The transition from the temperate south to the Frozen North was brutal. Within a week, the lush forests vanished, replaced by a wasteland of jagged ice and black stone known as the Iron Tundra.
They traded their scholar's robes for thick furs lined with heat-conductive Aether-filaments. The cold here wasn't natural; it was a byproduct of the ancient machinery beneath the ice, sucking heat from the atmosphere to keep the Archive's cores stable.
"The air tastes like metal," Lyra complained, her breath hitching in the sub-zero wind.
"That's because the 'snow' is mostly iron-oxide dust," Kaelen noted, his modern eyes recognizing the signs of ancient industrial fallout. "Stay close. The magnetic interference here will scramble your blind-sight."