I spent quite some time to carefully remove the dust and occasional pieces of debris that covered the bodies.

I was surprised to see that the corpses were almost perfectly preserved. This group of people was separated into several subgroups, encircling each other concentrically.

In outermost border, were heavily armored warriors clad in dark-coloured lamellar armor. They were surrounding some men and women dressed in long clothes that looked almost like robes or tunics. And in the very center lay a tall, but very thin man.

Everyone had slightly tanned pale skin, but a large variety of hair colours, which in addition to ordinary colours included truly eye catching vibrant red, green and metallic gold. The last one belonging only to the last man in the center.

That man was dressed in exquisite armor, seemingly made of reptilian hide, carefully fitted to preserve the scales. Dozens of tiny silver studs connected the separate articulated pieces of the armor, as if it was as rigid as if made of steel, making it look like parade armor from the end of Middle Ages.

---

Drawn by my interest in arms and armors, I reached out to touch it. As my fingers connected with the smooth, unyielding surface, I understood several things.

First of all, the hide used to make the armor was as unyielding as steel, which explained the design, although could not explain the manufacturing method or what creature’s back the hide came from. Secondly, the corpses were so well preserved because they were frozen solid. Guess that me having no heat receptors made the estimation of temperature really difficult.

To confirm my doubts, I grabbed a handful of dust that had covered the whole room and carefully inspected it.

It turned out to be snow, or rather, extremely small ice crystals.

It seemed, that all the moisture in the room had been frozen almost instantly, not even giving it time to condense into larger drops.

Dropping the icedust, I returned to checking the corpses.

---

No obvious external wounds, and I was not planning to take them apart either - I was no anatomical pathologist, and my own problems took precedence at the moment.

I looked for bags and any personal objects that could tell me about who were these people and what was outside.

I found several empty bottles and a few long-frozen pieces of meat and something that was probably wax-covered pieces of cheese.

Oddly, everyone was wearing a lot of jewelry, including armored men, who looked like bodyguards or elite soldiers. Perhaps to replace the currency?

But what made me much happier were weapons.0

Soldiers had polearms similar to poleaxes used in Europe in 15th century. The robed men and women had a choice of wide-bladed short swords looking like Aegean (Bronze Age Greece) swords, long daggers and a few good-looking slightly curved swords reminding me of large scimitars.

All bladed weapons were made of steel of rather good quality, regaining their shape after bending like proper spring steel. And that in severe frost, where ordinary steel would usually turn brittle.

Poleaxes were well-worn, with occasional chip having been taken good care of, same with scimitars.

Considering the unblemished steel surfaces, the amount of gold leaf, jewels and well-polished heavy wood used in the daggers (mostly found on women) and straight swords (mostly on men), their owners had their weapons more for appearance sake than due to any practical skill in their use.

Curiously, the central man, the one that had the fancy armor, had no weapons but a staff made of different pattern-welded metals. It looked rather imposing, with golden, reddish, green and other colours formed hypnotizing swirls over the surface, which made the staff a veritable piece of metalworking art.

And soon I found another item, that I was hoping for - a book.

---

Low temperature had preserved the thin leather-bound book fairly well. But brittle pages made of some sort of plant fibres were rather delicate, making the reading rather slow process.

Well, at least the language it was written in was the same as in the book that used to belong to the mage that got me here.

The book was actually a journal, describing the final period of the group’s life.

The magic sensitivity of the majority of the local populace was relatively high, the social structure was built around the magical ability of the individuals and groups.

The strong dominated the weak, seeing them as stupid and worthless, and only the agreements and traditions that limited the political power of the powerful mages kept the land relatively stable.

That is, until somebody broke it and started the chain reaction.

The thin man was a member of the council which used to rule a city or perhaps a city-state named Bial. That was before a war between mages broke out, plunging various cities and lands into chaos.

The man turned out to be quite clever, and did not openly oppose the battle-frenzied mages. Those who did, while trying to retain their authority, ended up dead like other members of the council.

Mages, bent on proving their supremacy to each other, reacted badly to any obstructions on their path.

They forcibly made themselves fol-ad-he, and took control of local governments, pulling larger and larger areas into war.

Whole cities were sacrificed to supply their fol-ad-he with corpses to create untiring armies that felt no fear not pain.

Rivers dried and impenetrable mountain fortresses were turned into rubble by powerful tactical-level explosive magics.

Thousands died as armies of forcefully conscripted men were ordered to attack the magical defences in attempts to overwhelm the arcane power with numbers.

Curiously, several mentions of shagor were found in the text, mentioned with extreme fear.

Apparently, those were magical constructs similar to golems, but made of condensed magical energy, and literally unstoppable.

And it seemed, that the mage who got me here, was planning to create his own shagor using souls. That would have allowed self-sufficiency and something like Artificial Intelligence, after the suitable processing including memory and emotion removal.

Um, that meant, I was a shagor, operating independently like some sort of self-conscious robot from sci-fi? Unsettling thing to realize, while sitting in ankle-deep icedust in another world while looking like a mere skeleton to boot.