Under the pale light of a waning crescent moon the group mushes on by dogsled. The temperature is below freezing and a scouring wind roars down the mountainside of Akin’s ridge, whipping gusts of snow into great whirlwinds.
Late in the day they arrive at the monastery and, while it remains sealed and boarded up against the winter, faint light can be seen from the second story. The building itself is a rough and rugged affair of cut stone, with a small tower looming over one side of the grounds.
They decide to split up, with the soldiers taking the dogsleds to see if they can find a sheltered kennel for their teams. The rest will enter through the front door to meet with Mondaleth. A knock on the door brings an silver and black garbed acolyte of the monastery to answer and they are brought in out of the cold into a grand entryway of vaulted ceilings, parquet flooring and other restrained displays of wealth.
Three acolytes are there to greet them, and the lead says that Mondaleth is in meditation and will be down soon. They are led to a waiting room and Ravenna strikes up a conversation with them, revealing inconsistencies in their responses. Eventually Mondaleth enters the waiting area, greets them and invites them into a lounge. He is a youngish northman with braided blond hair, dressed in the black and silver of the monastery, and pours himself a cup of tea. Mar’Khabazza begins the conversation about the fate of Beryl and his concerns for Opal’s future.
The conversation, while pleasant at first, grows stilted and Mondaleth has far fewer answers to Mar’Khabazza’s questions than is to be expected.. Magnus is warily eyeing the attendant monks and Ravenna grows impatient demanding answers to their questions and demanding an end to the obfuscation and evasiveness.
At this, the attendant monks draw weapons from beneath their robes and attack and a wild melee ensues, knocking over tables as the battle spills back into the entrance hall. At the end, the monks and Mondaleth are slain with Mar’Khabazza and Joktuk seriously wounded.
As Ravenna and the Rangers tend to the wounded, Magnus speaks up. “I really hope these were the people responsible for the slain priest outside and simply posing as the temple’s inhabitants because it would be a real shame if we just murdered Mondaleth.”
They push on, passing through the waiting area into a small chapel-like room with a stone chair on a dais. The stone is dead and grey and the chair is a simple blocky structure weighing several hundred pounds. Mar’Khabazza takes one look at the room and says, “I’m sure we are missing a massive clue to something here but we press on.”
They enter a lecture hall and a library and see that the books, scrolls, and tomes are in the process of being stripped from the shelves and lecturns, leaving the shelves bare with the odd piece of parchment discarded on the floor. Joktuk says, “Bandits looting coffers makes sense to me. Bandits emptying an entire library is more strengeness to the riddle.”
Moving through the ground floor they come across a temple chamber to Faylin the Stern Teacher.
They surprise a trio of monks moving a wheelbarrow loaded with boxes and loose coins across the chamber. When they spot the squad, they drop the wheelbarrow and flee. The rangers are quick with their bows and two are immediately slain but one ducks through a doorway and flees. And just like that, the group’s visit becomes a raid.
They begin a high-speed assault through the floor, sweeping through the rooms before making their way upstairs into an ambush that devolves into multiple skirmishes as Senior Sergeant Joktuk and Magnus lead the push through the ambush and take the fight to the impostors.
When the last sounds of the battle fade, many of the impostors are down with one prisoner taken. Mar’Khabazza is once again wounded, as well as Huntress Lokni and Private Furlbrow. They are put in charge of questioning the prisoner as the rest scour the floor. Joktuk and Magnus find a dormitory that contains a dozen or so occupants of the monastery, who immediately pleade for food as they are badly malnourished. Their story, collaborated by the prisoner, is that two weeks ago a band of marauders from the Koyatki Plains managed to gain access to the monastery from and old catacomb network. This assault caught the inhabitants of the monastery completely by surprise and they were quickly overwhelmed. They are led by Oolay’ah-ben-Ethrah-mah-Lanoorha-Tis, her sister and her consort. Over the last two weeks they have been taking a captive from the pool of prisoners and they aren’t seen again. The prisoner adds that, by explicit orders from The Lanoorha-Tis, they were to strip the library of all written materials, and move the books into the “room of stars in the caverns”
Leaving some of the squad with the liberated captives, the squad continues its exploration of the monastery, looking for any clue or sign to the whereabouts of Mondaleth the Sage or any of the monastery leadership. They do discover a tall mirror in a plush conference room. Its rack does not match the décor of the monastery and it looks to have been dragged here recently. From scuff marks and drops of blood it looks like prisoners are made to look into it, but the tracks and signs are confusing as to what happens next. More mysteries.
Further exploration reveals an old catacomb system that has new excavation that leads into a subterranean network of caves with an underground spring flowing through them.
Faced with a myriad of branches through the cave network, Mar’Khabazza gets the idea to have the rangers look for wheelbarrow tracks. Finding them, they move quickly through the cavern complex to a great star-shaped cavern that contains a massive pile of loot plundered from the monastery and a group of individuals clustered together and shouting at each other in multiple languages: there are four humans of various ancestry, two squat and sturdy duergar, and two tall and slender beings with the backwards-jointed legs of the winter elves.
Mar’Khabazza walks directly towards them, whether to parley or to bluff it is unclear, and addresses them in a commanding tone but the group is quick to respond, scattering and moving to engage while one duergar and one winter elf flee past a cluster of stalactites and exit the room while the remaining Duergar makes a gesture and the rocky floor, once ssmooth and flat, suddently sprouts a field of razor sharp spikes of rock which hampers movement and makes any fall deadly.
The Rangers harass them with arrows, Ravenna unleashes a fireball that completely immolates the leader of the marauders, Magnus fires at another with his flintlock pistol but is wounded by the stone spikes as he tries to maneuver.
Ranger Kina chases after the fleeing Duergar down a passage who summons the stone into a large wall, partially blocking the three of them from the rest of the chamber. Ravenna recognizes the remaining duergar as Earthmender Gorboto, the duergar from the complex in the abandoned wing of the Opal mines. She sends a spell of wounding at him, opening a bloody gash in his side, but he melds into the stone floor and disappears.
Blade and spell and arrow and bolt. The troupe are hard pressed at first, with the stone spikes causing wounds and hampering movement. But once free of the treacherous ground the unified tactics of the squad are effective against the leadership of the marauders who act singly and without regard for the others. The marauders are slain, but Kina is found mortally wounded behind the wall of stone. Her fellow rangers apply battlefield surgery, followed by healing spells to stabilize her. As the rangers work on their comrade, Ravenna, Magnus, Mar’Khabazza and Joktuk follow the passage further until it opens up into a freshly excavated room containing a recently excavated portal.
There are two large piles of books and scrolls on the ground next to the portal and the way they are scattered suggests that they were being thrown through the portal. But there is still no sign of Mondaleth.
