I have little memory of the maddened flight northward. It was a horrid, desperate experience comprised of constant cold, hunger, and thirst exacerbated considerably by injury. Lady Indili and I spent the days tied together by thick rope and during the nights we huddled together in a bitter struggle to retain warmth. Our path was determined solely by the open nature of the route and the hope of finding green beyond the glacier’s edge. We made no attempt to return to the east, knowing our weakened bodies lacked the strength to climb the pass even had we not lost essential tools. Instead, we sought out forests believed to lie to the north, occupying a low-lying plateau in the very center of the Dumum Mountains in a space of shelter between the Cracking Void and an even larger and more terrible glacier further to the north known as the Trembling Void.

Days blurred in a wash of whiteness. My mind reeled, struggling with both the burden of my injuries and the influence of dragon blood, and it took all the effort I possessed simply to stride forward hour by hour. We spent eight days on the ice after encountering the dragon. During that time, my eyes, which up until this point in life had been the common dark brown of most Sairns, acquired a secondary ring of color at the edge of the iris, stained pale cerulean the same as the dragon’s scales. Why this should have happened, and any meaning behind it, was then and remains now wholly unknown to me. Truthfully, at the time I was in no state to even recognize the change, despite the natural mirrors offered by the surrounding ice. I only learned of it after Lady Indili noticed and told me.

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Many times during that northward escape we almost perished. The glacier was as harsh as ever and as our food supply degenerated to mere scraps, we struggled to find the strength to keep walking. Desperation and the indomitable will to survive are powerful, and this drove us to continue. Stumbling about in failing strength, we each acquired a brutal collection of bruises. Only sighting the line of trees on the northern horizon, and the possibility of people and help that they offered, supplied the hope needed to carry forward.

It is a testament to the power of the natural world; this ability glaciers possess to obliterate the best efforts of humans. Stripped of tools, livestock, and stockpiled provisions, the icy wastes offer only death. Slow, grinding obliteration in the face of merciless cold. If not for the bones left scattered across the ice by the dragon’s predation, which we were able to gather and burn, we would have frozen solid. If we had not been prepared from prior attempts and supplied with fine winter clothes by the chieftain of the Gray Birches all our toes and fingers would have been sacrificed.

Glaciers preserve nothing of humans. Even upon the heights of the Shdrast Mountains there had been evidence of ancient inhabitants, and in the depths of the Shdus Desert hermits manage to find patches where a well capable of sustaining a single individual may be dug, but on the ice, nothing. Nor do these wastes feature any animal life, however limited. The ice was truly devoid of all life, unlike any other environment I have encountered. Only the dragon, a creature of essence above and beyond ordinary existence, resided there, and nothing else, a reflection of the truth of the Divines.

Of such things is faith made.