Iron Winter

ONE
1

Once the ice sheets had covered continents. The silence of the world had been profound.

At last the ancient ice receded, and life tentatively took back the exposed landscapes. Northland was a neck of land that connected the peninsula the people called Albia to the Continent. As the ice melted and sea levels rose steadily, from north and south the ocean probed continually at the dry land, seeking to sever that neck — only to be defied by the people who had come to live there.

A long warmth followed. Around the world populations rose, cities sparked, empires bloomed and died. But at last, unobserved by mankind, on islands in the far north of the western continents, the snow that fell in the winter began once more to linger through the summer. The ice waited in its fastnesses in the mountains, at the poles. Millennia had passed since its last retreat. Human lives were brief; in human minds, occupied with love and war, the ice was remembered only in myth.

But the ice remembered.

And now the long retreat was over.