And the moment is still there.

The blue tattoo on the pale shoulder, emerging from the ice.

The world she came from, frozen into the things her community placed around her.

The Ice Maiden, still on the Ukok Plateau — not in the earth now, but in the museum in Gorno-Altaysk, in the temperature-controlled environment that maintains what the permafrost once maintained.

She is home.

And the questions that she opens — about who the Pazyryk were, about what it meant to be a woman of status and possibly spiritual authority in the Iron Age Altai, about how a culture creates meaning and preserves it in the bodies of its members — those questions will keep researchers occupied for as long as she is studied.

The ice gave her back.