The incredible depiction of a tarrasque was nothing compared to the mural that lined the outside of the cylinder from which they emerged. Beasts of legend frolicked in gardens and infernal flames. Griffins floated through the heavens and serpents stalked the oceanic depths. Titans battled fiends, heroes confronted dragons, and set between them were arcane glyphs and writings in ancient languages. No vault any of them had seen contained such art, nor any king's palace. The walls of their cylinder were only the beginning. Along the floor and the other cylinders they could see similar images, all coated with a layer of clear ice that clung thickly to the walls and distorted the images through its ripples.
The ice had taken its toll down here, too. The floors were slick and frozen, and portions had warped and heaved up under the cold. Huge icicles hung precariously from the roof like the stalactites of a cave, threatening to fall at any moment. The magical, white torchlight struck the ice and sent strange reflections all along the walls and floor, and a tiny army of reflections followed along as they walked.
The occasional decayed desk or bare table stood next to the cylinders, some of them collapsed and broken. The mall looked unused for centuries. The impression was of a vast storehouse, fairground, museum, dance hall, or dining hall, an all-purpose subterranean meeting ground for the wizards who lived in the long-neglected towers above. To Sonja, Regdar, and Lidda, this place seemed like a blow to the heart, not only for its size and intricacy but also its emptiness. It felt every inch as desolate as the snowy, white world through which they'd just come.
This wasn't an expanse of nature, free of man. It was a relic of man's faded glory. It was a tomb.
Their mephit escort had little patience for the newcomers' awed stares. It let out another high-pitched squeal, and another replied from across the cavernous hall from the dark. The sound grew in echoes until it had the force of a jungle cat's roar.
"Your friend should be in that direction," the mephit explained. As they crossed the marble floor, keeping their footing carefully on the slick ice, their every footfall echoed throughout the hall.
Hennet was easy to find. He was backed against one of the cylinders, using his short spear to hold at bay a whole colony of ice mephits. There were about a dozen of the creatures. All of them looked almost exactly like the first, with only small deviations of size and face to tell them apart. The art on the cylinder depicted a stark starfield. Hennet and the mephits seemed to be floating together in a void. With the torch brought close, Hennet could finally get a good look at the things surrounding him.
"Hennet!" Sonja shouted. "Is that any way to greet our hosts?" Her voice reverberated throughout the mall.
The sorcerer turned to face Sonja. At that moment four or five of the mephits leaped into the air, swiftly grasping the shaft of his spear and ripping it from his hands. These mephits flew off with it while the others surrounded Hennet, hovering mere inches from his face, as if daring him to make any move. The mephit who greeted Sonja, Regdar, and Lidda flew over to join them and was soon indistinguishable from the rest.
"Please!" yelled Sonja. "We have an opportunity here. Let's not spoil it!"
"He killed three of ours already," whined one of the mephits. "We saaaaved him, and he repays with death!"
Lidda and Regdar looked up to see a small trapdoor built into the ceiling. A feeling like a small tremor spread across the room, and the trapdoor shuddered above them. Somewhere off in the darkness, an icicle was shaken lose by the vibrations and crashed to the floor.
"They attacked me!" protested Hennet.
"Only because he attacked usss first!" another mephit shouted.
"Please, please everyone," Sonja said, lowering the pitch of her voice in hopes that cooler heads might still prevail. "We're together in this thing. We must cooperate if we're to accomplish anything. I ask you to release Hennet, and Hennet, you must be calm. Just come over here."
"He is dangerous!" shouted another mephit. "A killer! You ask us to free him?"
"I ask you to give him a chance to repent for his mistakes," Sonja said. "He never would have killed you if he knew the truth."
"What truth?" Hennet shouted at Sonja. "What are these things?"
"With any luck," the druid told him, "they're our new friends."
With that, the mephits relented at last, pulling away from Hennet, dropping his short spear at his feet. He cautiously bent over to recover his weapon and walked over to join the others, dragging the spear's point on the floor. They kept a collective scowl trained at him, as if to say that they would have their revenge yet.
Again, the trapdoor above them rocked under a draconic assault.
"You killed some of them?" Sonja whispered into Hennet's ear. "You don't know what you almost did."
She turned her attention to the mephits, crowded around a small corner of the floor, all of their unearthly blue eyes staring at their human guests.
"I am Sonja of the North," she said. "These are Regdar and Lidda. Hennet you've met. We came to this city to investigate the origins of the cold that is currently expanding and devastating the countryside. We encountered the dragon up there several times in the past few days."
Lidda and Regdar exchanged a worried glance behind Sonja's back. Why was Sonja telling these monsters everything? She said they weren't evil, but that didn't make them friends.
"He is called Glaaaze," explained one of the mephits. They seemed to have no obvious leader. A different mephit spoke almost every time.
"Glaze," Sonja asked. "Is he the one who did this? Unleashed all this ice?"
The mephits nodded fervently. One of them proclaimed, "With the Ilskynarawin!"
Sonja shook her head at the difficult word. "The… Ilskynarawin?"
"It's an artifaaact," said a mephit. "It tears a hole in the worlds. Brings ice onto Prime. This issss what has happened here. It blew us through, and now we can't go home."
"It does more than that," supplied another. "It summons. It summons creatures of ice here. It turns place into cold place."
All this would explain how Savanak got here, Sonja reasoned. He was probably native to the plane of ice, but a powerful summoning spell uprooted him from his home and placed him here. That would explain the snowbloom, the polar bear, and other oddities of the cold zone. But the mephits' description also set off a long-lost twinge of memory in the back of Sonja's mind, something her parents told her when she was a child.
"The Frozen Pendant," she said. "I think I've heard of it, under the name 'the Frozen Pendant'."
"What do you know?" asked a mephit.
"Only a story I heard as a child," Sonja said. "I always thought that my mother invented it, but maybe not. It took place in an ancient kingdom in the middle of a hot desert. I don't remember many of the details, but there was an evil, foolish chancellor or vizier who presented a piece of jewelry to the sultan. The chancellor opened a box, and when the sultan touched the pendant, it erupted with ice, killing him, the chancellor, and everyone else. The ice went on to devastate the entire kingdom."
"There's a halfling story not unlike that," added Lidda.
"It may or may not have beeeen the Ilskynarawin," a mephit offered, "but 'Frozen Pendant' is a good name."
The others nodded in agreement, their little heads bobbing up and down aggressively
"Where is this Frozen Pendant now?" Regdar asked.
Every one of the mephits faced the ground. "Down, down, down. Hot down. We cannot go. You may go, not weee."
"Slow down," Sonja said. "Tell us about Glaze. Tell us how all of this happened."
The mephits whispered to each other for a moment in an unintelligible language all their own. Regdar took the opportunity to whisper in Sonja's ear.