The Place
Frostfang Crevasse is a deep fissure running a mile through the glacier, a wound in the ice that the glacier has never closed, and the wound is lit from within by a row of hot vents that break through the ice like cracks of light. The ice is blue where the sun reaches it and green-black where it does not, and the blue is a blue that has been cold for a long time, the color of a vein seen through skin. The steam off the vents is white and it hangs low, and the air between the blue ice and the white steam is the color of breath, a grey that is neither one nor the other. The vents number nine along the mile, spaced unevenly, and each one throws a cone of white light up through the ice so that the ceiling of the fissure is a row of windows that only open from the inside. It smells of cold iron and warm rock at the same time, a smell that should not be able to share a room, and the one sound is the ice itself, which groans and settles and occasionally lets go a crack that runs the length of the mile. There is no landmark the way a mountain has a landmark, but there is one: the Frost Gate, a low arch of clear ice at the mouth of the fissure, and the arch is the door, and the door is the cold. What makes the crevasse itself is the voice: the cold has a voice down here, an old one, and the voice is the vents, and the vents are the ice, and the ice is the mile.
How They Live
The Ice Goblins keep this place in the blue ice, carving their warrens into the walls of the fissure and lining them with fur and heated stone, and a warren is cut one vent at a time, because a vent is the season. Every dwelling is oriented to a vent, a rule with no exception, because a home without a view of the fire is a home that is dying, and the goblins have no patience for dying. Light is the vents, white and cold, and the white light makes the fur look grey and the faces look old, and the goblins like it that way, because the old look is the honest look. Food comes from what the cold preserves: the fish frozen in the ice shelf, cut free with heated stone, the lichen that grows on the warm side of the vents, and the minerals the steam carries up, which are not food and are kept as a promise. Water is the ice, and the ice is the water, and the goblins have stopped distinguishing between the two, which is either wisdom or a loss, and the crevasse has never said which. Heat is the vents, which rise and fall with the deep heat of the earth, and the day is measured by the vents, because the vents are the only clock the mile has, and the clock is not in a hurry. The defense is the cold itself: a visitor who steps into the fissure is already losing, and the losing is the alarm, and the alarm is the sentence. Every goblin that is born is set at the far end of its warren, away from the vent, for one full fall of the vents, and the far end is the naming, and the naming is the only thing the cold ever gives back.
People
Home of the Ice Goblins, whose frost-clans are counted by vent. Nine vents are lit at last count, and the count is kept in the ice, which is to say the count is as fixed as the cold, which is to say it does not change. The vent-keepers lead, and rank is decided by the reading, because a keeper who can read the rise and fall of the vents is the keeper the mile trusts. Nothing that runs on warm blood is welcome, and the warm is not needed, because the crevasse has a vent, and the vent has a fall, and the fall has a sentence. A surface traveler who once stood at the Frost Gate, the last one to be let into the mile, called it the only place where the air makes you pay before you take a breath, which is the truest thing he said and the thing the cold paid the least attention to.
In Stories
The place where the cold has a voice, and the voice is old. The Forgotten passed through the crevasse once, and the voice spoke to Uaellaen in a language he did not know, and he has not spoken in the mile since. The voice is still down there, and it is still speaking, and the goblins have never asked him to take it back.