The cold hit them like a wall. Not the cold of Northrend's exterior — that cold was the cold of a continent that had organized itself around the absence of warmth across geological time, the ambient hostility of a place that did not welcome living things but was not specifically antagonistic toward them either.
What was inside Icecrown Citadel was something that the exterior had been a diluted version of.
Jaina felt it stop her three steps inside the door. Not physically — she did not stumble, did not fall, did not reach for the wall in the way of someone whose legs had stopped cooperating.
She stopped because her entire awareness had been suddenly, comprehensively occupied by something that demanded full processing before the next movement was possible.
The cold here was not temperature. It was the Lich King's power expressed as environmental fact — the total saturation of a place that existed at the center of the most concentrated necromantic force on the continent, where the Frozen Throne's authority had been soaking into the stone and the air and the ambient magical field for years and had become indistinguishable from what the place fundamentally was. It pressed through every layer of her preparation.
She had spent the journey from Dalaran to the Argent Vanguard in focused, methodical construction of the protections that five years of accumulated intelligence about Icecrown's interior had suggested would be most necessary — the ambient magical resistances, the counter-workings against necromantic saturation, the Light-adjacent reinforcements that Liadrin had taught her to layer into her personal ward structure in the months following their first conversations about what Leylin's monitoring data suggested the citadel's interior contained.
The preparation was being noticed, and noted, and pressed against. She breathed. Slowly. Let the pressing be what it was — present, significant, real — without letting the significance become paralysis.
The protections were holding. The cold was pressing against them rather than through them. She was inside Icecrown Citadel and she was standing and breathing and the pressing was something she was managing rather than something that was managing her. She moved forward one step. Then another.
Varian was handling it differently. He did not stop. He slowed, in the controlled way of a warrior whose training had built into him the reflex of maintaining motion under pressure, because stopping under pressure was the thing that pressure wanted you to do and stopping was therefore the thing you did not do.
His pace reduced to something that was navigating rather than advancing, each step deliberate in the way of someone who was finding the floor through the dense quality of what the air had become.
He did not say anything. This was partly characteristic — Varian was not a man who narrated what he was experiencing when the experience was demanding — and partly because speaking required managing the breathing that the cold's weight was making harder to manage than normal atmospheric conditions made it.
Muradin Bronzebeard was beside him, and the dwarf's ancient constitution — built from generations of inhabiting the Khaz Modan mountains and the deep, cold spaces of underground dwarven civilization — was serving him better than the environment's pressure should have permitted.
He was not comfortable, this was legible in the quality of his breathing and the specific set of his jaw. But he was functional in the specific way of dwarves in difficult environments, which was a way that exceeded what most non-dwarves in comparable positions would have managed.
"Ugly place," Muradin said. It was both the most dwarven and the most accurate thing that could have been said about the citadel's interior in three words, and several people near him adjusted slightly toward the direction of the words in the way that people adjust toward a source of light in darkness.
Thrall managed the transition through the shamanic elements. He had been feeling Northrend's elemental character since the first day the Warsong Offensive had established its position in Borean Tundra — the pressured quality of elements that had been under the Lich King's influence for long enough that their communication with shamans carried the distortion of that influence.
He had been managing that distorted channel since the campaign began, and the skill of managing distorted elemental communication was the skill he brought to the citadel's interior now.
He reached for the earth beneath the stone floor — the deep earth, below the saronite's specific, Old God resonance, below the construction's necromantic saturation, to the bedrock that had been here since before any of this had been built on it.
The bedrock was not friendly. Nothing in this place was friendly. But it was old and it was elemental in the fundamental sense rather than the corrupted one, and the connection it offered was attenuated but real, and real was what he needed. The connection steadied him.
He looked at Garrosh, who had stopped beside him and whose expression was doing something complicated between the warrior's instinct to not acknowledge that anything was affecting him and the honest, immediate experience of something that was absolutely affecting him.
"Find the ground under the stone," Thrall said quietly. "Not the stone — what's under it. Earth doesn't forget what it is even when what's been built on it tries to make it forget."
Garrosh looked at him with the expression of someone receiving advice that contradicts their preferred method of managing difficulty but that is being received anyway because the difficulty is significant enough that preferred methods are not fully available.
He did not respond. But he breathed differently after, and the breathing was steadier.
Aminel moved through the adjustment with the organized quality of someone who had been building theoretical frameworks for exactly this environment for five years and was now experiencing the environment her frameworks had been describing.
The correlation between the framework and the experience was high. This was simultaneously reassuring and alarming — reassuring because it meant her analysis had been accurate, alarming because her analysis had included assessments of what the citadel's interior would impose on living things, and the assessments had not been reassuring.
She began taking readings immediately, because readings were what she could contribute to the first minutes that nothing else was better for. She read it and updated her assessment of the floors above in the rapid way that new data updated existing models when the new data was dense with information.
Leylin was above them. The relay was tracking his position through his ambient magical signature thats identifiable to her reading as a name. He was moving. The two major encounters she had reported to Jaina were confirmed cleared in her real-time data.
The floor above — the next significant encounter in the intelligence picture she had assembled from his monitoring — was occupied by something that her theoretical framework flagged as a categorically different problem from what he had already addressed.
She composed a message through the relay to whatever channel he was monitoring in the citadel and sent it immediately: We are inside. Ground floor. Adjusting. Coming up. She did not know if he would receive it in time to matter. She sent it regardless.
Rhonin had been inside Icecrown Citadel before the others stopped adjusting. This was not because he was unaffected — the Archmage of Dalaran was affected, in the way that everything living was affected by the citadel's interior, and he was not in the business of pretending otherwise.
But Rhonin's long career of operating in environments that actively resisted his presence had produced in him the particular quality of someone who had been pushed by difficult environments for so many years that the being-pushed had become the normal state rather than a deviation from it, and who therefore moved through the first phase of adjustment more quickly than people for whom being-pushed was less familiar.
He read the citadel's magical ambient while he moved. Not passively — actively, the Archmage's analytical engagement with the magical structure of the space he was moving through, identifying the load-bearing elements of the Lich King's power in this space and how they connected to the floors above and what the connection patterns suggested about how the citadel had been built and what it had been built to do.
This was the form of preparation he knew how to perform best, and the performing of it was simultaneously useful to the group and useful to his own stability in the environment, because having your attention occupied by the analytical work left less of it available for the environment's pressing quality to operate on.
He noted three things of immediate operational significance and kept them for the right moment to share.
The door opened again. Through the main door through which they had entered, Tirion Fordring came first. The Highlord of the Argent Crusade carried the Ashbringer at his side and the hardened quality of a man who had just been in the Cathedral of Darkness and had struck Arthas's heart with the Ashbringer and had come out the other side certain in a way he had not been before.
The certainty had settled in him in the hours since — not as comfort, because the content of what he was certain about was not comforting, but as clarity. The functional clarity of someone who has stopped carrying the weight of an unresolved question and is now simply dealing with what the resolution revealed.
He looked at the assembled group in the citadel's first chamber without particular surprise. He had expected them, or had expected people — the convergence on the citadel at this specific point in the campaign was not a coincidence but the logical endpoint of everything that had been building.
"Where is he at?" Tirion said, by way of greeting, because the greeting that the moment required was information rather than courtesy.
"Third floor, last we had," Aminel said.
Tirion nodded with the quality of someone incorporating new information into an already-organized picture. His gaze moved across the assembled group with the comprehensive, assessing attention of a commander reading a force composition.
He did not comment on the fact that the force composition included both Varian's Alliance soldiers and Thrall's Horde warriors, though the careful quality of his not-commenting communicated that he had noted it and had made a decision about whether to address it. He decided to address it.
"Inside this citadel," Tirion said, and his voice carried the carrying quality of a paladin who had been commanding in the field for most of his adult life and who understood that the voice was itself a tool, "there is one enemy. Not the Scourge in the abstract. The Lich King, specifically. Everything else in here serves that one enemy, and defeating that one enemy is the only objective that has meaning in this space."
He looked at Varian directly. "Whatever you are to each other outside, inside you are here for one thing. If you cannot hold that, you should go back through the door. If you can, you are welcome beside anyone who came here for the same reason."
The room held this. Varian's expression moved through several things in quick succession. The political, the personal, the military, and then — settling — the direct quality of a man who was, underneath all of it, a soldier who understood what was being asked and why. He said nothing. He did not leave.
Darion Mograine came through the door behind Tirion with the Knights of the Ebon Blade in the organized formation of death knights moving through hostile territory — not the unconscious, reflexive formation of living soldiers who had drilled it into muscle memory, but the deliberate, chosen formation of beings who understood their environment and had decided how to occupy it.
They moved into the chamber with the quiet, controlled quality of people for whom the citadel's necromantic saturation was the most familiar environment in Northrend rather than the most hostile.
Darion's expression was the expression of someone who had been inside the citadel before — at Voltarus, at the Shadow Vault's approaches, at the various operations the Ebon Blade had conducted throughout Icecrown.
He had not been inside the spire itself. But the saturation's specific quality was one he had developed a working relationship with rather than a reaction to, and the relationship was visible in the way he moved through the first chamber with a precision that the other living forces were still working toward.
He found Aminel's relay output with the specific efficiency of someone who knew what information would be most useful and had gone directly to its source.
"He's fighting on the upper floors," Darion said, reading the relay's position data. "Alone."
"Not for much longer," Jaina said. Darion looked at her with the quality of someone who has assessed the accuracy of a statement and has found it credible. "The Ebon Blade goes up the left flank. We know the citadel's internal geography better than any living force here."
He did not say this as a challenge — as a straightforward statement of operational reality. "What the mage hasn't cleared yet, we can support."
The operational picture assembled itself around the relay's data and Darion's knowledge and Rhonin's analysis and everything that the assembled force collectively possessed, and what it assembled into was a direction: up. Jaina looked at the stairs.
Somewhere above, floor by floor, Leylin was still climbing. The convergence had arrived at its destination. Now it needed to fulfill its purpose.
"We go up," she said. The force — Alliance and Horde and Argent Crusade and Ebon Blade and Kirin Tor, the improbable assembly of everything that the Northrend campaign had produced — moved toward the stairs.