felt like an age, the only sounds their own stomachs and the crunch of frost underfoot. The silence was a physical weight.
Then Gray's eyes caught it: a glint of unnatural blue jutting from a mound ahead. A hand. It was too smooth, too perfect, carved from solid ice with fingers outstretched from beneath the rubble as if in a final, desperate reach.
He slowed, a cold curiosity overriding his caution. He knelt, the ice biting through his pants. Against his better judgment, he wrapped his own gloved hand around the frozen one and tugged.
It moved.
The crystalline fingers snapped tight around his wrist with a brittle click.
Gray's breath shot sharp into his throat. He wrenched back with a choked curse, nearly stumbling, and the mound of junk shifted and spilled loose. What came free was not a body. It was just a hand, severed at a smooth, mechanical joint. A prosthetic construct of some forgotten craftsman, its inner workings visible as faint, frozen filaments.
It slipped from his grip and clattered to the ground, motionless once more. Gray stared, his heart hammering against his ribs, then gave a bitter, shaky laugh under his breath. "Of course. Just a hand. Glacierfang doesn't run out of surprises." He kicked at the frost-dusted scrap near it, sending a spray of ice crystals across the ground. "Why does everything in this place feel like a joke played on the desperate?"
Aurelle stepped past him without slowing, casting the fallen prosthetic one brief, dismissive glance. "Not a corpse. A tool. Someone wore this once. Its purpose is lost, not its form."
Gray rolled his shoulders, trying to shed the lingering unease, and sheathed his sword with a definitive rasp of steel. "I see"
"Gray!" Renn's voice cut across the empty field, sharp with excitement.
He looked up, spotting him waving from atop a slope of broken gear-teeth and rustless plates. Gray climbed quickly to his side, Aurelle a silent shadow behind. What Renn pointed to silenced them both: another pipe. It jutted from the cavern wall, higher than the last, maybe fifteen feet above the ground. Narrower, darker, but not blocked. A dark mouth into the ancient ice.
"That's the way," Gray stated, his gaze fixed on the opening.
Aurelle sized up the distance, his lips pressing into a thin line. The smooth wall offered no handholds. "We'll need a climb. Look for scrap big enough to stack into a ramp."
They spread out, not straying far, scouring the nearby piles. Gray moved with renewed purpose, shoving aside twisted beams and shattered glass, his encounter with the hand forgotten. The silence pressed down again, a watchful, waiting quiet. Then, movement.
A shape shuffled from behind a mound of frozen circuitry. Small. No mouth, no face. Its body was sculpted of solid, milky ice, angular and precise, like some delicate machine from a dream of clockwork. It lacked the savage, predatory malevolence of the pther monsters he'd met, those things carried a red-lit fury in their eyes. This one had no glow. Just blank, cold emptiness.
Gray's blade slid free in a heartbeat, his stance lowering into readiness. The thing didn't lunge. It staggered, its movements clumsy and jerky, as if it had only just woken after centuries frozen in place. It turned its eyeless face toward him, cocked its head in a gesture that was almost avian, then shambled a step closer.
Gray raised his sword higher, his muscles coiled, waiting for the attack. The construct lifted one stubby, crystalline arm, and for a heartbeat Gray thought it was reaching to strike him.
It broke apart.
The sound was brittle, almost pitiful. The body simply crumbled into a dozen geometric chunks, shards clattering across the icy floor like dropped china. No fight. No spark of energy. Just… silent collapse.
'What...the hell?'
Gray stared, his pulse still pounding in his ears, his ready stance suddenly feeling foolish. Whatever that thing had been, its time had long since passed; it had waited centuries for an end that was utterly insignificant. Something he wished would never happen to him.
A voice called across the scrapyard again. "Gray! Over here!" Renn.
He returned to find Aurelle and Renn had already leveraged a massive ice-sheathed girder and several thick gear-plates into a makeshift, rickety ramp. It wasn't elegant, but it would hold. Renn scrambled up first, grunting with effort, his boots slipping before he finally caught the rust-streaked lip of the pipe. Aurelle followed, his ascent fluid and effortless, landing silent as a ghost inside the tunnel's darkness.
"Your turn," Renn called down, his voice echoing slightly from the pipe, breath misting in the cold air.
Gray sighed, adjusted his grip on the katana, and leapt. His boots struck the stacked scrap, which shifted alarmingly under his weight. With a hard push, he grabbed the cold edge, his muscles straining as he hauled himself up and tumbled into the tunnel, the icy metal biting through his gloves. They were inside.
This pipe was different from the first. Narrower. Darker. The familiar fungal glow was gone, leaving only thin, dying veins of phosphorescence within the walls, providing mere ghost-light. Their progress was slower, hampered by chunks of frozen debris, a broken piston here, a cluster of glassy rods there, that jammed the way forward. They became a rhythm of violence: locate the blockage, target its weak point, and smash through. The ringing of steel against ancient ice was a sharp, jarring counterpoint to the silence.
Renn's muttering followed them, a quiet litany of anxiety. "I still don't get it...we were on a river… then deeper, deeper still. The geology is all wrong. How did they carve all this? The pressure, the ice flow… How are we even still alive down here?"
"Relax, does being claustrophobic make you think harder?" Gray struggled to hold his laugh.
Renn stopped for a moment before continuing.
"No, it doesn't. And for the record I'm not claustrophobic." His voice clear, devoid of his anxiety from earlier.
Gray let out a small chuckle.
"Sure..."
Soon, they reached the end of the pipe. A small blockage of ice in the way.
With a shared, straining heave, it shattered apart, and they spilled out together, stumbling onto an open ledge of black ice.
The floor was flat, brutally hard, and so cold it felt like it was sucking the heat directly from their bones. Gray rolled, coming up to his feet in a crouch, katana ready, scanning frantically.
On their right was a sheer drop, a vast void that fell away into darkness. And below, impossibly far down yet rendered with chilling clarity in the still air, lay their truck.
To their left, a narrow corridor hewn from the ice stretched away into shadow, turning sharply out of sight. Aurelle was already crouched low, his entire body rigid with focus. He motioned with a single, sharp gesture.
'Stay quiet and follow.'
They crept through the rattle until Aurelle stopped them again.
His voice was barely a breath, so faint Gray felt it more than heard it. "Around that corner. They are there. The trace of human Vyre." He paused, his head tilting a fraction. "But not alone. The monsters are near. I can taste their corruption."
Gray leaned forward, slow and steady, and peered past the sharp, icy edge of the corridor.