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[Arahim]

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Several moments passed uncounted before Arahim's eyesight grew accustomed to the vast chamber's pearlescent light, and he was able to take in this new venue. His harrowing flight forcing Fate's hand through the simple act of moving forward. The card that turned, a dizzying contrast to the gestating horrors behind him.

Limping, he stared at what lay before him like a man benighted suddenly awake to the many subtle glories and strange beauties hidden at the periphery of the World.

Massive ice columns held aloft the impossibly high ceiling, seemingly carrying the insurmountable weight of the whole sum of the mountain. Thick enough around that ten men linking hands would be hard pressed to encircle even the smallest of them.

Gleaming like a thousand poised daggers, stalactites fanged the roof. Many grouped tightly, and just as many, lone spikes jutting forth strongly, tapering to deadly points.

Likewise, sharp stalagmites dotted the many tiered, multi-levelled ground in a symmetry so curious as to be by design. So congruous, that if one could fold the space between them upon itself, and in half, one would lay perfectly upon the other.

Floor led to steps.

Steps and stair to archways.

Open air rooms partitioned, but free flowing. Roofless, one and all.

Half walls, some runed, and some adorned with cunning lattice work.

Everything...solely of ice.

In the empty spaces between, great frozen founts stood in static eruptions. Hanging untouched, just beyond the grip of Time. Varying in size from waist level to towering geysers. Arahim marvelled to see that many of them were haloed by single drops of ice, as though errant splashes thrown aside, suspended unaided in the still air. Taunting gravity and convention alike.

[Arahim]

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A musical tinkling, like the soft notes of distant, dischordant piano surrounded Arahim. Giving the air around him an almost tactile, electric feel. The atonal rhythm strangely set his frayed spirit at ease-fleeting, breathless ease, buoyed by its lulling, unassuming tide.

Alien, yet trancelike melodic.

In synchronized, languid movements, a calliope of wisps flowed through the chamber, unperturbed by Arahim's very sudden intrustion upon this place.

Spiralling about columns, and pillars.

Darting en masse with fleet abruptness, only to come to rest at some other corner or nook for no particular reason.

Here was a grand and cosmic play.

A secret dance set to inscrutable instrumentation.

Undisturbed, earthbound stars eternal. Possessed of immeasurable life.

A terrible vitality.

The lost and found souls of Winter.

They were the source of light and sound here.

Light and sound.

[Arahim]

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The bobbing glow drank away any pretense of shadow or sense of space. The cavern absorbing every glint and glimmer, refracting and reflecting through it's riotous plague of living crystal. The unearthly, impossible architecture more akin to breathing, prismatic sculptures frozen and forgot.

Tentative were Arahim's first steps. The bone-chitin gash in his thigh burned painfully, making his gait uneven though the blood had ceased to flow from it. His heavy booted footfalls struck and splintered the dark ice floor like dull breaking bone. Fine power spat up where his spikes bit down. A web of fine cracks, breaks in the perfect pattern, left behind him like veins in some opaque sleeping thing grown giant and age-worn at the World's forgotten core. Too vast to take notice of Arahim's passing, or to be discomfitted by the bearing of his weight upon it's great slumbering form, or to the damage his path created.

Arahim harbored no fear of falling. This ice would hold.

A lone wisp darted forward, disrupting, for but a moment, the curious cohesion of fluttering illuminations, and hovered eye level before him.

Faltering, the celestial drama froze, light, sound, and movement, in contemplative hesitation before resuming the dance. A new motif emerging. A new song born, no less ordered than that of previous, but more pleasing to his ear in it's burgeoning familiarity, and subtle subtexts. A repetition of theme and color strung together flawlessly throughout, evoking unbound memory. Sediment stirred in a focused swirl through placid waters, and reworked into a design brand new.

Arahim stood and stared at the starlit orb, pulsating silver and pure before him. Held in recognitive thrall; amazed to hear his own voice sung to him in soft susurration. Echo enmeshed within the music, yet prominent.

In wordless soliloquy, the lyrics his Life's very own, the wisp bade him follow, and so he did.

[Arahim]

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He was led to a curving wall that hugged the outer edges of the cave.

Arahim could not fathom what use the wall could fulfill, set as it was apart from the oddly arrayed partitions and dark, slick stairways that decorated his surreal surroundings. No door, nor opening of any sort broke it's cool, mirrored surface, and as such, he supposed nothing lay beyond it, and thought to approach no further.

In it's opalescent reflection, he watched the flitting of wisps at his back. Still content to flicker in time with their tranquil song, defying the oppressive heaviness so deep and far from the face of the Sun. Now, though, Arahim felt the feathery touch of expectation in the notes they trilled.

The wisp who had guided him drifted to it's fellows like thistle caught upon the gentle exhalations of Spring. It's purpose seen to completion, and eager to re-affix it's voice to the next verse.

It was in this reflection which sparked Al'lyria's instruction to him, spurring him on to see what he might. Roused him from the dark he had called home these past days. Hearkening to the memory of a small boy's simple statement, and subsequent questions as to remedy.

She's cold.

An innocent, plaintive intimation that his father could set things right.

Arahim knew were he to see what he set before himself to the end, time was not an ally, and so went he to the wall, and to the end.