No one knows why the Great Ice exists. It is of course well known that as we ascend a mountain, it gets colder. But although the mountains at the Great Ice are high, philosophers have opined that this would not be enough to produce an ice mountain, and certainly not one as extraordinary as the Great Ice.
We also know that the air gets colder as we go further south, and conversely warmer as we go further north, but we do not know why this is so. The nights are longer in winter, the further south we go, but in summer the days also are longer, and for a brief few weeks or months, it is almost warm, even in the far south. Yet it is not warm enough to melt the Great Ice, though there are reports that the ice rivers flowing footlength-by-footlength sluggishly down from the peaks of Great Ice, melt at their ends, the source of rivers, and that these rivers flow more strongly in summer.
There are some who say that the Great Ice is expanding, generation by generation, and that it will one day cover the whole of the Inner Sea. There are others who deny this. Such reports as there are, from the time of Fanuiloth the Great, do not give any indication that the Great Ice was smaller then than it is now. To find out the truth will require a full expedition, and the Yarsfelders are chancy folk to deal with.
Katya ys Jorac – The Geography and Peoples of the Inner Sea
Steppan approached the door, and, standing a footlength away from it, summoned from his memory the forms for fire. He pulled the fire out of the otherworld, concentrating it more and more, until he had two fiercely glowing orbs, about one footlength in diameter, floating above each hand. He could feel the palms of his hands burning, but he closed his mind to the pain. He flung one of the tightly bound furnaces against the door. It burnt its way instantly through the wood and struck the ice bear. The ice bear screamed in agony. Steppan threw the other burning orb through the same hole, and when this touched the bear, it expanded into a bonfire of flame.
Here was the risk: would it burn through the wood of the door? Had he made a funeral pyre for them all?
But the ice bear shrieked again and blundered away to roll in the snow, taking the flames with it. But these flames were magical. They would not be extinguished by snow, but only by a counter spell. He’d hoped that, though these fell creatures might be in themselves formed by a foul and evil magic, that they would not have the power to offset what he had done.
He cupped his mouth to the hole, and spoke in Elvish, and then repeated himself in Capporean. “Leave us alone. I have greater powers still than what you have just seen. We are not your weak and unprotected prey. Leave us alone and you will be safe.” He spoke slowly so that they might hear every word. He turned away, took a step back towards his bunk, then fell to the floor, insensible. In his darkness, he could still feel the pain in his hands, but his mind protected him from the agony. Unaware of what he was doing, and all that was happening around him, he lay motionless on the stone floor, only his whimpering and ragged breathing showing he was yet alive, so deep was his coma.
So he did not hear the reply whispered through the door. “You have bested us tonight, but you will not escape us.” Somehow, the whisper was more frightening than a bellow would have been. Yet, how could this creature speak Capporean, when the wargs had only communicated with each other in yips and howls? Magritta did not doubt that magic, evil magic, was involved. There came the sound of someone or something urinating against the door, like a dog, to mark his territory, and show his contempt, followed by yips and howls as the wargs moved away over the ice into the dark.
Nick Thiwerspoon 