The Frozen Flame
A mountaineer is found burnt to cinder in the middle of a pristine snowfield. No fire source, no accelerant, no footprints leading away. The snow around the body is undisturbed — yet the victim is charred black. A 1980s Soviet research station sits empty on the ridge above.
Era
Objectives
- Examine the body and the surrounding snow for burn patterns
- Search the abandoned Soviet research station on the ridge
- Cross-reference the station logbook with the victim's expedition notes
- Identify the temporal anomaly that caused the impossible combustion
Available Clues
- frozen-heights-1
- frozen-heights-2
- frozen-heights-3
Solution
The mountaineer was caught in a temporal fold — a future version of himself from a timeline where the Soviet station's experiment succeeded. The combustion was not fire but rapid forward time-displacement: his body aged decades in seconds while the snow beneath him stayed frozen. The undisturbed snow proves no one approached; the fire came from inside the timeline.