The City in the Ice
That which lies beneath, should remain beneath
The people. They always knew the ice would be a constant in their lives. It had always been there and it always would. The sea was the sea and ice was the ice. Two parts of the physical world that were unchanging. They were the yin and yang of the planet.
The ice locked up in glaciers and massive floating sheets was the monolithic ever-was of the extreme north and the extreme south. It signified the extent of those opposing realms.
And then, one day, those ever forever unchanging facts of our assumed historical memories of what is and what was and what ever should have been...wasn’t.
Ever so slightly at first the ice changed. Soon it seemed effervescent, something coming alive, changing in colour and texture and tone. Then in time it grew translucent, allowing glimpses into a dim and shadowy world frozen since the beginning. Then it began to slough off in sheet and layers and thickly trickling streams of undiluted sea. And the never changing always counted upon tides changed, the seas rose, and coastal cities grimaced in panic for they feared the end of all things was upon them.
And then...the city appeared.
From the remnants of the walls of ice atop that place that had been in ancient times name Greenland by an outcast Viking adventurer as a gambit to draw people to inhabit his new kingdom in exile, from that formidable island of stone and frost it was first discovered. Satellite imagery searching for underground volcanic activity that could potentially explain the melting ice in that region caught a miles long straight line of stones. While many scientists speculated that it seemed too long and too straight to be accounted for as a natural occurance, it was nonetheless declared as such. Simply an abnormally long and uniform glacial morraine. Through the following winter months it was dismissed as just that.
The following summer that speculation was dropped. As the seasonal tilt of the globe raised temperatures in the northern hemisphere the ice fell in a constant retreat, revealing new mysteries week by week. First perpendicular walls adjoined the initial discovery in a manner nature had never demonstrated throughout recorded history. Within a month the first full structures were freed from the icy tomb. Soon walled rooms separated by streets and alleys were exposed. Some even had wooden roof beams still intact, at least for a little while until the exposure to air thawed them and dried them and turned them into dust.
For several years the slowly melting ice revealed more and more until the sites of Mohenjo-daro and the various Tepes that dotted the Anatolian penninsula were all dwarfed by comparison, and it kept coming. Archaeologists were in heaven with the constant stream of new discoveries. Speculations and ideas, some thoughtful and logical, others utterly insane, abounded and constantly morphed and changed as they were proven, then disproven, then reproven, then shattered. Regardless of the theories and midnight fever-dream revelations, the who and the how and when remained a complete mystery.
The structures grew larger and larger as the wall of ice receded. First they were one and two story constructions of flat stones piled into circular rooms much like those in the Tepes. Those morphed into multi-storied buildings made of larger polygonal stones, weighing twenty to fifty pounds each and with a minimum of five sides to a stone that were fitted so tightly as to seem to have been poured into place. As each winter covered the work with loose snow, the following summer would reveal as much or more again in newly defrosted urban structures.
Eventually the stones grew as large as those found in previously known megalithic structures such as pyramids and temples around the world. Egypt’s pyramids. Peruvian Sacsawayman’s two hundred ton blocks set into walls ten thousand feet above sea level. Baalbek in modern Lebanon with its one thousand six hundred ton megalithic foundation stones. They all seemed as though they had been projects built by students in comparison to the stone structures that began appearing.
Massive walls built of immeasureably large weights of worked stone were being estimated in the millions of tons. At first it had been assumed they were carved directly from what had been a mountain. Until the quaries for those stones were discovered a hundred miles away, in another newly thawed region of the island, with two mountain ranges between sites.
Some of those massive stones served as the lintels for what had been the gates to the inner parts of the city, thousands of tons of solid rock hefted two hundred feet into the air to rest above the entrance to whatever lay beyond.
One morning in the spring of the fifteenth year of gradual exposure, the city center was revealed. Concentric circles rising within concentric circles finally reached their apex. At the core of all of the revealed treasures of ancient history all of the artifacts and all of findings were eclipsed by a single giant mass. Rising from regular rows and layers and levels of straight and artistically curved stone structures was what looked like a massive palace that had been melted into a mishapen lump out of some fairy tale nightmare world. Pyramidal in some respects but with turrets and ridges and what may have even been windows, it was reminiscent of a child’s plastic toy castle left too near a fire, still recognizable for what it had been but warped and twisted and burned in places, liquified and resolidified in others. The whole thing shimmered like molten glass the colour of ebony.
Research revealed that the structure was indeed vitrified stone. It shone like glass over its entire surface, and contained traces of so many elements that they were still being discovered and catologued when the project came to a sudden halt.
The sound that came from within the Palace, as it was being called, was not like any sound produced by any earthquake that had been recorded in modern times. It was not a boom, or a thump, or a crack. It was not a rip or a grind or a tear.
The archaeologists on the team who first detected the sound fled in panic the instant they felt it, for it was a sound not heard with only the ears, but that vibrated through ones body the way electricity does when it is too much to be comfortable and barely not enough to kill you. Once they had run far enough away to bring their minds back under their own control they described it as combination of equal parts roar, rumble, growl and shriek.
It had words.
Words they could not understand with their ears.
Words no human would be able to utter via throat and tongue and lips, but words for certain for they all heard them, not in their minds alone, but in their very being, their souls. And they all agreed upon what those words said.
“Finally I Shall Be Free To Rule Again! Finally I Shall Be Free Of This PRISON!”
And mankind was again panicked and terrified and filled with dread.
For truly it was now upon them … the end of all things.