Ice

In aeons past, the armies of Surtur the fire goddess and Ymir the frost giant waged an unceasing battle for dominance over the Earth. For all those ages, they maintained an uneasy but enduring balance. Then humanity rose from the mud, and with the passage of time, came to fear fire more than ice, devoting their own meagre forces to the conflict. Not to be denied, Surtur beat back both mortals and giants, consigning the planet to unrelenting heat and the ice lords to seeming oblivion. Before leaving the material realm, in jest, she gave humanity the gift of magic and the curse of the return of dragons.

For thousands of years thereafter, the race of people knew nothing but a world without ice. Spanning the globe in sailing ships, the humans continued to thrive and remembered not the distant past. Then Captain Ki-Moon Yong of the Oceanic Trading Company vessel the Star of Jindo is assigned the task of solving the most profound mystery ever encountered. Another ship has gone missing and her only remaining crewman suddenly commits suicide after visiting the sunken continent of Antarctica. All of the dinosaur species of the south have gone mad, invading the guarded towns and cities on their way north, as if to escape some monstrous terror.

The answers to these enigmas all lie on the continent at the bottom of the world, and Captain Moon must take the Star to a strange research facility to discover them. But once there, he is confronted with a truth so profound and so nightmarish that it will change the very nature of reality. Can the Star of Jindo escape the inevitable in time to warn an unbelieving world of that truth, or will they be consumed in frozen horror?

Our Review

Centuries before this story was written, a battle between fire and ice was waged. Humankind endured a world of fire after the fire Goddess Surtur, defeated the frost giant Ymir and for a long time the earth had no ice, for Antarctica lay at the bottom of the ocean.

But is the ice returning?

This is an exciting adventure like no other, with dramatic scenery and gripping personalities. Intricately plotted, gritty and well written with distinctive movie quality.

Despite involving goddesses, giants and mythical beings, this version of our own world seems all too real…

The Author

James Pyles is a published science fiction and fantasy writer. He is also an Information Technology textbook author and editor, and technical writer for the IT department of a multi-state corporation. Forty of his short stories have been published in anthologies and since 2019 and he sold his first novella in 2021. James won the 2021 Helicon Short Story Award for his science fiction tale “The Three Billion Year Love” which appears in the Tuscany Bay Press Planetary Anthology “Mars.” “Ice” his first self-published science fiction novella, was published at the end of 2021. You can find him at https://poweredbyrobots.com/ or on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/jamespylesauthor/