The young smith’s eyes, once more, lit up. One could see him give into a sense of relief, and then, he broke. In seconds he went from an utterly manic visage of sleeplessness, to a dead man’s slumber splayed over the massive machine by his side. With some care, Zel picked him up and carried him inside, making note of the meticulously organized nature of his workshop. It was a sharp contrast to his countenance, as well as to the chaotic mess that was the great big work table in the corner. Through the window of his back door, she also saw the half-finished body of Jorfr’s machine; its design was similar to hers, with the major difference that instead of an iron mammoth skull it used an iron rendering of a stern, brick-like face, with a long beard cascading down over the front wheel as protection. It was stylized enough that it didn’t resemble anyone in particular.
They didn’t return straight to the Bjorn longhouse. Rather, the iron beast would howl through the city and around its outskirts for the next hour.
On the morning of the next day, Zel visited the Revenant King once more. He bestowed upon her a further blessing to ward off hostile weather, and shared with her the knowledge she needed to actually find Eldartha. This knowledge, though he had told it to her, could not be put into words. It was, in fact, an eldritch, abstract seed which he had planted into her mind. Whenever Zel focused on this seed, this idea, she felt a tugging in a northeastern direction.
The preparations had long been completed, and she departed before noon upon her rebuilt sturmgandr. Solving the problem of Zel possibly becoming incapacitated had been simple; Jorfr would come with her. It had been Zef who had suggested the solution, though the blonde had of course wanted to be the one to accompany Zelsys. The reality of the environment Zel was heading into, however, dissuaded her. Even with proper camping equipment and heat-sealing body wraps, she would be gambling with death, and the odds would not be in her favour. Comparatively, Jorfr was a perfect fit. Trusted by the Revenant King to not attempt leaking Eldartha’s exact location, a Borean, a draugr, and someone with natural affinity for gelum to boot. At the absolute extreme, he could possibly encase himself in construct-ice while keeping his own insides warm, and resurrect upon Zel’s return.
So it was that, resolved in seeing this through, they departed Oasis City.
Driving on through the frigid waste, they journeyed beyond the edge of all known maps.
Passing frozen wrecks of ages long gone they tore through a great cyclone of near-absolute-zero wind as if it weren’t even there.
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They passed the eyes of a mighty beast of antediluvian provenance, frozen deep beneath glassy glacierglass. Yet, even as its form laid otherwise motionless beneath the ice, its eyes turned to stare up at them.
Further on, they drove, until they came upon a sprawling, hostile field of glacierglass spikes, stretching skyward at awkward and unsettling angles. They reflected light in just the wrong way, focusing even what little sun reached this place into rays of death.
It was here that the Revenant King’s blessing of knowledge came in most useful, for by following its guidance, the duo were able to navigate this deathly labyrinth.
Nearly twenty kilometers of that hell led them to the inner perimeter of a truly vast crater - a crater whose scale alone rivaled the crater in whose center Willowdale sat. Its concave shape was a fair bit more obvious here, where the landscape hadn’t changed in millennia.
Far, far in its center awaited not a flaming abyss as she'd expected, but a temple of ice wrought in the same cyclopean fashion as the King’s own throne-fortress. It was a vast tower, spiraling out from the ground up towards the sky, thousands of darkened archways staring imposingly from its walls. The way it was built, it looked hollow on the inside; a giant chimney. It possessed a giant, monolithic gate inscribed with an equally superlative glyph of undeniably antediluvian origin; only such glyphs gleamed with unnatural iridescence and dragged at the eyes when looked upon like this one did. A long procession of ice statues led up to that gate, all of them faceless, armored figures, bearing giant spears. Each statue-warrior held out his spear so it crossed with that of the statue across from it.
Between them and that procession towards the tower, however, stood an army of icebound monstrosities wherever else they looked; they ran the gamut of design and size. From humanoid, to bestial, to ominous collections of abstract geometry, as well as from the size of small animals to that of buildings. Stone-still and silent they were, and so they remained as Zel drove past them. Eventually, one moved. Then, another, and another. They broke their shells, huge chunks of razor-sharp ice crashing down around them as the largest of Eldartha’s guardians turned to merely look at them. Even without hostile intent, Eldartha’s iceborne guardians unknowingly threatened their very lives, and it took absolute focus to maneuver the sturmgandr between them. Zel wondered about the reasoning for such elaborate obstacles in favor of something simple like the multi-layered curse barrier surrounding the Blackstone Cathedral.
Drawing closer to the tower, it glistened in the sun, giving off an aura of unearthly grandeur. Zelsys instinctively slowed the sturmgandr to as slow as it could reasonably go as they passed through a procession of spear-wielding warriors. Their hollow eye sockets stared down at them, even as they remained motionless and without sign of life or magic. The tower’s great gate did not open at their approach, but melted; at first in mere droplets running down its surface, then a waterfall that soon became a deluge. It flowed around them, yet never once came close enough to splash them. This water was alive, within it glittering the same otherworldly iridescence as the Revenant King’s armor.