Oren opened his eyes. He was back at Sydon-Mar, the impossible stone globe laying half-buried in the northernmost snows of Omestris. The memory of him standing before the titanic monolith was etched into his subconscious, he remembered everything from when he visited it as a child-- the dry cold wind, the ocean of shadow that it cast upon the snow, the loneliness of it all.

It was different this time.

Oren turned around and saw them. A thousand thousand people stretching into the horizon, their gold eyes burning like torches for as far as Oren could see. They were all smiling, and somehow, he felt their hearts bestowing love upon him. It was then that he noticed it. The sting of frost on the top of his fist. Oren looked at his right hand and there it was-- an azure circle carved upon his pale skin. He grazed it with his fingers and felt it cool to the touch.

The azure circle began to glow, brighter and brighter, its resplendent blue light like a star in that darkness.

His eyes were still half-blinded by its light when he woke.

Ilya:

Ilya stood aboard the high spire of a beautiful white ark. He had never seen it before, but in his heart of hearts he knew that this was the VSS Karamzina.

Below him the deck was completely empty, which was strange to him. A ship needs its crew, and where else would they be but on the deck? Ilya climbed down the spire to investigate. The ship's Hearth Systems had cast its auto-aegis around the deck, forbidding the cold from seeping in and killing him. Still, even with the aegis' protection, he felt the frigid touch of the dark blizzards seeping into his blood. Such was its strength that with every step down the spire he became more and light headed. Ilya had never been so cold.

When he reached the deck Ilya looked around and saw nothing but darkness beyond the pale gold light of the ship's aegis. He realized, with both fear and excitement, that he was out there, beyond the Meridian, on uncharted ice. The Karamzina was proceeding through the darkness, cutting through the surface of the ice like a blade. The sound of the ark shearing through the frost was all-encompassing, but there was no life aboard the deck. It was as if he was the only soul on the Karamzina.

Suddenly, Ilya glimpsed a shape in the dark, standing near the edge of the ship.

It was Father Ragnar.

The young man turned to Ilya and smiled sadly. His pale violet eyes were sunken and the beginnings of a beard shadowed his jaw.

"I'm sorry," Ragnar whispered, his voice breaking.

It was then that Ilya woke up and found himself back where he was, standing before the doors of the Scarlet Shrine with the rest of Warband Leviathan.

"She was floating on a boundless blue ocean. The waves carried her gently as radiant white birds soared through the endless blue expanse above her. White clouds slowly trailed across it, casting soft shadows on the gentle waves below. She felt... something. A pleasant warmness touching her skin. She saw a halo of light shining down at her from high above but had to turn away when its radiance began to blind her. She marveled at it with squinting eyes, for she had never seen the sun as it wa. All her life she could only glimpse its vague presence shrouded behind the white Varyan sky. But in this place it had revealed itself, shining down proudly upon the world in all its splendor.

There, in that impossible ocean, where the frost that had imprisoned her world was nonexistent, she felt at peace. There was nothing but her, the sea and the birds.

It was then that she noticed it. An ornate blue circle on her chest. It seemed to be branded directly onto her skin, and when she traced her fingertips across it she could feel the strange brand growing frigid within her chest. It was as if someone had suddenly filled her heart with ice. Viveca began to cough. Frigid air escaped her lungs. There was something in her, something cold that was spreading to every inch of her body.

She was still shivering when she opened her eyes. She still felt it. The cold unlike any other."