It hadn’t been like that lower-down; it was stone-hard ice, even glacierglass at points, but not like this. This crystal-clear form of glacierglass resisted even masterworks like Ingvald’s picks.

Extending her left-hand Thundergod, Zel spun it up and slung the pick outward and up in the hopes that it would hook into the out-of-sight cliff-face beyond the overhang. It returned, giving no hope. Another attempt. Again. And again. And again.

Finally, on the sixth attempt, it stuck, and Zelsys took a swing of faith.

Her pick lost purchase just as she passed the overhang, catching sight of the Revenant King’s throne-fortress only a few hundred meters above. Zel had swung all three of her other picks by the time the first dislodged, yet somehow, all three failed to penetrate deeply enough into the glacierglass to hook in.

Thinking quickly, she pointed her left hand downward and fired her arm-cannon, its recoil sufficient to throw her upwards a short distance, the angle imparting a spin. In the same moment she also whipped her right hand forward just the same as she had in her battle against Rikke, giving it as much power as she possibly could and adjusting the motion for her momentarily weightless state, transferring her spin into it. It barely hooked into the glacierglass, but it was enough of an anchor to buy a precious few seconds, seconds which she used to also whip her three other picks at potential anchor-points. The only one that got any real purchase was an already-present outcropping. She barely managed to retract the Thundergod far enough that she didn’t slam into the overhang’s ceiling when she swung back in.

She continued the climb, scaling tens of meters at once using her Thundergods. It was careless, her lungs burned an unholy combination of hot and cold, her lips and fingers both were cracked and bloodied, but she pushed on. There was no time for slow, methodical caution, and no return either. The picks were doomed; trying again after a fall was no longer an option. A feeling in her gut told her that they might very well shatter before she could reach the top. Having spent all but one of the pills she’d ingested, Zel decided to use the last one as a core around which to wind every iota of spare Fulgur she could generate, just in case that gut feeling turned out true.

It did.

One after the other, Ingvald’s picks decayed, crumbled, and fell apart. Estimating her time left based on how long the first long took to fail and how its failure progressed, Zel instantly knew that she wouldn’t reach the top relying only on the picks.

Conqueror’s Mantle was her only option.

Barely, just barely, she pushed it through by the time the pick in her hand started to lose purchase. She let go, and wreathing her fingers in lightning, dug them into the ice. Finding that without picks her braids couldn’t penetrate the ice, she wrapped them around her arms for support and continued to climb with her own bare hands.

Left. Right. Left. Right.

Left. Right. Left. Right…

She didn’t reach the summit at the very edge of her endurance, and didn’t stumble towards the Revenant King’s palace, struggling to stay on her feet.

Upon reaching the summit, Zelsys simply let go of the Conqueror’s Mantle and took a long, long swig of the Witch’s Vitae Elixir as she looked out from the edge. The air was terribly thin up here, demanding four breaths to equal one, but other than that, it was lovely. There was no wind, making the cold comparatively tolerable to what she had just endured. For a few minutes, she stood there and looked out over the land, noticing a few towns scattered in the far distance, some of them possessing small oases similar to Oasis City’s. She wasn’t sure why she felt the need to keep looking, until she saw it; that seething, gangrenous wound in the permafrost, an eye-pulling scar upon the world itself. A stain the colour of dried blood, in its center an oblong gash in the ice, frothing and bubbling with the blood of uncounted sacrificial beasts. Never had she laid her eyes upon something so fundamentally wrong.

A blink, and it was gone. The gash was barely visible beneath a solid sheet of blood-red ice, an immense monument in the stain’s center reaching skyward. It was a straight tower with an X-shaped double cross just below its tip, which looked like the end of a snapped-off bone.

Just looking at it felt wrong.

Zel turned around and approached the Revenant King’s seat of power, that iceborne fortress of cyclopean, yet austere construction. Its great doors did not open at her coming, yet they offered up no resistance when she pushed them open, swinging in weightlessly.

An impossible hall awaited within, and the doors swung shut without nary a touch from her.

It stretched on longer than it could conceivably be, even given the temple’s gigantic outward size; she couldn’t even see the other end. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of lifelike idols filled the great hall, enshrined in alcoves to either side. They were made from a blend of translucent and marble-white ice, bestowing a strange grandeur that roused a deeply-buried sense of reverence. Despite her icy surroundings, the ambient temperature was warm. The sort of warm that invoked a burning sensation in her chilled extremities. No, that wasn’t it. The air was cold, as was the ground. This place itself was somehow working to bring her body temperature back to normal.

Zel made her way in, walking quickly and counting statues as she went, for no reason other than to estimate just how far she went, and so that she would notice it if they started repeating at any point. They never did; even after hundreds and hundreds of ancient heroes, each and every one was still distinct in some way or another. Though the runes inscribed upon their pedestals were ancient, they twisted beneath her gaze to make themselves legible.

Some of the names, she even recognized. Holan. Bjorn. Kildahl. Bock. Hille. Mogen, for the Mogensens, Tobias for the Tobiassens, and so on.

Bjorn.

Aase.

Ramdall.