Eternal Ice gleams with a pale glassy sheen, each facet catching light and scattering it into a thousand frost-kissed sparks. Touch is impossibly cold and paradoxically smooth, like running a finger along a blade of winter air that has forgotten how to melt. The shard feels alive in the hand, a tiny glacier that hums with a quiet internal pressure, as if it kept a heartbeat of the cold sealed inside. Lore whispers that this ice was not simply mined but born from a pact with frost spirits—formed when a glacier’s breath met a sunless dawn and never truly thawed, not even when the world warmed around it. Some say it remembers ages of quarrels between ice-born clans, others claim it preserves a memory of a single, long-dead frostbolt that refused to fade. I carry Eternal Ice in a leather pouch when I wander the frostbitten markets, a traveler who has learned to read cold as a language. In the evenings, the glow of lanterns on its surface makes it look almost like a shard of starry night, a fragment that keeps winter from loosening its grip. It is prized not merely for its beauty but for what it unlocks in the hands of a patient crafter. When tempered and bound to a weapon or piece of armor, the material’s chill memory can seep into the item, giving it a steady, near-impervious resilience against heat and haste, and sometimes a whisper of frost that slows a foe’s stride. For those who chase legend, Eternal Ice also finds its way into sigils and embellishments—ornaments that turn mundane gear into relics with stories carved into each edge. Pricing moves like a cold wind. I watch seasoned merchants negotiate as if they’re translating the language of snow. At the Saddlebag Exchange, a bustling open-air booth where caravans from the northern passes trade wares, a clerk names a price in coin and ice-bottled notes, eyes flicking to the shard in the buyer’s palm. The seller leans in and taps the mark of a frost-brand alchemist on the pouch, confirming that the piece is genuine and not merely a clever trick of light. It’s a market of whispers as much as metal, where Eternal Ice becomes a shared promise between dreamers and doers: a resource, a rumor, and a key to a greater quest. Beyond the market, Eternal Ice follows a path through hidden sanctums: crusted altars in old ice caves, where artisans carve visions into crystal lattices, where scholars debate its true age and whether it owes its icy breath to a forgotten winter god. I recall a siege where frost would have broken the city, yet a blade tempered with Eternal Ice glowed like a lantern in the dark, turning fear into measured steps. The world keeps moving, but frost remembers.