Twelve days later, a freezing northern gale howled down from the white peaks of the Frozen Heaven Mountain Range, driving sheets of sleet and snow across the jagged ice-cliffs of Shattered Glacier Valley.
The valley was a deep, mile-wide bowl of cracked blue glacier ice and black granite spires sitting in the no-man's-land twenty miles south of the Rimefrost border fortresses.
High atop a flat, wind-sheltered granite peak overlooking the southern rim of the valley—completely invisible and undetectable beneath an eighth-tier Void-Concealment and Thermal-Insulation Array woven by Alaric—rested the spacious, gold-trimmed flying carriage of the Jade Serpent Guild.
While the blizzard raged at twenty degrees below zero outside the crystal windows, the interior of the thirty-foot carriage cabin was heated to a tropical eighty degrees by internal fire-jade ducts and scented with warm spirit-orchid incense.
