The Temple of Ashtar of the Ice is a temple of Ashtar, dead for a century, standing on a plane of ice reached from Sogol. It must be redeemed by someone able to become its priest, and its heir defends it from the first day.
| Type | Place (temple) |
| Heir | Lucio |
| Access | Arch of the Not Yet (from Sogol) |
| Chronicle | SGL |
| Houses of the Cycle | ♑ · 🕯 |
| Spanish entry | El templo de Ashtar del Hielo |
The land
The land, a place of endless blizzard, collided in a cosmic cataclysm with ancient primaries and froze them whole. Its ice is not elemental but a mixed Gehenna: snow falls with ash, black ice bites like acid, and a volcanic ember burns beneath the white. Those versed in planes call it burning ice, the signature of a mountain that is home to a pale lady (Loviatar). An unending war of cold and fire is fought there; the temple is a frontier position in it, watched by mephits of both sides.
History
Founded barely a year after the refounding of Sogol, the temple soon died of attacks and collapses, its priests forgotten inside. Recalling the cathedrals of Africa, it seems carved from a single stone toward the sky, in three bodies: main church, healers’ house and stables, with light escaping through the cracks.
On the first day the living gesta found a defensive trench dug by the Planorcos occupying the nave; a frozen garden with amber lotuses under the ice and a tentacled thing beneath; an old priest’s disturbed grave, over which the Blue Mourner appeared with her chain; a surgery room lit for a century by a crystal sphere, its labeled shelves (healing potion, cherry flavor) all empty; and a spiral staircase from which a howling rises. Two arrows in a shield at the threshold paid the first blood of the redemption, and the house answered a prayer no one had prepared.
Later days brought the basement (an altered sanatorium and laboratory), the aunt and her two daggers, and the joined hammer and chisel in the surgery room, where the one-winged angel manifested; then a storm that carried the company across the Mists to Ungarn, and the return with Lem’s body. The portal back to Sigil remains in the temple, keyed to the ice dagger, but an intense presence makes it unsafe; even the ice beings who sought it keep away.
Relationships
Uken named the inheritance without being able to enter it. Caloria, the kingdom beyond the ice, knows it by rumor.