Abadius 31, 4713 (Uqtaal Necropolis, night)

I spent some time pouring through the books I brought with me, looking for every scrap of information I could find about yeti. I really wish Etayne was still with us. What took me close to an hour she probably could have done from memory, and maybe she could have given us something we hadn’t already learned from personal experience.

They are well adapted to the cold, obviously, as well as the dark. As we’ve learned, their bodies actually radiate a bitter cold, and if you are unlucky enough to meet their gaze you are hit with a paralyzing fear. On top of that is their incredible strength, rivaling that of even dire apes, and a ferocity to match. They don’t really have any weaknesses, either, except perhaps to fire. They are, in a word, dangerous—extremely dangerous—and there are dozens of them here.

They’re also intelligent, or rather, intelligent enough. One of the books I have suggests they speak aklo, a language of the darklands. In theory we would try and talk to them, but of course none of us understands it.

I have an idea about that.

Calistril 1, 4713 (Uqtaal Necropolis, early morning)

In my dream, I was standing on a hill at the feet of the Wall of Heaven, staring out at the expanse of Tian Xia below. The Path of Aganhei faded into the rocky plains in the distance, and a chill wind whipped around me. The caravan was behind me, silently waiting, the animals still in the cold air. I would find the way. The Path was important here. Stray too far from it, and the horse riders would no longer be bound by the traditions that protected us.

We had to stay on the road, but we couldn’t follow what we couldn’t see. I approached the two figures that were up ahead. I hadn’t noticed the tents making up the small village just beyond them. The Tian-La are a nomadic people, and move their villages with the winds and the seasons, following the wild horses that they would capture for breeding with their own.

The woman looked up at me. I skipped the introductions and pleasantries, and got to the matter at hand. In Tien, I asked, “How do we follow the Path from here?”

She looked up at me, smiling, and answered, “Chi bol gadaadyn khün shüü dee.” I didn’t know what it meant, and didn’t have the right spell prepared.

I tried again. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand. How do we follow the Path from here?”

Still smiling, she said, “Tanyg tusalj chadakh khün bii. Namaig daga,” and then gestured with her arms as she turned around and began walking away. I still didn’t understand, but she obviously wanted me to follow her, so I did. She occasionally turned her head back to check on me, to make sure I was keeping up. “Ireerei! Namaig daga!”

An enormous field of flowers spread out around us. There was no sign of the village or the caravan, just flowers as far as I could see in all directions. We were walking in between low hedges of flowers and thorns, and up ahead was a tall woman tending to her prizes. I was alone now, and she looked up and beckoned me towards her.

She had long, black hair, curly like the others I had met, but different somehow. It was much longer than I realized: it hung down around her ankles, and I thought I could see hints of red, green, and gold there out of the corner of my eye. When I looked directly it, though, there was just black.

“Bi tand beleg ögdög,” she said. I still didn’t understand, but she held out a flower to me and I knew that she wanted me to take it, so I did.

“Ene beleg tany ayalald tuslakh bolno.” This gift will aid you on your journey.

It was a delicate, red rose, the most beautiful rose I had ever seen.

“Bayarlalaa,” I replied. Thank you.

It needed a vase so I reached for one of the tall, empty glasses on the table in front of me. The glass was made from a lead crystal, extravagant for drinking but perfect for this. The table stretched nearly the width of the hall. It was a lavishly decorated palace, and also immaculately clean. The white table cloth that covered it looked as though it had been made just for this occasion, but I knew that it had been used many times, and fastidiously cleaned to return it to this state. There was not a speck of dirt anywhere. Not on the table, not on the people seated with us, or even on those we had met since entering the city.

“Tavtai morilno uu!” boomed a voice from one end of the hall. Welcome, travelers! I didn’t recognize the speaker, but everyone stopped talking and turned to face at me. I couldn’t see my friends anywhere, just hundreds of apprehensive faces.

I rose from my seat, and replied, “Urikhad bayarlalaa. Bid tantai uulzakhdaa bayartai baina.“ Thank you for inviting us. We are pleased to meet you.

Their expressions turned to smiles as the dream faded.

Our travels will takes us through Ordu-Aganhei in Hongal, and Hon-La is Shelyn’s gift to me.

Now we just have to live long enough to use it.

It was a long night. We faced threats from both ahead and behind, and the shadows and mummies had taken their toll on us. Qatana used the last of her spells to block the rear, while I conjured a stone building to partially block the passage a ways ahead of us. It’s normally used for shelter in the wilderness, but we needed a wall that we wouldn’t have to break through later and this fit the bill, especially since it lasts for several hours. Of course the yeti can just climb over it, but it was still useful as a bottleneck.

From what we can tell, a few of the yeti did, indeed, spend part of the night on top of the structure but stopped short of approaching us. They simply sat on the roof line, watching us as we watched them. Eventually, they got bored and left. Amateurs. Keeping a night-long watch is kind of a whole thing for us.

(Uqtaal Necropolis, morning)

People are upset with me. I get it. I changed tactics in the middle of that fight, and didn’t really have time to explain what I was doing while I was casting spells. We can’t function effectively as a team if we aren’t communicating with one another. The problems didn’t end there, either: afterwards, when I explained what I had done and why, it seemed as though they still weren’t hearing me. I was not trying to press an attack, nor did I think it wise to do so, but somehow that is the message that was received.

I don’t know how to fix this. I am not a tactician, and I don’t really understand the finer points of combat save for what I have learned from watching Sparna and Olmas. It’s difficult for me to explain my thinking in the heat of battle, especially when I’m reacting to a situation that no one else can see, and I don’t know when I am causing alarm or confusion.

All I was trying to do was stop those two yeti from getting away. If they could make it back to the rest of their tribe, they could rally a counterattack with more force than we were prepared to handle. I tried, but they were too fast and the caverns were too difficult to navigate. And then I found myself in the middle of a conjured storm of ice and sleet. I recognized the spell immediately—I actually know it, myself—and it was hardly dangerous, but it meant that a spell caster of some sort was coming. It meant the counterattack may be coming.

I did the only thing I could think of: I summoned a small cadre of fire elementals and sent them running amok through the caverns. My idea was to get the rest of the yeti tribe panicking so that the warriors and the spell caster would be forced to deal with it. I wanted their attention on the chaos, not on us. Qatana was up near me at this point and had a spell running so she could understand their language, and from what she told me this hasty, desperate plan was working. There were definitely panicked screams of “Fire!” and “Get water!” along with the unmistakable sounds of battle.

The others, though, seemed to think this was a waste of time and resources. I didn’t, and still don’t, understand. There was also this tense moment where they wanted to go on an offensive to take advantage of the chaos. Again, I didn’t understand. There were still far, far more of them than there were of us, and we could very easily be surrounded in caves which the yeti knew and we didn’t. But, eventually, Qatana and I were able to convince everyone to withdraw while we could, and use the time to prepare for retaliation.

I am not sure how I could have done things differently, how I could have prevented this confusion. But I need to figure it out; our lives are at stake.

Obviously, having had a skirmish with the yet more or less implies that our attempts to parley with them were not successful. Not entirely, anyway.

We were able to solve the communication issue with that spell Thadeus taught me, the one that creates a shared language among the participants. It’s the same one I used with mom and dad back when all of this began. But communicating turned out to be the easy problem: the hard one was making any sense of what was going on.

Qatana and I sat opposite two of the large creatures, separated by one of the necropolis’s anti-life barriers. The conversation, if you can call it that, was mostly a mix of threats and bravado, all of it directed at us. It was not a waste of time, however: we learned that their chief insisted on destroying the caravan and killing the people that he called “the outsiders”—that would be us—and that his subjects fully intended to carry out his orders. Negotiation was clearly not in the cards. This bothers me. There’s no reason to have to fight our way through here.

Two more things came out of the exchange. The first is that the chief normally did not talk like this, and that even the members of the tribe found this to be unusual. The second is that this whole change started “two moons ago” when the chief was “blessed by the gods”.

What does that mean, “blessed by the gods”? I don’t know, but I can’t help but wonder about all the little coincidences that are piling up.

Back at Dead Man’s Dome, I know, I know, I heard a voice laughing out in the darkness, almost as if it were the wind itself. That laughter turned to rage when the last of the frozen dead had fallen. More recently, we had that massive winter storm—we may as well call it a morozoku—parked over the only mountain pass into Tian Xia, and doing things that storms just did not do. Like, staying in one place for days. And following us. And that laughter; the same voice we heard at the Dome.

I admit that this sounds crazy, but I have a suspicion that we are still dealing with Katiyana here. Look, I know she’s dead—we have her corpse, for gods’ sake!—but maybe what we’re up against here is her spirit. It would explain the laughter. It would explain why all of this seems personally directed at us. It would explain the chief’s recent change in attitude if he was possessed (and, to the yeti, that might look an awful lot like “being touched by the gods”).

It’s not a perfect fit, admittedly. I can’t explain the storm, nor the timing of “two moons”. But I’m not an expert, and the one person in our group that should be an expert knows even less than I do and has no interest in changing that. The basics line up, though.

And remember that this place used to be a shrine to Desna. In one of the chambers we found armor and a sword that were made to destroy spirits, as well as exorcise them from the bodies they possess. What if the exact things we needed were sitting right in front of us? Wouldn’t that be some amazing stroke of good fortune? The odds of that must be astronomically small. If only there was a goddess of luck…

The others are skeptical. Ivan sees Oni and Five Storms everywhere. Olmas is on board with the possession idea, but is pretty sure it’s not Katiyana because she’s dead and he doesn’t understand how ghosts work. I don’t even know where to begin with that. I’m afraid to ask Qatana’s opinion because she’ll give it to me. Maybe I should work up the courage to talk to Koya.

I hate this place.