Sea of Ice
The Sea of Ice is a frigid, desolate expanse that stretches across the Elemental Plane of Water, marking the border with the Para-elemental Plane of Ice. Unlike the vibrant coral reefs and warm currents found elsewhere on the plane, the Sea of Ice is a realm of arctic stillness and crystalline beauty, where the water grows sluggish, the currents falter, and the temperature plummets to soul-numbing cold.
The Sea of Ice is where the fluid vitality of water begins to die into silence and stasis—a stark, majestic boundary where one can feel the elemental war between motion and stillness. It is a place of isolation, beauty, and hidden peril, where survival depends on resourcefulness and warmth is a fleeting dream.
To traverse it is to move through a realm where every breath steams in protest, every heartbeat echoes against cold stone, and where even the sea itself may seek to freeze your story in place forever.
Geography
This vast region is composed of interlocking fields of icebergs, glacier-like flows, and slush-choked waters where solid and liquid blur in a state of ever-changing tension. The sky—if one can call it that—glows a faint, ghostly blue, filtered through shimmering frost-fog and crackling auroras. Below the surface, sheets of submerged ice form a jagged labyrinth, making navigation treacherous and easy to lose one’s way.
Large islands of floating ice drift through the sea, some as small as a boat, others vast enough to support entire frozen ecosystems or ancient ruins sealed in frost. The deeper one ventures, the more the warmth of water yields to creeping stillness, and eventually to the utter solidification that marks the threshold of the Para-elemental Plane of Ice.
Fauna & Flora
The Sea of Ice is home to a variety of cold-dwelling elemental beings, such as ice mephits, frost salamanders, and water elementals tinged with ice, whose forms crackle with frozen brine. Marids rarely venture here, though some maintain frost-bound citadels to monitor the encroachment of the Ice Plane’s influence or to exile those who have offended elemental courts.
Frost giants, white dragons, and ancient cryohydras are sometimes spotted migrating through this region, having found a way through interplanar ice tunnels or ancient glacial gates. Some mariners speak of icebound spirits—souls of those lost in the frozen sea—wandering the floes and whispering secrets in the wind-chill.
Occasional blizzards and flash freezes erupt from the depths, freezing entire fleets or turning vast stretches of sea into sudden sheets of ice. These phenomena are often unpredictable, tied to fluctuations in the Ice Plane’s elemental pressure or the will of unknown forces lurking beneath the floes.
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