He was dressed like Narav, the mage that got me into this world. I mean, not the dried-up ragged skeleton Narav, but how I saw him in the mindspace where he tried to dominate my soul. All that odd-looking ensemble of leather and cloth forming an exotic outfit was now nicely preserved in ice.

The corpse had several balls of cloudy quartz in front of him, and a large saddlebag was at his feet. The bag was filled with carefully secured pieces of crystals, metal wires and odd-looking instruments. Everything was clearly marked, although I was unable to understand the symbols used. And for my disappointment, I found no books or diaries.

I was puzzled, as I could not understand the reason why a mage, who clearly came later than the original group, got frozen. I started to move around, searching for clues.

Further down the passage, I soon found a large, closed-off room. Along the walls were stacks of huge wood and metal cages. Several cages near the entrance were empty, while the rest contained one frozen creature each.

Most of these animals were weird. Some had uneven amount of limbs, some looked like crossbreeds not only between different breeds or even classes, but even phyla. I could see structures of reptiles, mammals, insects and something I could not even recognize. It was not just otherworldish zoo, but a veritable Kunstkammer. Well, some animals still looked fairly ordinary. At the very least, some resembled felines of various sizes similar to jaguars.

I cut up a few carcasses to check their physiology. As it turned out, most had fairly ordinary organs, and none had odd spheres instead of brains or gaseous blood like spirds. And all had a gold and quartz contraption attached to their heads. Or rather, those which had brains. Some large worms had it attached to their backs.

In the middle of the room were several human bodies forever frozen into the poses they had when still alive. Some were sitting, some standing or doing something. And every person was wearing very thick fur clothes, almost completely covering their bodies.

---

I spent a while to search everything, and finally managed to piece together some clues.

As much as I could deduce, the mage had some with a group of servants or workers and a massive amount of different caged creatures. He was aiming to pass through the area frozen by the Beating Iceheart, and used his mojo to modify the animals in order to manipulate them.

Some animals were more resistant to cold than others, and the mage conducted experiments to improve their traits as he progressed. While the area they were in was not in the range of Beating Iceheart, the proximity of the zone zero was enough to lower the temperature due to thermodynamics.

The low temperature killed some of the creatures early on and forced the servants to wear thick clothes. It was interesting that the mage was wearing ordinary set of equipment even in such conditions. I guessed he used some magic to keep his temperature comfortable.

The masses of ice on the stairs were likely formed by freezing the moisture from the air at the outer border of the Iceheart-generated area, where the warmer air from the outside used to come in.

Judging by the fact that I could feel no difference in temperature before and after the stairs and that people had frozen instantly, I could only conclude that the range of the area zero had suddenly expanded. Perhaps, that was the meaning behind the “Beating” part of the Beating Icehearts naming?

Well, at least the mage was successful in bringing spirds - they not only survived the extreme cold, but even managed to propagate.

---

After I learned everything I could, it was time to loot. As an old PCRPG and D&D player with a cynical attitude towards life, I believed that the living had greater needs than the dead.

Unfortunately, the mage’s group had few possessions I saw useful. I managed to get a hunting axe and a bag full of salt. Their weapons were of bad quality and nobody had anything resembling money or jewelry. For future references, I carefully removed and wrapped up a few of the animal control devices, matching the etchings on them with the crystals from mage’s bag.

I also carefully cut some choice loin cuts from the animals I guessed to be herbivores. They did not have their blood drained, I had no ways to check if the meat was edible and I did not need to eat. But I still guessed that I could use it as rations to help me pose as a traveller in case I met somebody.

---

Having finished there, I moved on. Passages were followed by halls, then there were stairs, curving corridors and galleries branching into various rooms and pathways. It kept repeating in various combinations for hours. The building was gigantic, likely many kilometers in circumference. Unless it was bigger on the inside than outside, like a certain blue police box.

From time to time I kept encountering the regions filled with masses of ice. Those were like growth rings in trees, showing the boundaries the Beating Iceheart had frozen as the ground zero kept expanding. Sometimes I encountered blockages and had to pick other routes. Occasionally, I saw frozen animal carcasses and human corpses.

Finally, I reached a circular room, which was half-buried by collapsed ceiling. Several passages like mine converged there together, but a single, wide hallway led out.

Between the collapsed rubble were odd thick columns of ice covered in icedust. Each one was just a bit over two and half meters high, and did not look like ice stalagmites I saw before. They were thick, reaching one and half meters in diameter, forming sort of uneven cylinders.

Just in case, I tried to check those out with my energy vision.

Bingo! All of them faintly emitted magic, it was so faint that it was on the verge of disappearing. But one had a peculiar strong glow coming from it. It was in the center, close to the frontal ones. As I looked from the side, it seemed that several columns before it were fused together, forming a wall.

I wiped off the layer of the icedust covering the column near me. There, behind the thick layer of ice, was a blurry humanoid figure. It was keeping hands crossed together in an odd defensive posture. I approached another column and also checked it out. And then another.

All ice columns were encasing people who kept the same posture.