I had traveled seven days and nights across this vast expanse of ice. Only by the measurements of my astrolabe, could I confirm that I was making headway and that I had not been going in circles. Even so, in this unchanging expanse, it might have been all the same.

  There was day. There was night. And yet there was no end, only more snowy fields that strained the eye. My cloak billowed in the wind. My face stung in the chill air. And still, it did not end. The Great Ice Plain never ended. To think that I had not even traversed a fraction of its great breath did more to weary my soul than steering the ice skimmer’s rudder, enduring the wintry winds.

  And yet, there was never an instant where I hesitated, contemplating turning back. How could I? If I had done that, I would’ve betrayed my oath. And what’s more, I would have broken my heart for nothing. There was nowhere I could go, except forward, plunging deeper into this interminable waste. The Great Ice Plain had earned its moniker and then some. I only wished I could cross it without losing my sanity, whatever that meant in this desolate place.

  I mostly subsisted off the provisions provided me, little more than stale meat and bread. I felt no desire for fish yet, but near the end of my week-long endeavor, I had also grown tired of canned meals. Passing by many flocks of flightless birds, I decided to test my luck despite Gereon’s warning. I steered the ice skimmer towards one such flock, and anchoring the vessel a distance away, I approached on foot.

  They were small, ill creatures. They sped upon the ice on their bellies, as the most ignoble of animals. And yet even with these, the most lacking of birds, I could not help but come to a strange fondness as I approached.

  The birds squawked and hollered, the flock eyeing me nervously. Only one of them dared face me. It wobbled on two stumpy legs, flapping its useless wings in a futile display of defiance. I couldn’t help but laugh, scooping up the squat animal with my gloved hands. Shaking the creature up and down, the bird shrieked in alarm, realizing quickly it had matched itself against a far superior opponent.

  And yet, despite its awkwardness, the bird fought heroically against me. The little creature pecked at my shoulder, its defiance so spirited that I burst into unexpected laughter, and I let the creature go. I could not bring myself to harm such an animal, even to satiate my belly. It was too innocent. Its ferociously inept display of bravery was all too endearing. In a fit of goodwill, I let the return peaceably to its flock.

  I fell backward onto the ice, arms stretched out, looking up into that brightest of blue skies. It is said the Potentate scattered among the creatures of Earth the many aspects of men, so for mankind to better understand themselves. To these birds of the ice and snow, I have no doubt he gave them nobility and humor, so that man would know these two things are not so separate. Not that one should mix with the other, but so all could see that one should never be so proud as to forget laughter.

  As if to answer my absent-minded thoughts, a young bird waddled up. It had not yet shed its feathery down, and yet it strode boldly forth. Flopping and then climbing on my belly, the little thing squawked triumph on the Great Ice Plain, conqueror of all. I laughed again and petted the creature, stroking its fluff with my gloved hand.

  I wondered if we were not so dissimilar before the Judge of All, honking and hollering our little victory. As a father playfully wrestles with his children, I wondered if the Potentate might so grapple with mankind, letting men eagerly cry success as the father falls to the ground, holding his mewling babe in the air.

  The little bird hopped up and down, knocking the breath out of me for a moment. I laughed some more. The creature surprised me with its strength, a feisty thing. And strangely enough, it was a mighty thing, in its own manner. But it grew bored with the play, and it soon waddled back onto the ice. It rejoined the flock, and they moved on, wandering amidst the endless land. I knew some untold instinct would draw them to the coast where they could fish and swim, but I was still sad to see them go.

  A companion—any companion—would’ve been a great comfort in this dry and lifeless world. Shortly thereafter, I returned to my ice skimmer and continued on my way, searching for something to keep my sanity together.

  I was no stranger to seclusion or isolation, but this place had an eroding effect on the mind. There were precious few landmarks, and even these melded together in a disorienting blur. I noted particular clumps of snow and ice along the way, rising above the shallow dunes. A few times, I saw stone and scrap metal half-buried in the rolling land. Once, I discovered an abandoned wreck of an ice skimmer, its hull scavenged and left to decay in the snow. A tattered sail still flapped defiantly in the wind. I stopped to examine the vessel. I say examine—it was more a fun diversion as I climbed up on its fatigued metal.

  Anything to get away from sailing across the ice. Piloting the ice skimmer wasn’t punishing, not in the ways that broke the back and spent the muscle. But it was tedious. The jostling motions of the ship were difficult to get used to, and I could never find a comfortable position. The ice skimmer dipped when I expected it to plummet, and it jolted when I expected it to nudge. Over time, I would come to realize the obvious. To treat this ship as a vessel for water was a mistake. Despite the similar way it often swayed and pitched, this was a craft of the air, and I had to not so much follow the flow of the ice as to glide over it.

  I would eventually become more adept with the ice skimmer and how it handled, but unfortunately, there would be no alleviation of my other annoyances. The harsh glare on the ice often forced me to don snow shades, a piece of bone with two slits for the eyes. They were rather ill-made and sat poorly on the nose. I had to keep pressing them up so they didn’t slip off.

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  Still, it was better than being blindeded.

  More than once, I considered traveling during the night and resting by day—just to avoid the glare. But night came with its own problems, namely the further drop in temperature. The wind was biting in the day, but at night it became unbearable. The builders of the ice skimmer considered this, and the stern curved upward as a windbreak. But even that afforded little protection against the nightly chill. Twice, I had gone so numb in my extremities that I feared frostbite, and I did not want to squander the Bene Tincture on regrowing a finger.

  So, I stuck to daylight, with all its nuisances. I say again, if there was anything that gave me comfort, it was that I was liberated from Terminus and all its scheming. At least here, I was free, unbounded, able to go wherever I wished and when. There were no more conspirators lurking in the shadows, I often played with the rudder of the ice skimmer to ease my boredom, swerving this way and that, and chuckling at my own foolishness. But it was of great sadness to me, with this unfettered freedom before me, that there was nowhere to go, and that there might be nowhere to go ever again.

  After another five days, I could’ve easily imagined spending the rest of my life out here, growing old and never once reaching Myz. I wondered if my destiny was to be a skeleton under the yawning blue sky, clutching my tome as I was slowly buried under the snow and forgotten, like all the rest.

  Almost as if to shake me from these dark thoughts, I noticed a grey smudge on the horizon. Little more than a pallid speck amongst the endless white, I doubted it was anything significant at all. The glare had played similar tricks on my eyes before. And yet, I steered my rudder towards the mote in the long distance. Any distraction was welcome now, and if it had only been my imagination, then at least I could ease my curiosity with the knowledge that there had been nothing.

  Over the ice, I flew with a speed faster than the swooping dive of a bird of prey. Yet the grey smudge remained affixed steadfastly where I had first glanced it, neither fleeing nor revealing its secrets to me. After a while, I knew not the time, I realized that I was far far away from whatever had caught my attention. And whatever it was, it must’ve been a preposterous size to be visible over such a distance.

  I urged the ice skimmer on, excited by this new mystery. Stubbornly—reluctantly—the smudge grew into a defiant dot, taking on the beginnings of form and feature as I crossed the sweeping plains. I squinted my eyes until they hurt, and even then, it took an additional hour to make out what it was.

  Rising out of the ancient ice was a statue. Perhaps statue was the wrong word; it was more like a mountain, carved in the visage of a man. It had sunk to its chest, being swallowed by the slow passage of time. And yet, its immensity was such that I trembled at the creation and trembled even more so that it had been almost buried out of sight. A man might’ve chiseled his many palaces into the megalith, and it still would’ve been dwarfed by the statue’s indescribable vastness.

  The image wrought in stone depicted a stern, bearded man gazing resolutely out into the sky. His grey robes cascaded like cliffs, flowing cloth cut of ten thousand quarries. His chest and arms rose like colossal towers—no—great heaps, for I doubted any craftsmen could build another. His beard tumbled like a waterfall from the sky, curling as the currents of great rivers, trickling down into stone streams. The man’s austere visage sneered beyond sight, as if challenging the firmament itself. With one arm raised and pointing skyward, the statue seemed to be beckoning an unseen army, and giving the cold command to conquer the empyrean itself.

  I was greatly disturbed by this sight. I knew many things were said to be lost in the Great Ice Plain. This vastness, which must’ve once been an ocean, which still earlier must’ve once been a desert, had many mysteries untold. Wise men have said we stand on the shoulders of giants, but aboard my ice skimmer, I realized once more we stand only in the shadow of them.

  To think such a deed had been forgotten troubled me. I had grown up as a boy on Zodiak, living my life ignorantly without knowing such a thing rested here.

  Was this man a tyrant? A great king? Was this the likeness of the Potentate, or some blasphemous other god? Was this a machine of war, now unrecognizable to me in its mechanisms, or some act of great ritual? This was no mere sculpture. I could not possibly allow it to be that frivolous, so overwhelmed by what I saw.

  And yet, the hideous thought tugged at me. What if this thing, scarcely comprehensible, was inconsequential? Were there even greater feats lost to the passage of time? And if there were, how was I to know, unless I were to lay my eyes upon them? Of this man, of this mountain, I could not say. Should we plunge deep into the earth, would we find buried even greater giants, holding the world aloft on their shoulders?

  And to think it was forgotten! My heart despaired at that moment. Was this truly the fate of all things, no matter how mighty or defiant? Was it all to return to dust from whence it had come? And if so, was there no one who knew a way out of the grave?

  I could not stand this thought! Taking my ice skimmer, I sailed around, seeking any hint of who had made this wonder and why. I spent hours desperately searching up and down the rising walls—great bluffs of stone. I didn’t know what I was looking for. Perhaps language? Perhaps an inscription? But even if there were such words somewhere, there was no sense that I could read such an ancient language. With a sinking heart, I knew it was all obscured. All departed.

  Turning my ice skimmer away, I understood that I could not stay here, lest this distraction become an obsession. I set my vessel back on its original course, to distant Calrathia. And yet, I could not follow this path for long. Steering the ship back, I drove it all the way to where the rock rose frighteningly steep out of the ice.

  I hopped off my ice skimmer, and my feet passed softly on the ground. I laid my hand upon the weathered stone. It was intolerable to me that this monument should remain nameless, like no one had ever been here. I grabbed some tools and held them to chisel into the rock. And yet, before I made even the smallest strike, I hesitated.

  Who was I to deface such a work, made by hands so much greater than my own? But equally, what was I to do? It felt a worse stain to leave this monument unremarked on. I think there is much merit to the man who wants only to preserve things as they are. But at some point, we must abandon the lie that we are the curators of all history and take our place in the drama.

  Whatever we do, truth falls into fact, and fact falls into myth. But perhaps from myth, we may find truth again.

  I wrought words into the stone; words that had come unbidden from a story I heard long ago. It was this epithet—this memory—I cast for those yet to have eyes to see.

  My name is Usermaatre, Sovran of Sovrans; look on my Works, ye Humble, and rejoice!

  I departed back into the desolation, and as the cenotaph slowly slid away under the horizon, I recalled my own history.