For two days Elijah had gone back upon his own trail, step by careful step, feeling his way through the lightless vaults of the caverns. The web-weaver’s nest lay somewhere behind him in that smothering dark, and though every instinct urged him to flee farther still, he would not rush blindly to his death. A wrong turn here was not misfortune—it was extinction.

  There was no sight to guide him. The black was complete. It pressed against his open eyes as heavily as against his skin. He moved by touch alone, one hand sliding along the wall, boots testing each uncertain stretch of ground before he committed his weight.

  Ice. Always ice. Hard, bitter, and slick as iron beneath frost. Or stone, rough and immovable, sweating with cold.

  His palm moved forward again—and halted.

  This surface did not freeze his flesh at once. It did not ring with the mute solidity of rock. Beneath his fingers lay something faintly uneven, fibrous. He pressed harder. The material gave the slightest whisper of resistance, not brittle like frozen water, not ancient like buried granite.

  He explored it slowly, reverently, tracing lines that ran long and parallel. Grain.

  Wood.

  Elijah’s breathing slowed. In all this frozen underworld, wood had no right to be.

  He spread both hands now, mapping its breadth in the dark. A wall—broad and upright—imprisoned within the ice. The glacier had crept about it, sealing it in a tomb of cold, yet the structure endured, stubborn as the hands that must have raised it.

  His fingers found emptiness.

  A great hole gaped in the barrier. He moved along its jagged rim, feeling splinters, torn edges, fibers crushed and broken. This was no gentle rot, no patient gnawing of time. The wood had been burst apart.

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  Here, beneath leagues of ice and stone, men—or something like men—had once built.

  Elijah stood for a long while before the splintered breach, listening.

  The dark gave no answer.

  At last he lowered himself and passed through the torn opening, one hand extended, the other braced behind him. The wood rasped against his shoulders as he slipped inside. His boots did not meet ice.

  They met planks.

  The floor slanted upward at a gentle incline, boards laid close together, though swollen and uneven with age. They creaked faintly beneath his weight—a small, human sound in a place that had forgotten such things. He paused at once, listening for any stir in answer.

  Nothing.

  Only the deep and breathless hush of buried chambers.

  He straightened slowly and began to move, palms brushing along the walls, boots testing each step. Wood surrounded him—walls, beams, and floor alike—imprisoned somewhere within the glacier’s vast body. The air was still and heavy with the dry scent of old timber and long-settled dust.

  His hands found objects scattered across the incline. A table overturned. The brittle remains of something that had once been cloth. A chair collapsed upon itself at the lightest touch. He moved with care, cataloging the shapes in his mind, building an unseen room from fragments.

  Then his shin struck something unyielding.

  He crouched and ran his fingers over cold metal—curved and broad. A great pot, iron by the feel of it, thick-rimmed and deep. It stood solid and patient, as though awaiting a cook who had stepped out but yesterday.

  The discovery stirred something fierce in him.

  He searched again by touch and found loose lengths of timber—broken boards, perhaps torn from wall or furnishing long ago. The wood was dry. Miraculously dry. Preserved by the cold.

  Elijah gathered what he could carry and returned to the center of the room. Kneeling upon the slanted planks, he worked with steady hands. Steel kissed flint. Once. Twice. A third time—

  A spark caught.

  It smoldered, hesitated, then drew breath from the brittle wood. A faint crackle followed. Then another. Flame licked upward, small and uncertain at first, then bolder.

  Light burst outward.

  After such endless blackness, it was almost violence. The chamber leapt into being around him—walls of timber bowed but unbroken, beams locked in stubborn defiance against the ice pressing at their back. The ragged hole in the outer wall showed only a thickness of frozen blue beyond.

  The fire grew, casting gold and amber across the boards. Warmth touched his face, cautious at first, then sure. It soaked into his stiff hands, crept through his sleeves, and drove back the bitter ache lodged in his bones.

  Elijah sat back upon his heels before that beautiful, living flame.

  For the first time in many days, the dark no longer ruled him.