the Thaw Bloom

The Thaw Bloom is the widening meltwater channel the clans have watched with growing cold: what slept in the deep cold is waking hungry all at once, and the crack's floor is a hatchery this season, broods of things the year-lists have no names for coming up the blue walls toward the light. Durgan's contested priests and Vhael's hunters agree on nothing about the Bloom except its arithmetic: the hatchery's output climbs each thaw, the ice's lid thins each year, and somewhere under the north the cold that kept all this asleep is failing, which means the north's real question is no longer what is waking. It is what was keeping it asleep, and why that stopped.

the Thaw Bloom lies in the Crack. Adventurers of levels 38–46 find their measure here.