The crystal palace was...palatial. The whole place looked like a massive crystalline castle. Some of the ice was frosted, and some was clear as glass, and the combination created an effect like windows and walls in what was essentially one big ass piece of carved unmelting ice. It wasn't just ice either, looking close I could see what looked like millions of tiny runes around the edges. This thing was enchanted, and judging by the scale, it must be absurdly high level material.

"Does she have a stockpile of high ranked materials or something?" I said curiously. "Because this is E-ranked ice. You said she created this right? She didn't make ALL of it did she?" I wasn't surprised that she'd made something her own rank, but this place was absolutely massive. Being able to create an ice castle on this scale and then enchant it...Frostbite must have a ludicrously high Creation stat, even for an E-ranker.

Callie just shrugged. "Hard to say. Obviously 'she built the giant ice castle herself with her bare hands' is a much better story. You have to question everything you hear about Ascendants, especially high rankers. They're masters of media manipulation. Nine out of ten things you hear about them could be bullshit. Of course, that tenth thing is the one that'll kill you if you assume it isn't true, so you can't dismiss anything outright."

I raised an eyebrow at her dryly. "Wow. That's so helpful. Don't believe anything you hear. But don't not believe it either. Because it could be true. Or false. Any other wisdom to drop on me."

She smiled at me sweetly. "Yeah, don't make fun of your girlfriend if you don't want to sleep on the couch for the next two weeks." She winked to let me know she was teasing and then the smile melted off her face. "But seriously, just...be careful. All the E-rankers we've met have been either allies or constrained by circumstances. Frostbite is too when it comes to dealing with you, but if she decides to take out Midknights daughter..."

"I'd throw myself in the way and let my mask swallow her whole." I said icily. "Not to mention that small scale faction war or not, Alexander would fucking murder her if she hurt you. Frostbite is an E-ranker at the top of one of the biggest organizations on this planet. I refuse to believe she'd stupid and reckless enough not to know the consequences of killing either of us. Plus if she was going to off us it would be stupid to invite us here to do it. Make more sense to assassinate us somewhere unrelated to her. Blame it on one of the visiting factions."

Callie's jaw dropped as she looked at me and I shrugged. "I've been putting lots of thought into possible assassination strategies. I don't want to get backstabbed by some cultist because I wasn't paying attention, and you have too much on your mind for it to be fair to expect you to do it alone. Politics might be beyond me, but figuring out ways someone could kill us I can totally do."

She smiled and stood up on her toes to kiss my mask, then pulled back slightly with a grimace and kissed the side of my jaw. I snickered at the reaction. "Yeah, I would prefer you avoid kissing the mask too. After I saw it eat someone I haven't been able to look at it the same way." Granted, I could still WEAR it, mostly because the security was more important than the creep factor, but things had definitely changed in the way I viewed the thing.

Chuckling lightly, Callie looped her arm in mine and we headed to the massive double doors of the palace. She reached up and rapped three times on the opaque ice. The boom that shook the area was much deeper and more resonant than expected, like she'd been knocking on a sheet of metal. After a minute or two the door slid open to reveal a small pale woman with bright blue hair and icy eyes. Her blue lips quirked up in a smile as she saw us.

"Can I help you?" The F-ranker said in a melodic voice. Her frozen blue eyes seemed to crack and shift around the irises, like there was a snowstorm or a pair of crashing glaciers being projected through a pair of wheel shaped viewing screens. She was so pale it literally almost hurt to look at her and it took me a second to notice that her ears, behind which she'd swept her long hair, were pointed like Celine's. Some kind of ice elf maybe?

Callie smiled, holding out a hand. "Yes, I'm Nightstrike, this is Solomon. We're her to see Frostbite. She should be expecting us?"

Her lips curved up in a paradoxically warm smile. "Of course." She said in a voice like the wind through a forest of icicles. "My name is Rime. I'm Frostbite's personal valet." She stepped back, swinging open the door with a gentle tap of her fingers. As she did, we were able to see that she was much taller than she'd looked before, having been leaning out the door. I'd have put her at six feet, though the silver heels under her shining silver dress might have been throwing me off.

Her blue hair was held back by an icy crown and was lost in a bloom of white fur draped over her shoulders that spilled down her back to very nearly sweep the floor. Some kind of thick pelted animal, and not a small one. She gestured us past her and we both nodded out thanks as we entered.

"This is a lovely building." Callie said politely. Clearly not sure what to say to the woman when we'd spent so much time focusing on how to address Frostbite.

"Yes." Said Rime happily. "It is." We...had no response to that, and we both decided it might be better to just shut up.

We mounted a set of spiral stairs along the perimeter of the building and began to ascend. The external steps led us along the outside edge of an absolutely massive space inside the castle. Along the edge of the space were balconies that acted as floors, leading out into the external parts of the castle away from the towering hall. Crystalline walkways threaded between the balconies and across the vast open expanse, reminding me of nothing so much as that crystal spider web back in the cave in Doomtown.

The sun reflected through the icy canopy above us was diffuse in most places because of the opaque ice, but there were a few clear spots like skylights that shone beams of startling light down into the atrium, each beam hitting the walkways and scattering into prismatic rainbow cascades that crisscrossed the open space.

"This..." Said Callie breathlessly. "This is amazing. Now I see why they call it the crystal palace. You live here? It must be wonderful getting to see this every day."

Rime shrugged. "You get used to it. It's still pretty, but it starts to lose some of its impact after the five thousandth viewing. Though I admit, I imagine it loses its appeal much slower than an office building, so I suppose I'm still lucky in that regard."

She stopped talking again, but we weren't in the mood to gape silently now that we had the ball rolling. "So do you know Cold Snap?" I asked politely.

That drew a snort from the F-ranker. "I changed his diapers as a baby, so yes. That explains how you got this meeting. Frostbite isn't usually so accessible to the younger generation." She shot a sideways glance at Callie. "You might have managed it just from the sheer amusement of your little display at the opening ceremonies. Though admittedly it probably wouldn't have been so quick."

So she knew who we were. She could have saved us the intro at the beginning, but then again, I suppose that was just basic politeness. Finally after minutes of walking, we approached the top of the massive atrium. As we climbed, the balconies began to take up more of the space as the castle narrowed, the catwalks and empty rainbow filled nothingness condensing until finally we stepped off the stairs onto a large floor with only a relatively large hole in the center you could look down from.

Rime led us across the floor, which alternated opaque and crystalline squares in a DEEPLY unsettling and yet incredibly majestic way, then stopped in front of a huge pair of double doors carved from what I was pretty sure was black permafrost. I looked around. "Is there like...nobody else here? Because this place is a total ghost town from what I've seen. Seems weird to have a castle this big with no people."

The blue haired woman rolled her eyes. "Of course there is. They're in other parts of the palace, on the floors and in their offices. The steps and catwalks are transport, people don't spend time lingering on there. The prismatics can be disorienting with long term exposure, even for Ascendants." She raised a hand and rapped three times on the black door. "Wait here until the doors open then go inside. She'll arrange for someone to pick you up on the way out..." She paused. "Or throw you out the window. Probably not though. She hasn't done that in months."

With that last very unsettling statement she turned and strolled away, seemingly unbothered by the idea that we may be thrown from the top of a castle...or possible just fucking with us. I took hold of Callie's hand just in case, readying Leaf on the Wind. Better safe than sorry I always said.

Callie smiled at me wryly, and I felt through the bond that she was just as sure that had been a joke, and just as disturbed by the possibility that it wasn't. We stood there like that, waiting, for a few minutes, before the doors creaked slowly open, allowing us inside.

We stepped in, and my break was taken away by the sheer majesty of the room we entered. The scale wasn't as grand as the main hall or its prismatic walkways, but the DETAIL of the icy carving here was staggering. It was a large room with a vaulted ceiling, and every single inch of it was absolutely perfectly carved.

Furniture was shaded various colors of blue and purple and black that somehow seemed like a full spectrum with shading, a fireplace sat to one side of the room, a lifelike crystalline carving of flames so realistic it looked like they were leaping affixed to the center as light danced through the facets, causing it to glow with a rainbow radiance, and in the back behind a large black desk of shiny ice, sat Frostbite.

With all the grandiose pageantry I'd expected her to be flashy and dramatic, but she just looked...normal. A pretty girl who seemed only a bit older than us with a cornsilk blonde ponytail and bright blue eyes, wearing a t-shirt and jeans. Her one nod to her Ascendant identity was a long snow white trench coat she wore draped over her shoulders, her arms not even in the sleeves. To cap off the image, as she watched us calmly she popped a huge pink bubble noisily, slurping the gum back up to continue chewing it.

She looked interested, if not terribly enthused by our presence, and I saw her flip a folder closed on the desk as she stared at us. She seemed to mull over what to say to us for a minute before she finally opened her mouth and said something. So." Said the E-rank executive of one of dominant faction of this entire planet. "You guys want some ice cream or something? It's home made."