I stepped through the second doorway, and cold slammed into me hard. After the scorching heat of the Chamber of Flames, the transition was so jarring that my lungs seized, refusing to draw breath for several heartbeats.
"Fuck," I gasped when my body finally remembered how to breathe. The word emerged as a cloud of white vapor that crystallized and shattered in the extreme cold.
The chamber before us was a vast cavern of perfect, pristine ice. Unlike the jagged, natural formations of Frostfall's wilderness, every surface here was polished to mirror-like perfection. The walls, floor, and ceiling reflected our images back at us from countless angles, creating an infinite regression of ourselves stretching into eternity.
Heartseeker appeared in my palm without conscious thought, its crimson glow pulsing weakly against the overwhelming blue-white of our surroundings. In this place, even it seemed diminished, struggling against an environment that opposed its very nature.
"This is... beautiful," Laina whispered beside me, her violet eyes wide with wonder. Her breath froze solid before it fully left her lips, tiny crystals falling to shatter against the floor. She reached up to brush frost from her eyelashes, leaving smudges across her cheekbones.
Joran moved cautiously forward, testing the floor with each step. "Be careful," he warned. "The ice is perfectly smooth. One wrong step and you'll slide right off the edge."
I followed his gaze and noticed for the first time that the path we stood on was suspended over an endless abyss. The ice was so clear that the distinction between solid ground and empty space was nearly invisible.
"What do you think this trial is testing?" Laina asked, moving carefully to stand beside me. She'd pulled her fur collar high around her face, but already her skin had taken on a bluish tinge from the cold.
I frowned, studying the chamber. "The last one tested courage—facing what we fear. This one..." I gestured at our reflections, multiplied infinitely around us. "Maybe it's about facing ourselves?"
As soon as the words left my mouth, the reflections... changed. No longer mirrors of our current selves, they began to shift and transform, showing different versions of us. Different moments.
Different deaths.
The nearest reflection showed Joran, his lean body impaled on the claws of a Reflector, his face locked in a grimace of pain and surprise. Blood—so much blood—spreading across the snow beneath him, steaming in the cold air.
Beside it, Laina knelt in a snowdrift, an arrow protruding from her chest, her fingers weakly trying to stanch the flow of her life's blood.
And then... myself. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of different deaths playing out across the mirrored surfaces of the chamber. Torn apart by wolves. Frozen solid in a blizzard. Falling from the mountain path. Drowned in the marsh. Burned alive. Crushed beneath avalanching snow.
"Don't look," I warned, tearing my eyes away from the grisly spectacle. "They're not real. Just illusions meant to test us."
But I couldn't help looking again. Among the reflections of my many deaths, one stood out. I lay on an altar of black stone, my chest carved open, heart exposed but still beating. Around me stood seven figures, each utterly distinct from the others yet sharing an aura of terrible power.
One appeared as a woman composed of living flame, her hair a corona of white-hot fire that moved as if underwater. Beside her, a man of living ice, his body so cold that reality itself seemed to crack and distort around him.
The third figure towered over the others, a giant with skin like polished metal, reflecting fractured light from his perfect surface. The fourth was barely visible at all—a shadow given form, darkness deeper than the void between stars.
The fifth was neither man nor woman but something other, their body constantly shifting and changing, never settling on a single form for more than a moment. The sixth was ancient beyond comprehension, withered and bent yet radiating power that made the air around them warp and twist.
And the seventh... the seventh wore the face of the most beautiful woman I'd ever met… if it wasn't for the maleficence that was pouring off of her.
They stood in a circle around my dying form, watching with expressions ranging from curiosity to hunger to something like respect.
"Isaiah!" Laina's hand gripped my shoulder, pulling me back to the present. "Whatever you're seeing, it's not real."
I blinked, the vision fading but not entirely gone. "Right," I managed, my voice rough. "Not real."
Joran had moved further along the path, carefully testing each step. "There's something ahead," he called back, voice tight with tension. "Some kind of... structure."
I forced myself to focus, to push aside the lingering images of death—mine and my companions'. With Laina close behind me, I followed Joran's path, placing my feet exactly where he had to avoid slipping into the abyss.
In the center of the chamber, a formation of ice rose from the floor. Unlike the perfect smoothness of the rest of the chamber, this structure was jagged and rough, more like natural ice. As we drew closer, I realized it wasn't a random formation at all—it was a tableau, a frozen moment captured in perfect, crystalline detail.
It showed me, lying dead at the foot of a snow-covered mountain, my body broken and twisted from what must have been a terrible fall. My eyes were open but unseeing, a thin layer of frost already forming over the blank stare.
"What the hell?" I muttered, circling the ice sculpture cautiously. "Why am I the starring attraction in this frozen horror show?"
"Look at the others," Joran said, gesturing around the chamber.
I followed his gaze and realized that the central tableau wasn't alone. Surrounding it were smaller ice sculptures, each depicting another moment where death had nearly claimed me. The marsh leviathan, its monstrous form lunging as I barely dodged aside. The wolf pack, surrounding me as Torsten prepared to sacrifice me to save himself.
"These aren't just possible deaths," I said, understanding dawning. "These are moments I actually survived. Turning points where I could have died but didn't."
"Why show you this?" Laina asked, her breath still freezing solid with each word. "What's the point?"
I approached the central tableau again, studying my own frozen death more carefully. Something about it called to me, drawing me forward despite the grisly subject matter. Without fully intending to, I reached out and placed my hand against the ice.
The moment my skin made contact, the world shattered.
I wasn't in Frostfall anymore.
A room filled with screens, each displaying different scenes of destruction. Gates—massive tears in reality—opening across unfamiliar landscapes. Monsters pouring through, tearing apart buildings, people, everything in their path. A woman with blood-red hair stood before the screens, her back to me, fists clenched at her sides.
Crack.
A child—no more than ten—floating in a tank of glowing blue liquid. Tubes and wires connected to his small body. His eyes snapped open suddenly, revealing irises that glowed with unnatural purple light. The glass of the tank began to fracture.
Crack.
A massive arena filled with thousands of spectators. In the center, two figures locked in combat—one wielding a sword that burned with golden flame, the other controlling shadows that moved like living things. The crowd roared as the shadow-wielder pinned his opponent against a wall of darkness.
Crack.
Seven people seated around a circular table. Each radiated power in a way I couldn't describe but instinctively recognized. One spoke, her voice somehow audible despite the distance: "If it wasn't for Lilith's mistake that day we wouldn't have to deal with this mess."
Crack.
A laboratory. Scientists in white coats surrounding a pulsing tear in reality—a gate, but controlled, contained. One scientist approached it with a device in hand. The gate pulsed once, twice... then exploded outward, consuming everything.
Crack.
Darkness. A voice—familiar yet strange: "The Domain isn't what you think it is. None of this is what you think it is. Wake up, Chain breaker."
Crack.
My own face staring past me. Blood trickled from a cut above his—my—eye. Behind him stood a city in flames. His lips moved: "Remem-"
Crack.
Then nothing.
I snapped back to reality with such force that my legs gave out. I collapsed onto the ice floor, barely catching myself with my hands. My entire body shook violently, not from the cold, but from whatever I'd just experienced.
"Isaiah!" Laina was beside me instantly, her strong hands gripping my shoulders. Her violet eyes searched my face. "What happened? You touched the ice and just... froze."
Frozen sweat glistened on her forehead, her black hair now rimmed with frost that sparkled in the blue light. The cold had brought high color to her cheeks, making her look feverish against the paleness of her skin.
"I... saw..." I tried to form words, but my thoughts were scattered, fragmented like the visions themselves. What had I seen? Cities? People? A future? A past? "I don't know what I saw."
Joran crouched beside us, his lean frame tense with alertness. Frost had formed in his short beard, giving him a prematurely aged appearance. His eyes—gray in this light—darted between me and the ice tableau I'd touched.
"You weren't moving," Joran said. "Not breathing. For nearly a minute."
I stared at my hands, half-expecting them to look different somehow. They were the same—calloused, scarred, strong despite their slenderness. But they felt foreign, as if they belonged to someone else.
"I saw..." I tried again, forcing my scattered thoughts into some semblance of order. "Images. Flashes. Nothing that made sense."
"What kind of images?" Laina pressed, helping me to my feet. Her grip kept me anchored in the present when my mind wanted to drift back to those fragments.
I shook my head. "Nothing… nevermind."
"Isaiah…"
I ignored her and started circling the ice formation again, careful not to touch it. The frozen version of me stared upward with glassy eyes, a perfect replica down to the smallest detail. The scar across my palm. The streak of silver in my hair. Even the slight crookedness of my nose from that street fight years ago.
"The Chamber of Frost," I murmured, thinking aloud. "What is it testing? The first chamber tested courage—the willingness to face fire. This one..."
"Mortality," Joran suggested. "Facing your own death."
"No," I said slowly, the answer crystallizing in my mind like his frozen breath. "Not just death. Acceptance."
I straightened. "These aren't just deaths I've avoided. They're possible futures. Paths my life could take." I gestured to the central tableau. "Including this one."
Joran frowned, the ice in his beard cracking with the movement. "You think the trial is asking you to... accept your death?"
I shook my head. "Not accept it as inevitable. Accept it as possible." I met his eyes. "There's a difference."
Understanding dawned on Laina's face. "To move forward without fear, we have to acknowledge what might happen. Face it directly."
"Exactly." I turned to face the central tableau again, steeling myself. "I think we all need to do this. Face our possible deaths. Accept them, not as certainties, but as possibilities we're willing to risk."
Laina approached one of the smaller ice formations—this one showing her with an arrow through her throat, blood frozen in mid-spray. Without hesitation, she placed her hand against it.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then her body went rigid and her lips parted slightly, frost forming instantly on her breath.
"Laina!" I started toward her, but Joran caught my arm.
"Wait," he said. "Let her complete it."
Seconds stretched into what felt like minutes. Finally, Laina gasped and stumbled backward, her hand dropping from the ice. Unlike me, she kept her feet, though she swayed slightly.
"What did you see?" I asked, moving to steady her.
She blinked rapidly, as if adjusting to the light. "Nothing like what you described. Just... my death. Over and over, in different ways." Her voice was steady, but I could see the tremor in her hands. "It was... clarifying."
Joran went next, approaching an ice formation that showed him being torn apart by Reflectors. His lean hand pressed against the frozen surface, and his body went still. When he returned to himself moments later, his expression was grim but resolved.
"We've done what the trial asked," he said simply. "We've faced our mortality."
I nodded, turning to look for the way forward. The chamber remained unchanged—endless reflective ice stretching in all directions, the abyss yawning beneath the transparent floor.
"Something's missing," I muttered. "We've faced our deaths, but the trial isn't complete."
I approached the central tableau again, studying it more carefully. There was something about my frozen death that still called to me, something I hadn't fully grasped.
And then I saw it. Clutched in my frozen hand, barely visible beneath my broken body, was a small object. A crystalline snowflake, perfect in its symmetry, untouched by the violence of the fall that had "killed" me.
"There," I said, pointing. "That's what we need."
Before either of my companions could respond, I placed my hand against the ice again—not on my frozen form this time, but directly on the crystalline snowflake.
The cold was instant and absolute. Not the biting, painful cold of Frostfall's wilderness, but a pure, perfect cold that transcended physical sensation. It flowed into me like liquid, filling every vessel, every organ, every cell.
For an instant, I thought I'd made a terrible mistake. That this perfect cold would freeze me from within, turning me into a living statue of ice. But then the cold... changed. It became something else—like the moment after waking from deep sleep, when the mind is perfectly clear before the day's concerns cloud it.
I understood, in that moment, what the Chamber of Frost truly tested. Not courage like the Chamber of Flames. Not acceptance of mortality. But clarity—the ability to see clearly, without the distortion of fear or desire.
The ice beneath my palm dissolved, revealing the crystalline snowflake. I closed my fingers around it, and it melted instantly, becoming a part of me just as the flame had done in the previous chamber.
The endless reflections surrounding us shimmered and faded. The perfect ice floor beneath our feet lost its transparency, becoming solid and visible. A path appeared before us, leading to a door that hadn't been there moments before.
"Two down," I said, flexing my fingers. The cold remained within me, but now it felt natural, comfortable—a source of strength rather than weakness.
Laina studied my face, her violet eyes narrowed with concern. "What did it do to you?"
I considered the question, trying to put the sensation into words. "It gave me... clarity. The ability to see things as they truly are."
The door before us opened silently, revealing the now-familiar central chamber of the Temple. Two of the six doorways now glowed—one with orange light, the other with blue.
"Four more to go," Laina said, her voice stronger now that we were leaving the extreme cold behind.
I nodded, but my mind was elsewhere—still trying to make sense of those fractured images.
And my own face, older and scarred, with a warning I couldn't even get to hear.