Seraphina opened her eyes, though the phrase hardly fit what happened next.
There was no light and no dark. There was only cold, infinite and featureless. She was not standing on ice. She was not floating. She was held inside the cold itself, like a speck of dust caught at the centre of a crystal that went on forever in every direction.
It was not the Frost-Heart Cavern.
She had spent a gruelling season down there, three months in the mountain's heart, and that cold had been alive. It shifted. It pressed. It hummed with slow currents of power and old pressure, and every hour of it had asked something of her and given something back. This cold asked nothing and gave nothing. It was absolute zero held still, with no flicker of movement anywhere in it, no change, no next moment. A tomb built to put out the very idea of warmth.
The silence pressed on her ears like deep water.
