Thorn’s Chronicle Rise of the Winter King Part 2: The Lost Valley of Hutaaka, and the Vault of the Ancients Prologue: Down Lightningʼs Road" 3 Waxing crescent of the Deep Snows (on or about Kaldmont 4, 997AC)" 5 First quarter moon of the Deep Snows (on or about Kaldmont 5, 997AC)" 10 First quarter moon of the Deep Snows (on or about Kaldmont 6, 997AC)" 13 First quarter moon of the Deep Snows (on or about Kaldmont 7, 997AC)" 27 Half moon of the Deep Snows (on or about Kaldmont 8, 997AC)" 45 Half moon of the Deep Snows (on or about Kaldmont 9, 997AC)" 52 Half moon of the Deep Snows (on or about Kaldmont 10, 997AC)" 66 Waxing half moon of the Deep Snows (on or about Kaldmont 11, 997AC)" 72 Waxing half moon of the Deep Snows (on or about Kaldmont 12 - 17, 997AC)" 105 Waning half moon of the Deep Snows (on or about Kaldmont 18, 997AC)" 152 Waning quarter moon of the Deep Snows (on or about Kaldmont 19, 997AC)" 198 Waning quarter moon of the Deep Snows (on or about Kaldmont 20, 997AC)" 227 Waning quarter moon of the Deep Snows (on or about Kaldmont 21, 997AC)" 247 Prologue: Down Lightning’s Road We ran. When I would stumble, Gilliam’s hands were on my arm, hauling me forward. The walls were chased with more and more streaks of lightning, their courses becoming increasingly erratic as they played out ahead of us. The walls seemed to thin in places, and there was naught but blackness beyond the fog. We dared not look back. Somewhere, the ground beneath our feet took on a different texture, the dwarven-stonework smooth surface we’d been running down becoming more uneven, and then, amidst the splashing of the water at our ankles came the harsh crunch of rough river sand under our feet. Gilliam and I both staggered, our feet sliding nearly out from under us, and we tumbled. “Roll!” he shouted as he went down a half step ahead of me. The cold water was a slap in the face, a tingling shock running all the way up my left side as I hit the ground of the tunnel. Water flooded my mouth and nose, and I coughed and sputtered, remembering at the last minute to roll as I fell, to let the momentum of the roll take some of the bite from the impact. I rolled over and over in the cold water, soaking myself literally from head to toes. The water wasn’t very deep — at best two handspans, but it tugged at me as I rose uneasily, trembling with the shock of the cold and the tumbling fall, wheezing, trying to draw air into my lungs without taking in any more water. “Keep coughing,” Ana’s voice said to me, as if from a great distance. “Your lungs will clear in a few moments.” I blinked water from my eyes, looking around. The moon was further along in the sky, nearly blocked by the towering walls of a mountainous canyon. Gilliam and I were crouched along the bank of a narrow but swiftly-flowing river. The bank was lightly populated by low scrub and a few stunted trees. Those, and rocks were our only company. “Where are the others?” Varis asked, throwing a blanket over Gilliam’s shoulders. Ana helped me gather another blanket around my own. Gilliam glanced back, where the low fog was already being blown to shreds by the gusts of cold wind. “They should have been right behind us,” he said, through chattering teeth. I shook my head. “Silva fell. I saw, just before this... thing… started to collapse.” I waved a shaking hand at the last of the curls of fog. “How?” “Arrows. Sped by the wind that carved that tunnel in the fog.” “Is she—” I shook my head again. “I could not say. But they were the same arrows we saw used earlier. Black shafts, black fletching.” I did not hold much hope for the girl, but I did not wish to burden them with my speculations. The girl was in the hands of the Immortals now, more than ever. “Here!” Varis called, motioning us over to a deep split along one wall of the canyon. It looked to’ve at one point been the bed of another stream that fed into the river Gilliam and I had tumbled through — the floor was wide and sandy, and sloped slightly back towards the canyon. We hurried out of the biting winds, Varis and Ana making forays out among the riverbank to bring back what scrub wood they could find. Fortunately, much of it was dry enough to use without my having to resort to flamecraft, the narrow walls of the pass only admitting the lightest of snowfall. Though the fire was warm enough, it did little to lift the dark mood that had settled over us. We slept poorly, in shifts, but the rest of the night passed uneventfully. Waxing crescent of the Deep Snows (on or about Kaldmont 4, 997AC) A thick, heavy mist rose as the night dipped even colder. Sounds in the fog seemed louder, nearer, yet further away, and as if they came from every direction at once. I closed my eyes against the swirling shades of gray, and concentrated on listening. The dull crackle of the fire, the burbling rush of the river beyond our shelter, and the rattling swish-clatter of the mountain winds through the scrub were all that I could make out. Occasionally, a clink or rattle as Varis shifted in his sleep — how anybody could sleep in armor, though, was beyond me. “How the in the name of Vanya do we find our way through this muck?” Gilliam asked over breakfast, waving a hand at the shifting, stifling mist. He drew his cloak closer about himself, and hunched closer to the meager fire. I was having to prod it along, the mist trying to stifle it. “Not that seeing our way through this will be of any good,” Varis said, swirling the leaves in his tea cup. “We’re already lost, it can’t get much worse.” “Lost?” Ana asked, her eyes widening. She glanced over her shoulder, at the roiling wall of fog that obscured even the break in the cliffs that was less than a stone’s throw distant. “Did you not see that tree at the turn in the river’s course? It was the same one we saw on the far end of Thorn’s Hierarch’s traveling spell.” “I was a bit busy looking up and down river for enemies to take note of a single tree,” Varis said. “Besides, how do you know? One tree looks much like another to me.” He shrugged, then swallowed the last of his tea. “It was— Oh, Thorn, you tell them,” Ana sighed. “I’ll admit, I was a bit preoccupied by shivering and wanting to get out of the wind,” I said. I sipped at my own cup of tea. “And to be honest, one tree looks as much like another to me as well.” Varis stood, then, a sharp motion that sent the plate on his knee clanging to the ground as his armor jangled about his shoulders. He scanned our small camp. “We need to go,” he said, stooping to begin shaking out his bedroll. Gilliam held a spoonful of overly-thick oatmeal halfway to his mouth. “Can I at least finish breaking the night’s fast?” “Depends on how fast you want to run to catch up,” Varis said over his shoulder. “Some enlightenment, Varis, please?” Ana had poured some of the boiling water into her camp bowl, and was sloshing it about. “The Greenwarden pointed to the northwest last night, correct?” Varis asked me. I nodded. “Then that river is more likely than not the Foamfire. And that puts us squarely in Death’s Head tribal lands.” He tugged viciously at the straps securing his bedroll to the bottom of his pack. Gilliam chuckled. “Gave them quite the bloody snout— Oh… “ He had some difficulty swallowing the last of his oatmeal. We picked our way slowly upriver, Varis at the front, Gilliam treading carefully behind, his eyes seemingly only half open. But he was doing as I had done earlier on my watch — listening more than looking, for there was little to see in the mist but swirls of gray and darker gray, shadows within shadows. We broke for an early lunch around another of the sharp turns the Foamfire had wrought through the canyon, where the approach from ahead and behind could be more easily watched. The fog still hadn’t lifted, and our hoods and hems of our cloaks dripped with the moisture. “Just how far does this river go? And to where?” Ana asked. “Not many have mapped this far in,” Varis said. “Gnolls tend to eat anybody who comes even half as far in as we’ve made it.” “Well, that’s reassuring,” the cleric said. “And yet we haven’t run into a single one,” Gilliam mused. “That worries me.” “I would be more worried if they started coming at us out of this fog, I think.” I said. “As far as where this river leads, well, we just need to keep following the road.” Gilliam and Varis both glanced at each other, and then to me. “Small, broken with age and a lack of upkeep, but there was most certainly a road here, an age ago.” “And… roads only lead to one place,” Ana said.