: A narrow arch of frost over a bottomless chasm. To cross, Elias must face a Trial of Truth, where the bridge only holds if the traveler confesses their deepest regret.
Elias reaches the palace, scaling walls of slick ice. He finds Freya in the Great Hall, surrounded by hundreds of frozen "statues"—the victims of her loneliness.
Instead of breaking the ice with force, Elias places the not on his sister, but at the feet of the Queen. He tells her, "Fear is the coldest ice of all. You didn't freeze the world to rule it; you froze it so nothing could ever leave you again."
When Freya discovers him, she does not strike immediately. Amused by his defiance, she offers him a bargain: "Find your sister among these thousand statues before the moon sets, and you both go free. Fail, and you join them." The Twist of the Heart
: Along the way, Elias saves a fox trapped in a snare of magical ice. In gratitude, the fox—actually a minor spirit of the hearth—bestows upon him a "Warmth-Stone," a small ember that wards off the Queen’s lethal "Heart-Freeze" spell. The Confrontation at the Sapphire Palace