The air was bitter.
It wasn't just cold anymore—it was a deathless freeze, one that seeped into the bones and refused to let go.
Even Thae'Zirak's massive frame moved more slowly now, wings laboring against the sharp, glacial winds that coiled in from the north like ghostly serpents.
The sky had lost all warmth. It was a ceiling of pale iron, heavy and endless, with no sun and no moon—only light without source, dull and indifferent.
Below them, the frozen wasteland stretched on, cracked and broken like the shattered shell of a world long dead.
And at the center of it all—the Hollow Bastion.
It was no fortress in the traditional sense. No battlements, no gates, no signs of war.
It was a monolith of ice and stone, carved directly from the bones of a colossal glacier.
The structure spiraled upward, not in straight lines, but in curving, unnatural arcs—like a great tower pulled upward by invisible threads, frozen mid-rise.
