Chapter 1: The Eternal Blizzard

One second, I was convinced I had passed out beneath the snow: my rapidly fading vision being all that was left to cling to before I froze alive. Then, my eyes snapped open, and I found my upper body hanging from a short plateau above the sea of snow.

I barely noticed the small figure that disappeared into the blizzard that obscured everything farther than three feet in front of me. I was too busy flinging my arms out for a handhold as I started to slide backward. Every muscle in my body tensed until I gripped the plateau’s edge with numb fingers.

Once my pounding heart resumed its usual pace, I hung for a minute. Though, remembering how quickly the cold that started to prick me to the bones could return to a numbed lack of feeling, I hauled my booted legs from the waist-high snow before consciousness could slip away again.

Gritting my teeth as the bare palm of my one gloveless hand seared against the ice that likely stretched miles beneath me, I blindly dragged myself up the plateau. Only once the light that burned between my squeezed eyelids abated did I allow my aching arms to fall out from under me.

Cracking my eyes open, I strained to raise my head and glance over my shoulder. Untouched snow reached a faint, metallic speck in the distance and stretched farther still to the horizon. The crater my unconscious body had made became filled with falling snow in seconds. I frowned once conscious thought returned, and I remembered what the speck was: my airship. The one I had used to fly to this island. Of course, from there I had been forced to use my wits alone to find what I was looking for in this blizzard.

I cursed myself and tore my gaze from the empty stretch of snow that shone from the sun between the airship and the plateau. It’s as if I’m hoping that they’d brave the blizzard searching for me. How strange that I am not seeing my unmissed absence for the good fortune that it is. Now I won’t have to bother with any troublesome questions about why I trekked all this way by myself. Those deckhands would only try to steal my discovery once I’ve found it.

I visualized the directions on the University record I had memorized, written by a forgotten explorer who had once walked this very path, and hoisted myself onto my shuddering legs to shuffle across the plateau. I burrowed my gloveless hand beneath the three oil-stained coats I had been wrestled into before I was set loose with the airship’s deckhands. Couldn’t have any able bodies freezing on the spot, but apparently, the most they could do to keep me from escaping was grabbing my gloved hand until I wrenched it loose. Would the rest of the expedition crew even bother to scrounge through the snow to find that discarded glove? If they left, what would they have to remember me by? Oh, what is this sort of fussing supposed to accomplish? Of course, I’m going to return home. As soon as I’ve made my discovery. The directions from the ancient record that might as well have been engraved in the back of my mind claimed I should have already run into what I was looking for. But with it nowhere in sight, I continued marching through the blizzard. All the same, it can’t hurt to get a move on in case they decide that returning home is more important than waiting for me.

I narrowed my eyes and slowed my pace as I spotted a hunched silhouette amid the curtain of snow that swirled around me.

The person from the plateau’s edge stood unflinching against the blizzard.

Cripes, I didn’t think any of the deckhands would catch up with me. I shuddered at the thought of some random deckhand stumbling upon my discovery by accident. I mean, who else could this be? As I crept around the stranger, I realized they were close considering I could hear the clicking they made while shuffling several paces forward before retracing their steps back toward the plateau’s edge. I paled while wondering how long this stranger had kept stride with me: especially since they were downright shrimpy. Deckhands were only made useful for their brawn, and this person barely reached my waist. Goodness, they were smaller than any person I’d ever seen. Of course, I snorted at that possibility. The last person to have lived in this wasteland was reported to have disappeared over fifty years ago. “No need for alarm. I am just the University’s archivist. You may call me Miss Webb. Alice Webb. Here to record anything worth seeing, but between us, I’m starting to think snow and ice are the only worthwhile attractions on this glorified rock. You’d better head back. The University will want to know my thoughts on the place, and I’d hate to leave it at ‘frigid’ in my report.”

The stranger whipped toward me. Deep within the darkness of its hood, two pinpricks of light honed on me like beacons. They remained unblinkingly fixed on me as they trembled on the spot.

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“Hello?” I inched toward the stranger.

The hunched stranger held something inches from where its face should be with a talon that reached from under its lumpy robe. As it poked one of the fingers from the object it was inspecting with a long, curled talon, my eyes widened. It looked like a severed hand.

“You aren’t human, are you?” My hand twitched toward the hilt of the rapier I kept strapped beneath my billowing coats. Theories flooded from where I had kept them locked in the back of my mind. My mouth opened and closed wordlessly before I managed to speak. “No, you’re a birdman.”

The creature’s talons clicked against the ice as it sprinted away.

“It’s not that I don’t appreciate unexpected acquaintances, but it’s customary to respond when spoken to.” I bolted after the creature. The screaming voice of my survival instincts was snuffed out by my rambling thoughts. If that really was a birdman, I couldn’t be far from my discovery. But what else could it be? There was only one breed of animal that was rumored to survive in this wasteland where even the hardiest scrubs wither the second they peek above the frozen earth, and that was it. Unless my mind was making up hallucinations while I was on the brink of freezing alive. No, I needed to see it again. I needed to know birdmen were real. I blinked rapidly to clear the tears that might have come from more than staring at this land of gleaming snow.

I froze when my gradually refocusing vision took in what first resembled a white blot that somehow stood out stark against the whirling snow that filled the sky. Squinting, I distinguished fluid tendrils that twined upward and outward to form an inverted pyramid before converging at the top. There, they knotted into a cacophony of impossible forms that twisted skyward while molding into each other like a tower made of light or a jellyfish contracting in on itself. Or perhaps it was a beast hunkering in the snow. A series of spikes and plated domes rose from its arched spine. However, my mind finally wrapped all these overlapping visions of what I was seeing into a palace. A palace that was more of a mismatch of architecture than a unified structure. Miles of minarets and domes somehow balanced by the tip of the palace’s inverted, pyramidal base: embedded deep beneath the ice. Thankfully, the palace stood unflinchingly against the battering blizzard as I marched toward it.

I spotted the creature soar up the palace’s side and disappear within one of the countless archways that dotted the pyramidal base. My steps slowed, and I gulped as I imagined myself climbing up those yards of bleached bricks: only distinguishable from the palace’s solid, ivory silhouette if they had been pushed loose by the dark vines that weaved through the cracks.

A living presence pulsed within the smooth brick I gripped. I flinched, but it didn’t pull back inside its niche in the wall along with my hand which some small part of my mind insisted it would. Here’s my discovery. Right where I knew it’d be. Just let them try and claim that such a palace can’t exist now.

I craned my neck and shrank beneath the hundreds of rows of archways that reached above a sky filled with snow. I pushed any similarities to a hornet nest from my mind, set my jaw, and hoisted myself up the side of the palace.

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