Abadius 2nd, 4713 (night, The Path of Aganhei, The High Ice)

The Path of Aganhei lies ahead of us; the frozen remains of the undead, behind.

I spent most of the night finishing a headband for Qatana. She approached me with the request the night that we left the Storm Tower.

“Hey, do you have a minute?” she asked sheepishly.

“Of course. What’s on your mind?”

“I picked this up way back in Kalsgard, but forgot about it until I found it while rummaging through my pack this morning.” She held up a simple bronze headband studded with half a dozen gems of swirling green malachite. “I was wondering, uh, if you weren’t too busy…if you might be able to fashion this for me into a headband that can strengthen my will.”

I took it from her and studied it under the caravan lights, turning over and around. Qatana’s tastes tended toward minimalist. “It’s lovely,” I said, and I meant it. “I like the malachites.” The simplicity of its design had a certain elegance.

She made a small squeak, shifting on her feet is if someone had prodded her. I looked up expecting an explanation, but none came. Instead she added, “I have enough diamond dust to complete the work…at least when supplemented with some of the crystal shards we took from the tower.”

We had piles and piles and piles of purple shards. The unidentified gemstones had powered the storms above the Tower, and we destroyed them by literally bashing them to pieces. They shattered into clouds of tiny fragments as the magic infused in them was released. They almost certainly have no trade trade value, but that does not make them useless.

“Of course!” I said. “It will take me several days, but I can do it.”

The magical cubes we’d found made this process both faster and easier. Spells and furs might keep me warm, but my tools and equipment have no such protection. With the cubes it was like working in a heated cabin, only without walls or a roof. No matter how cold it was outside, once you crossed the threshold the chill was just gone. Which was weird until you got used to it.

Qatana looked excited when I presented it to her this morning. “You used the tourmalines!” she said. “And you’ve made it beautiful!”

I smiled at this. I didn’t strictly need them, but the headband itself came from Kalsgard, the ornamental wire from Unaimo, the gem fragments from the Storm Tower…I could go on. “I wanted this to tell a story,” I replied. Almost everywhere that we’d been was represented in some fashion.

I was actually worried that I had overdone it. The design was a little more ornate than pretty much anything she wore and I was more than a little relieved that she liked what she saw. One very refreshing quality about Qatana was that you always knew where things stood with her. If she said it was beautiful, then she thought it was beautiful.

After making camp tonight, Ivan conjured some fire for the sole purpose of melting the ice and snow around us. “We’ll have a snow party!” he said, clearly excited.

It was actually pretty fun, much more than you would think. For weeks the landscape has been a trial at best, and this was a chance to see it not as an obstacle to overcome but instead something to play in and enjoy. It felt good to just be silly for a while.

I spent a couple of hours creating an ice sculpture of the Dead Man. It won’t win any awards, but that’s not really the point.

Abadius 3rd, 4713 (noon, Path of Aganhei, The Crown of the World)

We’ve dropped down into a basin on the Tian Xia side of the plateau. It is enormous: according to the map, it’s roughly 100 miles wide here, at its narrowest point, and four times as long. At the wide end, the town of Ul-Angorn sits on the shore of the Ruun Uvas, a huge saltwater lake which is fed by melt water coming off the ice sheet. It will take us nearly a week to reach it.

Vankor is still not doing well. Qatana, Ivan and I talked this over and we’re going to use the restoration spell on him again. We have plenty of diamond dust, Ul-Angorn isn’t that far away, and we really need him back. This second casting will take care of it. Qatana will prepare it in the morning.

Abadius 6th, 4713 (evening, The Path of Aganhei, The Crown of the World)

Qatana cannot always be relied on to help us maintain a low profile. That’s just something we’re going to have to accept, I guess. Part of the frustration is that you never really know which Qatana you’re going to get when we meet someone new. Will she be cordial? Suspicious? Friendly? Hostile? I’ve given up trying to predict how she’ll react to strangers. Honestly, at times it just seems to be completely random.¹

She wasn’t always like this. I still remember, very vividly, the first time I saw her after she and her family had vanished and were presumed dead. It was in Korvosa of all places: she was the only one who had survived, and it was Shalelu that had found her. I have no idea how or why they were so far east; I never asked. I was eleven then and Qatana and I spent a couple of days exploring, me showing her the best parts of the city from a child’s perspective. She was distant, hesitant, guarded, and grieving, but also curious and excited. And more importantly, what she did also made sense, even to an eleven-year-old. At least, once I fully grasped what was happening. Even a decade later when we would see each other in Magnimar, she was still the Qatana I had grown up with. Yes, she may have come across as rude to people who didn’t know her—OK, and sometimes to those who did—but she was never erratic.

This…what I see now is something new.

Sometimes I feel like there was more I could have done, or something I could have done differently, once she was back in Sandpoint. Those first years were hard—how could they not be?—and they were the years that would have made the difference. Without a family of her own she needed support wherever it could be found, but the thing is, neither of us were particularly rich in friends before. Logically, I know this doesn’t make sense, that this isn’t about me, that there’s more to it than that. But logic has nothing to do with it. It’s how it feels.

I bring this up now because we’re only a couple of days out of Ul-Angorn and we’re starting to see signs of human and humanoid settlement. The most significant of them came about mid-day today, when we passed a cabin fairly close to the Path of Aganhei. Even in the faded twilight we could see the smoke coming from its chimney so we decided to stop. I mean, why not? Not counting Katiyana (why would you?), this was the first sign of civilization…gods, in nearly two months.

The owner was a halfling gentleman named Kobi, and for reasons known only to Qatana she decided she liked him. After an awkward little greeting where he thought we were headed onto the High Ice—we were clearly headed south, but people see what they are expecting to see, I guess—and tried to talk us out of it, he invited us inside just to visit. There was no hiding that we had just crossed, of course, but Qatana just could not help herself. She gave him the highlights of our exploits across the Boreal Expanse: the storms, Katiyana, the Storm Tower, Iqaliat, the white dragon, and even the Dead Man. What do you do at that point?

It’s not the events so much as it is the attention. Realistically, one halfling living 100 miles from the nearest settlement does not seem like a huge problem, but eventually he will talk to someone, who will talk to someone else, and so on. Word spreads. We were supposed to come to the Crown and disappear, not develop a reputation that calls us out.

Abadius 9th, 4713 (night, Ul-Angorn)

I give up. Honestly, I do. It is impossible to keep a group of thirteen adults, including the ones who should know better, from drawing attention to themselves. So I am done trying. I can’t be everyone’s nanny, and I wouldn’t want the job even if I could. I don’t want to be my grandmother. I love my grandparents, but that is not the same as loving everything about them. That is no way to live my life.

People will either learn or they won’t. Ameiko obviously hasn’t—at this point, whenever she says, “No one here knows who I am,” it is reasonable to assume that we are in imminent danger—and even Suishen has stopped offering advice on what to do about it. The sword and I finally share a common bond.

We are a danger not just to ourselves, but also to those around us. If we’re going to continue to tempt fate like this, then I’ll just have to be prepared for when someone takes advantage, especially in environments that put others at risk, as happened tonight. I have to pick spells that I can use in close quarters, without harming people and structures, even incidentally.

Speaking of tonight, that ogre mage was foolish to try and take us all on like that, but hauteur seems to be a running theme there. I mean, he had to know we were not going to roll over and die given what had happened in Kalsgard, right? But I guess he thought he was different.

In all honesty, his gambit was a good one. While we were all wary, we weren’t really on guard for an oni disguised as a human (though I suppose we should have been, yes?), and even if we were could we reasonably have kept it up for hours on end? Which is how long he was willing to wait. That part was smart, as was the attempt to lure Ameiko away through an enchantment. He just didn’t have a contingency plan that was better than “hack-and-slash with sword”, which is what surprises me. But if our enemies want to make it easy on us, I guess I shouldn’t complain.

The worst part of that was having it all happen in the middle of The Frozen Spike. One second we have Mr. “Why Don’t You Come See My Music?” surrounded and magically held, and the next there’s an ogre mage standing in his place, chairs and tables pushed aside and bar staff and patrons scrambling to get the hell out of the way or cowering in terror.

Ten seconds later we had cut him down on the spot. Ameiko landed the killing blow. That may end up being important.

The owner or proprietor, I think her name was Gerta, was pretty distraught. I guess I would be too if something like this happened in my bar. Ivan and I used our spells to fix the chairs and tables, and of course expunge the blood. There was a lot of blood. In less than 15 minutes, though, there was not a trace of it left, and I think the bar was even cleaner than it was before we got there. A little music, a little dancing, and a round of drinks for everyone, and things were more or less on the road back to normal.

Maybe I am being hard on Ameiko and the others. Yes, a Tian woman playing a samisen is an obvious giveaway, but so is a five-wagon caravan rolling in at this time of year, looking battered and battle-scarred. There is a reality here that there’s just no way for us to hide or be discreet. Drawing attention to ourselves was just pouring water in the ocean.

You know who else is well known here? Ulf. I guess that shouldn’t be a surprise. I imagine every caravan stops in Ul-Angorn on the way to Tian Xia so they probably get to know all the Crown guides fairly well. Gerta’s professional assessment? He can hold his liquor. That, and he can be “surly”. That’s it. That’s what came to mind. Obviously, she bases this opinion on how he spends his time between jobs, or on overnight stops. Which is a little unfair. The drinking he’s done on the road with us has hardly been excessive, and you can be surly and gruff if you have the skills to back it up.

We more or less knew the “surly” bit already, anyway. It was pretty clear from talking with Uksahkka that Ulf had his way of doing things, and you either did them his way or he wouldn’t do business with you. But like I said, his reputation spoke volumes. Even Greta eventually, albeit grudgingly, admitted the same: “He obviously must be good at what he does because gets people across.”

We’ll be here another night.

Abadius 10th, 4713 (evening, Ul-Angorn)

Sparna has made arrangements to have some maintenance and repairs done on the wagons. Strictly speaking, this isn’t even remotely necessary, but given last night’s events a little added good will can’t hurt. I spent the morning getting us re-provisioned and learned the locals were divided on whether we were saving the day or the source of the trouble. Of course, we know the answer to that but we’ll be keeping it to ourselves.

Qatana interrogated our corpse because that’s just a thing we do now. Like that sort of thing is somehow normal. For once, we got direct answers.

“Who were you working for?” she asked.

“I am an agent of the Five Winds.”

The Five Winds? We have no idea who that is, though it’s certainly a good guess that they are related to the Five Storms and bad with names.

“How did you find out we were here?”

“I was waiting to see if you would come.”

“How did you get here?”

“Traveled by magic.”

Her last question was the one we most needed to know: “Did you communicate our presence to others?”

“Yes,” he said. And that was that.

Obviously, this is not good. They know we’re right here, right now, and will soon learn that we survived. If it was up to me we’d have left on the spot, but no one asked me for my opinion.

Ivan took care of the body. He conjured a ring of fire around it and just let it burn until there was nothing left but ash and blackened, brittle bones.

Sparna found a set of jeweler’s tools for me while I was running my errands. I’ll need them for our talismans, which I want to set with some semi-precious stones just to give them a little flair. We still have weeks of travel ahead of us, and this is a good way to use the time.

There are a handful of dwarves here and they and Sparna have more or less gravitated to one another. A couple of them were in the Frozen Spike last night and I overheard them talking to Sparna, but I played dumb. For one, I’ve learned not to tip my hand just to show off, and two, I didn’t want to butt in on their conversation. And, I suppose there’s a three, as well: people talk pretty candidly when they don’t think you can understand them. You never know what you might hear.

Ameiko, Qatana, and I spent the afternoon together and, predictably, it descended into mischief. I like a little mischief now and then, and the three of us were pretty good at it when we were kids. There was this one time, back before Qatana…well, back before, so I must have been 9 or 10 years old. The Flinch brothers had this horse and they were obviously not taking care of it and she was very upset. We came up with this crazy scheme to liberate it without it being obvious that it had been taken. Qatana spent days making an enormous, fake cocoon, and one night—anyway, it was so brazen and ridiculous that it made sense only to a kid, but amazingly, it worked. Well, it worked long enough for the horse to find a new home far away from Sandpoint, which was good enough.

Today, we visited a little shrine to Desna that was tended by a druid. I was a good girl, and did not burst out laughing when Qatana asked, “Would you mind if we erected a small tribute to Groetus behind the temple?” If you want to really catch someone off guard, that’s a pretty good opening line. From that moment on, I was on board with her idea.

Qatana’s formal religious education may have stopped a few years ago, but mine has not. Some random druid was not going to win a theological debate with me, and they relented in short order. “Just make sure it’s far behind. Maybe on the other side of that pond over there?” That was a little extreme, of course, but I didn’t want to upset Desna, either, so I chose a respectful distance for my task: making an ice sculpture of a grinning skull.

Side note: it’s really hard to do that when you’re fighting fits of hysterics.

Abadius 14th, 4713 (evening, Ovorikheer Pass)

We started the climb to the Ovorikheer pass today. This whole area is geothermally active and it just smells terrible. We had to navigate the fumarole fields of Baruun’s Breath carefully to avoid being overcome by the fumes.

Radella unpacked what looked like a portable alchemy lab and spent much of the evening extracting chemicals from the hot springs near our camp. It’s the sort of thing Etayne would have done.

When she was finished, she had four vials of what looked like three different substances.

“What did you end up with?”

“Sulfuric acid, arsenic, and cyanide.”

I am sorry I asked.

Abadius 15th, 4713 (midday, Domagalki Forest)

Everyone’s pretty shaken up, including me. Gods! Two enormous spiders, the biggest I’ve ever seen, hit our caravan. We didn’t even see them until they were practically on top of us. How do you miss something that big? How do you miss two of them?

I didn’t even think. One of them was bearing down on Ameiko’s wagon and I just started dumping everything I had on it. When it backed off, I turned to the other and didn’t stop until it was engulfed in flames.

The others had to intervene to keep me from incinerating the first one, too. Why? Because they wanted to harvest its venom. Again, sorry I asked.

Olmas went down during the skirmish, barely clinging to life. Sparna, too. We were mere seconds from disaster.

People are giving me that look. Especially Sparna. What do you want me to say? What did you expect me to do? They were gods-be-damned spiders the size of a whale. What part of this don’t you understand?