Ice Caves are more than a frozen passage through The Tower: they are a hostile route where movement, technology, and buried history repeatedly meet. Will, Steve, and Loth cross them as an expedition, but the caves turn travel into a sequence of hazards and revelations, culminating in the discovery of a preserved corpse and the recovery mission that follows.

Setting and Traversal

Together, Will, Steve, and Loth push deeper into the Ice Caves while each adapts to the slippery floor differently. Will manages by improvisation, Steve relies on cleats, and Loth fashions makeshift footing of his own. The contrast establishes the caves as a place that tests practical ingenuity rather than allowing a single standard of movement; even Loth’s toe claws are unsuitable because using them would be uncomfortable.

The caves also function as a route between danger and safety. After Will shelves his suspicions about the circumstances surrounding the dead, the expedition continues, and several hours later the group has recovered four of the six corpses on its list. With Loth securing the route back, they return quickly and simply by way of the Ice Cave route to the surface. The location therefore serves both as an expeditionary interior and as a navigable line of retreat, though its safety depends on preparation and on the abilities of the people crossing it.

Hidden Discovery

The Ice Caves conceal their most important evidence beneath hoarfrost. Steve notices a faint shadow in the wall while holding glowbugs against it and asks for heat. Will has no fire Abilities, so Loth starts one of his personal heaters and hangs it from a chain beside the lump. As the hoarfrost melts, the apparent irregularity becomes a crystal-clear sheet of pure ice containing a perfectly preserved young woman.

The body is identified as Alicia Zodiac, daughter of the famed Lord Zodiac. She wears obvious Ranger gear and has a bow suspended beside her in the ice; Relics cover nearly every part of her body. The preservation is exact enough to make the scene a discovery rather than a conventional burial, while the missing head turns the corpse into evidence of violence and concealment. The caves thus transform the dead into an unresolved historical record: Alicia’s equipment remains legible, but the most identifying part of her body is absent.

Corpses and the Expedition’s Stakes

Alicia’s discovery is part of a larger effort. The party is not merely mapping the Ice Caves or passing through them; it has a list of corpses to recover, and four of six have been secured by the time the group turns back. That numerical progress gives the expedition a concrete operational goal while preserving incompleteness. The route produces results, but not closure.

The circumstances around Alicia also expose the social power surrounding The Tower’s elite. Will considers the situation strange but recognizes that he does not possess the whole story and likely never will. Rather than resolving the mystery, he shelves it and continues through the Ice Caves. The location’s function is consequently double-edged: it yields material proof, yet the proof remains embedded in political silence, missing remains, and inaccessible explanations.

Narrative Significance

The Ice Caves concentrate the book’s recurring tension between ordinary tools and extraordinary environments. Glowbugs reveal the hidden wall, Loth’s heater removes the hoarfrost, cleats and improvised footing make passage possible, and Relics identify the dead woman’s status. Knowledge is obtained through equipment, but every device also reveals the limits of what can be known: the ice preserves Alicia’s body while the missing head preserves the central absence.

The caves belong to a wider Tower whose spaces combine ancient engineering with unexplained systems. Elsewhere, Will studies a plain satchel that seems subtly enchanted, looks up at a sky fitted with reflective surfaces installed by Climbers thousands of years earlier, nearly falls through a three-foot-wide shaft of immeasurable depth, and finds an emergency-escape hatch beside the remains of a dissolved iron ladder. Against that background, the Ice Caves are not an isolated wilderness. They are another layer of a built environment in which old technology, magic, danger, and institutional secrets survive together beneath the surface.