The High Shelves & the Under-Ice¶
North of Mother Rime's court the Pale Steps keep climbing: the High Shelves, the glacier's second tier, where the blue ice stands in treads cut for something patient and the country stops pretending to be landscape at all. Above the fields lies the Auger Field; west of them, the Sworn Terraces; inside the glacier itself, the Under-Ice - and at the far edge of everything, two things the north does not open. This is the surface game's top rung, levels 26-32, and the first zone where the dark is part of the terrain.
Getting there¶
From the Pale Steps shelf, cross the Rimefield (2044) and go NORTH through the rime-hedge gate. There is no camp, no vendor, no hearth and no mercy above the gate: the nearest bed is Thornfold's, the nearest buyer is Maud (135) or Ozzel (130), and everything you mean to use up here rides on your back.
Two practical warnings before the ladder:
- Blue ice is a footing hazard. Wear Maud's hobnailed fell-boots or climbing spikes (icy ground).
- The under-ice goes dark. Ten of its galleries are lightless in the full sense - the unlit fight blind. Carry a lantern, carry a spare, and count your oil like arrows.
The ladder:
| Stretch | Levels | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| The shelf fields | 26-28 | rime-hulks; the great steps; the survey cairn |
| The Auger Field | 28-29 | ice-augers, wind-played bore-pits |
| The Sworn Terraces | 29-30 | frost-sworn elders (tier-4 lockboxes) |
| The Under-Ice | 30-32 | glass-veined stalkers; ten dark galleries |
| The Margin Stair | 31-32 | hall-wards; the Doorward of the Margins |
The shelf fields (26-28)¶
The fields are blue ice stepped like a staircase built to no mortal scale, and the things on them read as terrain until they stop being terrain. Rime-hulks (the core skins at 240) stand cased in their own hoarfrost among the real boulders, and the difference is delivered at a walking pace that turns out not to be one. Hunt the long field, the shelf break, and the hulk wallows; mind the cornice walk, which is scenery, and load-rated by nobody.
The Auger Field (28-29)¶
Above the high step the ice is drilled - round pits, glass-walled, wind-played into a chord that never resolves. Ice-augers (the casing, 220) cut them, and cut them still: they arrive from below with half a second of rising note for notice. The flute ground is crossed quietly, the deep bores are not plumbed, and the whole field stops at a boundary no one drew, which the augers honor and travellers should find instructive.
The Sworn Terraces (29-30)¶
West over the crevasse bridges the ice has been dressed into terraces, and the frost-sworn elders keep them - the veiled ranks above the cantors, past singing, administering Mother Rime's tolls with a courtesy that has outlived its warmth. They carry silver and tier-4 lockboxes, and they do not decline the fight; the terraces' stillness is a manner, not a truce. What they watch, from rail and bench and chair of grown ice, is the glacier wall - and the ordered glimmer deep inside it, which has the look of streets.
The Under-Ice (30-32)¶
The glacier is hollow where it matters: galleries of glass and blue, lit wrong - a lightfall here, a milk-white blindness there, and ten stretches of honest total dark. Glass-veined stalkers (the pelt, 380 - the premium skin of the west) hunt it wearing the room's own glow. The under-ice keeps what it takes: read the glass vein, count the well's numbered steps, and form your own view of the wrong window. The deepest galleries run dressed and swept, which no melt does, and end at black stone.
The Margin Stair (31-32)¶
Dressed black masonry rising through the ice as if the glacier had been poured around it: the outermost margin of the halls the dark-elves have never confirmed. The stair descends to a lamplit landing and stops mattering after that: hall-wards - black-stone constructs, no blood in them - turn back the uninvited at the ward line, and the Doorward of the Margins (level 32) anchors it. It drops the margin-black shard on a good day. Beyond the line, the lamps go down to avenues nobody visits. Invitations are not applied for. Nobody has ever seen one issued, either.
The far ice¶
Past the under-ice's cold crawl the glacier's west flank opens on the far ice: flat light, no tracks, a wind that stops at a drawn line, and a mile that rings hollow over something the charts insist is not there. A black survey cairn - dark-elf work, the only confirmed kind above their halls - sights due west along a polished bearing-groove.
At the end of the bearing, set in a headwall of black ice, stands the Western Door: shut, seamless, of no material the north can name, with a ring of bare ice around it that the frost has spent ten thousand winters not crossing. The old charts put the Long Dark's margins behind it. Nothing opens it. Nothing knocks. The shelf-hands' entire map of the far west is one word, and the word is turn.
Skins & takings¶
- Skinning ladder: auger casing 220 - rime-hulk core 240 - glass-veined pelt 380. Maud at Thornfold pays 135 in the hundred, Ozzel 130.
- The elders carry tier-4 boxes and about 75 silver; the Doorward's margin-black shard books at 500.
- Curiosities off the country: the frost-sworn knot-ring and the glacier glass lens, for the collectors who ask no questions and pay accordingly.