The landscape went on forever. Deeply blue ice spiraled up in minarets, towers and peaks. Some showed crystalline roots – rough-hewn hexagonal bases and delicate branches at the top. Others were spindly coils of a wide icy thread. The closest way to describe them was to freeze a cyclone and turn it upside down. Thin rails and ribbons of flat ice flung from structure to structure.

Far off, they saw what could only be icy grass. Rolling fields of bluegrass, thin blades and microstalagmites arranged almost in a windborne lean across the ground. It crested a ridge and swept down towards a deep blue lake. The lake water moved in rhythmic sweeps, and it crested and broke upon the shore in a spray of snow that fed and grew and moved the grass out from the shore. It moved slower than water, like a thickened blue soup.

They looked on all this frozen beauty. They could not speak for a moment because it was so alien and yet so natural. Only the noise of their surrounding rubble could be heard.

Click, Click, Click.