The ice groaned beneath our treads—an ancient threshold cracking open. Beneath its translucent skin shimmered a skyline long forgotten: a city entombed in silence, its spires bowed beneath centuries of frost. Dr. Elen Varis called it a cathedral of cold geometry—vaulted towers of obsidian and fractured glass, laced with frozen veins of bioluminescent script. The light pulsed faintly, like breath held too long.
