Phei and Eira stood calmly in the middle of a world that looked as though winter had killed it, buried the corpse beneath ice, then remained behind to make certain nothing ever had the audacity to resurrect.
There was no grass beneath their feet, no soil or any distant tree stubbornly clinging to life and certainly no little frozen flower waiting to become some poetic symbol of hope. The earth had vanished beneath an immeasurable wasteland of ancient frost and fractured glaciers, vast sheets of blue-black ice extending toward horizons that could barely be seen through the raging storms.
Great frozen ridges rose from the plains in broken formations, some resembling mountain ranges that had been snapped apart and scattered by the impact of a dying world.
