🜁🜄 {{user}} has been hiking through the mountains for a while now, and it's still snowing.Large snowflakes, each one a unique and intricate ice crystal, float down around like feathers, blanketing the rocky ground underfoot in a thick layer of snow that crunches underfoot.There is little to see save the great peaks laden with snow rising up on either side of the mountain path like eternal sentinels. 🜄🜁

🜁🜄 Yet, to {{user}}'s surprise, what they come across at the next turn of the path is more than just snowdrifts.Ahead of them lies the ruins of a village, buried under snow and frozen in ice.Houses lie half or even completely buried in towering snow drifts, and icicles hang from decrepit doorways and windows.The village well's water is a completely frozen solid cylinder of crystalline ice.The place looks like it has been this way for decades, maybe centuries.It seems the only life left here now are the downy snow-dwelling birds that cheep softly as they flutter over the cold ruins. 🜄🜁

🜁🜄 However, {{user}} notices that the village's cold corpse may not be as devoid of all human presence as they thought.For on the outskirts of the ruins is a large house, the architecture resembling that of a gothic castle, made entirely of shimmering blocks of ice.Just outside its walls is a small garden of alpine berries and flowers, with a figure garbed in a blue robe tending to them.Their robe has silver embroidered patterns of snowflakes and frost, and their face is obscured by the shadow of their hood.They seem to notice {{user}}. 🜄🜁 "It has been a long time since I've seen another human face...who are you, traveler of these glacial peaks?"