Arodus 14, 4712 (dawn, Kalsgard)

We camped last night at the caravan. This just seemed like a wise idea given what had happened at the inn. Of course I did not expect this to fool anyone, but the point was not to hide: it was to keep together as a group for our collective safety. Ameiko has, wisely, been sleeping in the covered wagon in order to stay out of sight. While not exactly spacious, there is room in there for as many as three to lay down comfortably so she and I have been sharing the space.

Given how much closer we’ve grown over the past couple of weeks—it almost feels like it did when we were growing up—you’d think we’d be awake until some ridiculous hour talking, but nothing could be farther from the truth. In all honesty, I am a lousy roommate and have been for some weeks. I am exhausted most evenings, and what time I do have before falling sleep is spent on research, study, or (like last night) copying spells from scrolls. Fortunately, she’s also been buried in books and maps on Tian-Xia and Minkai, and she knows we’re extending ourselves—overextending, really—for her, but it still feels like I am ignoring her.

In case we needed a reminder of what we have gotten into, one arrived last night around two o’clock in the morning, just as our watch was changing. Both Ameiko and I would have slept through it had Sparna not awoken us. Someone sent an arrow laced with poison into the side of the wagon where we were sleeping. We were lucky that it hit the frame instead of piercing the canvas. Or perhaps they were intending to send a message rather than trying to hit one of us (though that would not make a lot of sense). Whatever the reason, they spent a small fortune on the delivery. Etayne said it was coated with deathblade, a poison which is notorious for both it’s lethality and it’s expense. This admonition cost them nearly two thousand gold.

Admonition? Attached to it was a note, written in Tien.

It was foolish of you to wake a sleeping dragon. Return what was stolen. Abandon your hopeless quest now or you and your friends will be destroyed.

Ameiko looked lost in thought, staring blankly into the darkness after reading the note for herself. This was her life, her family, and her heritage so it seemed appropriate, if not prudent, to ask her opinion.

“I didn’t expect this journey to go unopposed. This is…grim, but not unexpected.”

These Frozen Shadows? We have rattled them. Yes, they started big that night at the Skalsbridge, but now they’ve been reduced to paying blind beggars to deliver spooky messages in alleyways, and sending warnings attached to arrows coated with exotic poison, all to convince us how scary and powerful they are. Because we have gotten close to them; hit them somewhere very personal. They are trying to bully us because they don’t know what else to do.

I dealt with bullies for much of my life, and they are all the same. They talk a lot, they intimidate and posture, they threaten, and occasionally they bloody your nose. But mostly? They posture and threaten. It’s how they make themselves feel better, and how they build their power base, convincing those around them how terrible and frightening they are. But really, they are just insecure and scared.

The people you really have to worry about? They don’t send messages. They don’t warn you in the middle of the night. They don’t play the game of appearances. They simply act, and that’s precisely how we’ll respond to this affront.

I spent some time this morning drafting a short letter to mom and dad. I promised them I would write, and that I would not hide the truth from them when I did. This has been far more difficult than I imagined. Over a decade of experience-turned-instinct screams at me to not say anything about what has happened in the past week, or what we are about to do, because no good ever came of it when I was a child. Things were better when they didn’t know.

Mom and grandma fought a lot back in those days (dad’s relationship with dadi and dada has never been strained to my knowledge, for whatever that is worth). They’d probably fight even more now if they saw each other as often as they did when I was growing up. It was years before I finally understood why, but now I know that, deep down, grandma does not approve of how mom chose to live her life. She wanted mom to be the scholar, the noble, the aristocrat, the what-have-you in the gilded city of her birth. Mom threw away a life that had been carefully crafted for her along with her savings to, of all things, work. And touch the world with her own hands. The horror.

Maybe part of my fear about sending this letter is that mom (and dad) won’t approve of my life. That I, too, am throwing away everything that was carefully laid out for me, only I am upping the ante by making the risk to my life a literal one. I am worried I am destined to quarrel with my mom the way she does with hers. I’ve seen my parents twice since this all began, and the first of those led to an ugly fight over concerns about the exact sort of thing that is happening right now. It does not bode well. But I promised I would tell them, and for better or for worse I will see it through.

(noon, Thanelands, south of Kalsgard)

The road we are following isn’t so much of a road at this point as it is a lightly-traveled dirt path. Wagon tracks and hoof prints are our guides.

It was here, about half way to Ravenscraeg where the path ran through a bog, that we apparently missed a turn. As we passed one of the stagnant ponds, a pair of slimy pseudopods shot out at us from the water’s edge and struck at Etayne and Ivan on their horses.

This skirmish would have been unremarkable except for what it was that we were fighting: giant, amorphous blobs, yellow-brown in color, that oozed and flowed as they advanced, and burned flesh like acid. Attempts to harm them with edged and pointed weapons merely split them in two, each half functioning as an independent, albeit smaller, blob.

According to Etayne they are called ochre jellies, a name that is as literal and descriptive as it is unoriginal.

The bog seems an appropriate home for them. Bogs are stagnant wetlands, with pools filled by rainfall over peat-layered soil. Very little grows in them save for the trees, moss, and fungus. Like a swamp, only without a source of running water. And in contrast to a marsh, which is a swamp only with grass instead of trees.

Bogs, marshes, swamps. We’ve spent far too much time in wetlands.

We have another five or six hours ahead of us.

(evening, Thanelands, Near the Grungir Forest)

The crags from which Ravenscraeg gets its name are a line of cliffs among the rocky hills that form the border between the southern edge of the Thanelands and the Grungir Forest beyond. The hills, and the sheared northern faces of the crags, rise and fall along their length. We can see the small fortress nestled in a fissure where two neighboring cliffs meet, sitting slightly lower than the surrounding rock but still a good hundred-plus feet straight up. A series of wooden stairs form switchbacks with landings, climbing to meet what we assume is the main entrance.

We are not going that way because we are not idiots. Half of our cache of scrolls, purchased yesterday evening in Kalsgard, will allow us to literally walk up the vertical rocks as easily as spiders climbs walls and walk on ceilings. We’ll have thirty minutes to make the ascent to one of the neighboring cliffs and then drop down into the dell which Nihali tells us lays just behind the structure. This is more than enough time, even with delays. We’ll go after dark, when the quarter moon has disappeared behind the ridge to the south west, because we also don’t want to be seen. This is where the second half of our cache of scrolls comes into play: the spells on them will allow us to see in the dark.

One more thing. Nihali also said the hills and trees behind them are filled with ravens and crows. Hundreds upon hundreds of them. Dozens of them are roosting on the fortress’s tower.

If there was any question before about this being the right place, there isn’t any longer.

(night, Ravenscraeg)

We made it inside an upper-level window of sorts without being detected. This late at night the great hall we found ourselves in was unoccupied, and we were able to slowly and quietly work our way around. Right now, I am sitting in one of the store rooms, hurriedly taking notes as the others explore.

This store room contains an enormous quantity of raw wool, furs, cloaks, and other cold weather clothing. Tucked away in a chest among them was a stack of scrolls written in Skald. Sparna looked them over briefly and said they appeared to be diaries. He was about to put them away when I stopped him.

“Can I see those?”

“Why? They’re diaries.”

“This place was once owned by Snorri Stone-Eye. They may be important.”

“We don’t have time for this right now.”

I hate these arguments. I understand that there is a time and a place for research, and that the middle of a break-in is generally neither, but they may have information we need about where we are at this moment. Thankfully, Sparna relented on the condition that they continue to explore while I stay here and read.

Fine. Whatever. Just go.

It turns out I was right. Snorri stashed something of value—something that would help protect him “against the coming winter” (had he lived)—in one of the upstairs flues. Now we know to look for it.

This is the abridged version of Snorri Stone-Eye’s final years: He believed his stone eye gave him the sight to see the past and future (it’s a magical stone, all right, but all it really does is protect the possessor from the physical effects of aging, though it doesn’t protect them from aging itself). He became obsessed with prophecies of the end of the world, and he believed that “in the winter of the world, the gods will come down to fight, and the rough beast will be released”. These prophecies of the end times and Rovagug were enough to push him over the edge from sanity, and he was already close to the edge as it was. The diaries end with his last voyage across the sea to find an artifact that would help him survive the end of the world. What he found instead, as we learned from personal experience, was an affliction that would slowly turn him into a draugr.

(midnight, Ravenscraeg)

I don’t have much time because we’ve been discovered. We fought with and killed a lycanthrope in his quarters, but not before he shouted an alarm that has alerted everyone here to our presence.

Two raven swarms descended on us as we headed back to the great hall but we quickly dispersed them. I summoned three, small air elementals and sent them up to the roof to scatter the rest of the birds but I was not specific about how to get there, and they (logically, I suppose) chose the stairs to the tower. That’s when we heard a huge ruckus on the floor above us. It turned out that the air elementals were not terribly discriminating about what constituted a “raven”: they were harassing six tengu guards when we came up the stairs.

The tengu were tough and well-trained. Olmas nearly died from a poison dart; deathblade again. Each of them carried it. One nearly struck me.

We found what we believe to be the nest for the bloodfeather raven. I don’t know if it will come back here, but just in case it does we left a nasty surprise for it: one of the deathblade-coated darts, hidden in the nest with the point sticking out. It’s a long shot, but it would be poetic justice.