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Save Point: The Last Of The First Ones

Northern Ice Fields

It takes her eyes a while to adjust against the brightness, before she realizes that what she is seeing is not a tomb, unlike the rest of the ancient barrows spread across the wilderness. It's a cryo facilty.

The shaman who guided her here is a withered old wreck, long sparse white beard yellowing at the center, wild staring eyes, half his teeth at strange angles and the rest missing, and yet she suspects that if she'd intimidated him with any number of actual threats, rather than her depth and breadth of hidden knowledge, he still wouldn't have shown her this. Even with that, if she hadn't shown him the fire, he probably still wouldn't him given a damn. He'd clutched at his staff, muttering about 'sun-home' and 'steel-rime', and making weird genuflective motions that seemed to indicate it was she whom he was talking about, rather than the island. Then he'd suddenly started marching and made indications to her to follow.

Several days deeper into the remotest places, during which time, she becomes quite uncomfortably aware, she has never actually seen him eat anything, and here they are. The crazy old guy starts in on a sort of well-practised ritualistic rant, a declaration committed firmly to memory for the training of some infinite series of successors, pulled out here and today for a special occasion.

"...they were here before men, and they spoke to the first ones in dreams..." translates one of her support squad guys from the appallingly gutteral tribal dialect.

Yeah, right. She deeply doubts it.

The sharp-edged blocks of unmelting ice are strewn about the place, some at angles where they have fallen or been disturbed from their placement, slotted neatly inside shelves of stone that have lost their edges with the passing of time, or stood upright at a slight angle around the entry shaft to facilitate viewing. The ice is impossible, too clear and perfectly crisp and blued to be real ice, and inside the centre of each block are the skeletons, fragile and gracile, vindictively sharp.

They weren't skeletons when they were put in there, of course. Even the smaller, maybe female ones are intimidatingly tall, seven or eight feet, and her best guess is that, even frozen solid, molecular and fine-scale motion has literally shivered the flesh off the bones, dispersing it into an infinitely fine cloud that has then been scrubbed from the ice by whatever properties, possibly still in play, were designed to keep each block perfectly clean and sterile. The bones have probably turned to something more like stone after all this time, terminally blackened, darkened with the ages.

"...will wake again when the stars are right..." the old man continues his rant, as she ignores him. Things tend to lose their thought processes after a few million years dead, though she wouldn't put it past them that a few memories might have been mapped into the blocks, as frozen nerve tissue finally surrendered and dissolved. Sleep lying against something like this, and between the cold and the uncanny presence of the dead but not dreaming, if you did wake up you were bound to have gotten a little strange.

The material is familiar, now that she takes a closer look and lets her mind reconstruct the layout, as it must have been, more than sixty-five million years previously and in a different world. She's seen pieces of it built into armor worn by a very few of the most significant warriors and thegns in a strictly limited radius about what must actually be this pinpoint on the map, a hole pierced down by the compass through the vellum into a different world.

The normal plate around here is tusks, baleen, whalebone, anything organic and hard that can be sliced or carved into thin but lightweight sheets that don't conduct the cold, and in her own armour of bone she fits right in, looks impressively resplendent, even. Her support squad have bought their iron mail and lots of fur and are regretting it, although they can probably take more hits in the long run since the metabolism of the leucrotta-bone substrate is considerably slowed.

She'd wondered what the blue stuff was, assuming it was from some obscure creature that rose infrequently from the abyssal depths, suitable in its exclusivity and brighter color to be substituted for bone as a mark of rank and importance, but of course it's actually ice. Or something that started out as ice, but which has gained a self-sustaining integrity all of its own across the aeons that will keep it solid, even at room temperature or next to an open flame, as it ablates in mono-molecular layers to sustain the whole.

She shivers, for the first time in a place where everyone else is full of fear, as it finally occurs to her that this is what would have happened to her if she'd stayed in that suspension tank back in the temple in Khem. The mixture would have eventually crystallized and her flesh dispersed amongst the tar, a cat shaped bundle of bones in bitumen, to confound some later explorer.

It was only luck that saved her, and luck of the sort only a crazed Dragon could pull off.

She dreams of walking on warm sands. This place is all ice.

Like all the remnants of the ancient civilization that they've seen, this must have been something buried deeply underground when it was first made, with the depth and supreme engineering of its makers enabling it to somehow survive the ages against erosion, uplift and downflow. The deep ice sheets of the glacier surround a sleeping volcano with an unpronounceable local name, product of the spreading rift nearby where the earths crust is being slowly pulled apart by unimaginable pressures. The uplift and the sudden reduction in weight where the distant peak has melted aside the ice have conspired to raise this ancient hidden thing to the surface, and at long-last one of the upper shafts or light-wells has broken open, exposing a mass grave older than time.

"What do you think they are?" she asks one of the shield-bearers, out of sudden curiosity.

"They are the ancient heroes whose fathers were gods," he says with a sort of terrified humbleness that is quite out of character for him, going to one knee in a submission of respect. "The sorcerors preserved their bones in ice, that they might never be forgotten. Thank you, mistress, for allowing this one to see such a thing."

She has to try really hard not to laugh, and turns it into a beneficent gaze such as might be directed at an enthusiastic sub. The skeletons are clearly and horrifyingly inhuman, and yet he has managed almost instantly to convince himself that what he sees is something that complies perfectly with what he's expected to. To have expected otherwise... well, she must be getting old.

It is with this accumulation of knowledge that she studies the remains dispassionately. Longer but also more spindly than a human, with a strange pelvic girdle and stretching fingers, somewhere between a tyrannosaurid raptor and a chicken. She wonders what they hoped for when they laid down for the cold sleep. Certainly not this, being gawped at and reverenced by the descendants of the little ratty things that had dashed between their feet. There's a certain nobility to them, something in the curve of the forehead that suggests a finality of design.

"I imagine it goes down a long way," she suggests to the ancient shaman, experimentally.

"Down and down," says his apprentice, who didn't want to interrupt the ritual recitation and so has only just gotten bold enough to speak. "At the bottom there are broken stairwells and more ice and it all just keeps going down. And the whole place is empty and it's frozen cold and there's just nothing there!"

"Yeah, that's pretty much what I imagined," she concedes. If this is a cryo facility, and she can't see how it could be anything else, pure common sense would dictate a location far off the beaten path, hidden and deeply buried, far from depth trains and energetic upwellings or, for that matter, anything else that might disturb the sleep of the occupants. She can't help but deem the choice of placement to have been a success, since time alone has robbed the inhabitants of flesh and all their personal belongings long before there was anyone else around to even try and take them. "So you, what, mine the pieces for armour and weapons?"

"It won't break," shivers the apprentice, an intelligent young man trapped in the middle of nowhere with too much weirdness and too many mysterious questions and, until now, no-one to ask. "No matter how hard you hit it, or with what. There are pieces holding up thousand tonne boulders down there! You can only use the bits that have already broken off and are sort of the right shape, and then you put them over a fire and burn them into shape with whale-oil or something and it still takes months and months!" His voice rises slowly but steadily in pitch as all of this spills out of him until it sounds like he's on the verge of panic.

The old man curses out his apprentice in the local gabble, and he falls silent. It seems that ancient sacred ritual does not allow for the inconveniences of a questioning mind.

It's quite a sight to see, but there's just nothing she can do with it. However deeply interesting the remains may be, they're embedded in solid blocks of almost indestructible ice and there's no way to cut one open without destroying the contents. Even if she managed to hack some bits off with some sort of creative combination of fire and sword, maybe by heating one of the crappier pig-iron blades they've bought with them until it glows and slicing down like the proverbial knife through butter, it would take an age to shape them into anything useful.

And worse, it would feel like sacrilege. It might be literally taken as sacrilege, if the tradition of only using pieces broken off naturally under geologic forces is deeply enough embedded. Destroying something like this after it has survived for so long outside of its time just feels wrong. Here there are no dangerous sources of potential power or ancient secrets, just the eternal ice.

The rest of the support squad, not the most reverent of men at the best of times, have lit travelling torches and are waving them up alongside the ice, marvelling at the peculiar play of shadows through the skeletons and the refraction of the ice. The cowering shield-bearers are holding back in pious fear as their brave and heroic masters disrespect the sleeping dead but can't actually despoil them, there being too much ice in the way. "I don't suppose there's any gold or jewellery?" her second in command sighs regretfully.

"Nope, not a thing," she concurs. "If any of you want to go down there and collect some loose bits and pieces, go for it. Just remember that you're going to have to carry them home with you, they weigh about the same as a rock, and they'll be completely useless until you have a spare winter's worth of being snowed-in to make them into something useful."

"You won't being going down there with us?"exclaims someone.

"Hel no. It looks really cold. I'm going back to somewhere that has live girls and booze."

Commitment definitely wavers at the mention of such better options. It will take just a little push further to get them over the edge...

"I'm sure the old guy would really appreciate you carrying some back for him," she suggests. "It'd only be to the village, we could take some of the larger bits that are too heavy for him."

That does it. There's general shuffling and a certain amount of muttering about wasting of time and getting out of here, and the only pieces of ice collected are from a stash the apprentice has cached behind a fallen rock on a previous visit. With everybody carrying one, the whole load will get delivered at once, and the apprentice is smart enough not to worry having it stolen, because after several days of travelling back again through the wilderness, even the hardiest warrior is bound to start making miserly decisions about weight management and inventory space. There's no way any of the larger bits will ever make it beyond his workshop, and some of them may wind up cached again before they're even halfway there.

There are several nice wedges that might make good axe-heads or daggers, but they'll pay for themselves by persuading greedy claimants to try and carry the larger bits they can't take with them. She watches her team testing out the weights in their hands, swinging experimentally at one another in a sort of mock-menacing, slow motion battle. The prospect of hitting, stabbing and slicing things has gotten them all cheered up and full of enthusiasm again, helping to distract from the strange origin of the material and the skeletons in the ice.

Cleo sidles over to the apprentice with a deceptive feline grin."So you like to play with fire all day in your workshop, do you?" she hints suggestively.

"Ah, well, yes, that is, I mean, well, that's how you shape the ice plates, with a thin flame to cut through them or a sort of broader, spreading one to smooth them out..."

"As it happens, I very much like flames too. And tight places that are cosy and warm and private, like your workshop. Perhaps we could work together on making some armour? I'm sure there are lots of really interesting things you could teach me, and I'm sure there are lots of_really_ interesting things I could teach you..."

"Well, erm, you'd need somewhere to sleep..."

"Ohhh, you really are a clever boy."