The Basalt Pits are a strip of volcanic ground in the land of hielo ardiente (“burning ice”), disputed by two kingdoms. Their basalt pays for the ice palace’s rituals; their obsidian veins are held to be the source of black blades that kill what cannot be killed.
| Type | Place |
| Chronicle | SGL |
| Houses of the Cycle | ♑ · ⚒ |
| Spanish entry | Los Pozos de Basalto |
Description
Burning ice is the mixed Gehenna onto which the Arch of the Not Yet opens. The Pits are open mouths in black rock, smoking in gray snow, fire showing through the cracks. The fire cools into basalt columns and, where cooling was abrupt, into veins of obsidian. The plate adds two facing watchtowers under different banners, both unmanned this season, abandoned winches, and a freshly carved black-glass blade beside a dark stain in the snow.
The disputed strip
The basalt sustains the rituals of the ice palace and, it is said, older ones. When the Pits do not deliver, the rites are paid in the officiants’ blood. So the strip is garrisoned, lost and retaken, and truces between ice and fire are measured by who holds it each winter. Mephits fight on both sides. The dead Temple of Ashtar, exactly midway between the kingdoms, owes nothing to the Pits.
The black blades
- A dagger of black volcanic glass (the chronicles waver between obsidian and black basalt) killed the Lady of Pain.
- The obsidian plates of the six-armed guardian were forged, or appeared, from the same source.
- The key-dagger that opens what waits beneath the temple, and the black glass of the rebus that announced the Arch, share the material.
See also
- Loviatar — the pale lady of the ice side
- Obsidian Gates and Midnight Road — the other great black glass
- The Matter of the Ashes
- Temple of Ashtar of the Ice