On the evening before they expect to reach the Tsolenka Pass, the companions bid their elderly elvish visitor a warm good night, watching as she settles into her bedroll. The party takes turns standing watch beneath Barovia’s perpetual misty rain, the nighttimehours passing uneventfully until Zilk’s shift.
The old woman stirs even as the sky remains inky black, rolling up her bedding with practiced efficiency. She fixes the bugbear with her ancient eyes. “Your friend may keep the ring,” she tells him. “He will need it more than I if you are going to the Amber Temple. I do not expect that I will be returning to these mountains.” A swollen knuckle brushes tears from her eyes. Without another word, she shoulders her bundle and sets off northward, vanishing into the misty predawn darkness. The snowflakes swirl behind her.
At the end of Shifty’s watch, something extraordinary occurs. Ilya rolls over in his bedroll and pulls forth the small, tarnished hand mirror from his pack. Its gentle vibrating has woken him from sleep. The boy frowns—the surface doesn’t give back his reflection. Instead, the glass remains stubbornly foggy, swirling with unnatural mist. Ilya rubs his palm across it, and the fog clears like breath wiped from glass, revealing the thin, drawn face of Ireena.
“Ilya! I am so glad to see you!” Her voice echoes from the mirror, hollow and distant. “Please let me speak to your Papa Ratrick!” She manages a wan smile, though her eyes dart nervously over her shoulder.
Ilya crawls over the bedrolls to the sleeping form of Ratrick. “Papa! Please, look! The mirror has someone in it that you know!” The boy thrusts the hand mirror at the drowsing ratling, his voice quietly urgent and excited.
“Of course it does, my boy,” grumbles Ratrick, pushing the mirror away without opening his eyes properly. “Every mirror I’ve looked into has someone I know in it.”
Ilya pushes the mirror back insistently, practically shoving it against the rogue’s snout. “No, Papa—*look!*”
Grumpily, Ratrick takes the mirror and glares down at it blearily.
He finds himself staring into the clear green eyes of Ireena Kolyana. His breath catches.
“Ratrick, my friend, I am so very glad to see you!” She smiles wanly from within the mirror’s foggy depths. The rogue cannot tell from where she speaks, but from the way she keeps glancing anxiously over her shoulder leads him to believe she must still be within Ravenloft’s walls.
“I am away from the vampire for now,” she whispers, her voice barely audible, as though she fears being overheard. “He is trying to persuade me to wed him… he wishes it to be of my own free will. So far I have denied him, but he is wearing me down, alternating between threats to…” Ireena pauses, “And there is something else. Something worse. I will tell you when I see you.” She shakes her head, her expression haunted. “I must leave this place. I will steal a horse tonight and meet you somewhere. Where are you? Please tell me you’re not far.”
Ratrick’s mind races. “We are traveling to the Amber Temple, but we’re on a tight timeline,” he tells her quietly, aware that others in the camp are beginning to stir. “Within fifteen days, we will be back to Krezk to complete the resurrection of Nicholas Wachter. Then we head east to Vallaki. Can we meet you in one of those places?”
Ireena nods eagerly, relief flooding her features. “Yes. Yes, I’ll find you. We have these mirrors to communicate. Ilya found them at the Abbey above Kresk. I’ll—” She glances over her shoulder again, her eyes widening. “I must go. Be safe, my friend.”
The mirror grows foggy once more, obscuring her face until only swirling mist remains.
Over a meager breakfast of hard bread and cold sausage, Ratrick shares Ireena’s desperate message with the group. The news settles over them like fresh snow—cold, heavy, and inescapable. They pack up camp in grim silence and prepare to continue their journey.
Led by Nike’s steady navigation, the party departs once again, facing the steep, snow-choked road upward toward the Tsolenka Pass. The air grows thinner and more bitterly cold with each step. Zilk’s sharp eyes spot something against one of the few trees at this altitude. He carefully steps from the road toward a mound at the tree’s base. The rogue sweeps snow from atop the mound to reveal the frozen body of a traveler. “He’s mummified,” calls Zilk, “The unfortunate fellow has been here a while.” Zilk sees that the dead man’s pack lies protected beneath him, preserved by the cold and the corpse’s own weight. Without ceremony, he shoves the body sideways.
Zilk kneels and pulls the pack free from the frozen ground, his fingers working to pick apart the stiff sinews that tie it closed. Within, he discovers that the unfortunate traveler had carried several days’ worth of rations—dried meat and hardtack, all still edible—along with a leather covered journal, twenty-five silver pieces that clink dully together, and a single healing potion that glows faintly golden in its glass vial.
Zilk thumbs through the journal, scanning the story. Its last entry, dated nearly eight years earlier, tells a tale of a journey left incomplete. The traveler had been unable to get past 'guardians' on the road to the Amber Temple. The companions exchange concerned looks, the implications settling uneasily in their guts....what could the 'guardians' be?
The team then faces an incredibly challenging climb—both impossibly steep and treacherously slippery with ice. Several of the party—Ratrick, Biblo, and Nike—lose their footing and fall, tumbling painfully against unforgiving stone before catching themselves, resulting in bruises and minor cuts. The wind howls through the narrow canyon like a living thing, brutally chilling and monstrously strong.
Soon, they enter a canyon high in the mountains. Before them, in the misty distance, they can see the snowy sides of Mt Ghakis. To their right, the road drops away into a yawning abyss that plunges six hundred feet into fog-shrouded nothingness. To their left, a sheer cliff face rises into the perpetual mists above, offering no shelter, no respite. The wind screams around them, brutally cold, so they cannot be heard except when shouting and must plant their feet lest they be swept into the abyss.
Before them looms a massive gate that truncates the road entirely. Behind the gate, a tower rises through the mist, its peak crowned by carved stone guardians, each bearing an enormous sword gripped in weathered hands. Ahead of them, the portcullis is lowered. Flanking the gates arch, two statues of large reptilian creatures glare down into the valley below with stone eyes that seem almost alive.
“Those are meant to be vrocks,” Crystal says quietly, recognizing the winged, demonic beasts perched above the gate. Her voice carries a note of dread.
Shivering violently, Nike mutters that they desperately need to seek refuge from the merciless wind. Zilk carefully picks his way forward to the gate itself, his boots crunching on ice. Locked. He backs up, nocks an arrow, and sends it flying through the wooden window sash of the tower behind the gate wall. Despite the warm light that glows invitingly through the windows of the bottom floor, no one appears. No face peers out. No voice calls to them.
Zilk approaches the gate again and crouches before its massive lock, pulling out his thieves’ tools. He can feel the tumblers shifting and moving beneath his careful ministrations, responding to his picks—but the gate remains stubbornly, impossibly locked.
Nike tries next, her more delicate fingers working at the stubborn lock with practiced precision. But the gate remains secured, her efforts proving just as unsuccessful. As she works, concentrating on the feel of metal against metal, she notices something troubling—a fine sprinkle of stone dust that filters down from somewhere directly above her head, dusting her shoulders like gray snow. Further, she has the feeling of being watched.
Further down the cliffside path, Biblo squints hard at the vrock statues through the driving wind. He is certain—absolutely certain—that he’s seen something out of the corner of his eye. That something atop the gate has moved.
His heart hammering, Biblo stares harder. One of the vrocks now stares down at Zilk and Nike with unmistakable focus. He is sure with cold certainty that both statues faced the valley only a few minutes ago. Both had been looking away from the party.
He stammers out what he has seen, shouting frantically at Nike and Zilk thirty feet away, his voice cracking with urgency. The howling wind steals his words completely. The dragonborn can see that the pair haven’t heard him—they’re still focused on the lock, unaware, vulnerable.
Ilya, intuiting the danger, takes off running to alert Nike and Zilk.
And falls.
The boy’s feet fly out from under him on the ice-slicked stone. He begins to slide helplessly toward the cliff’s edge, picking up speed, his eyes round and white with pure terror. He is only just able to catch himself at the very brink, his small fingers—scraped raw and already bleeding—clawing desperately at frigid rocks. His feet scrabble uselessly as they try to find purchase against the sheer rock face. The abyss yawns beneath him, hungry and patient.
Unaware of Ilya’s plight behind her, Nike suddenly notices a thick drop of what might be mucus that falls from directly above. It strikes her shoulder with a wet plop, and the immediate stench of burning wool alerts her to the hole it sears through the thick fabric, smoking and sizzling. She looks up, her breath catching in her throat.
The wings of one of the vrocks spread wide in a cloud of stone dust and the crack of breaking enchantment.
The creature screams and dives with terrifying speed, its talons extended, slashing viciously at Nike. She staggers backward, crying out as claws rake across her armor. Swooping past her, the vrock seizes the dangling Ilya in one of its massive talons before the boy can scramble to safety. The boy shrieks in pain as the creature squeezes him cruelly, its claws puncturing flesh. Blood streams down his side, hot against the freezing air.
Ilya pushes desperately against the vrock’s claws with panicky strength. To his own surprise, he manages to pry the grip open just enough—and desperately throws himself toward Nike. He lands in a bloody, crumpled heap at her feet, gasping and shaking, his small body injured but alive.
Shifty sprints to Ilya, healing the boy. The vrocks scream in fury, slashing at the pair but, fortunately, missing. The cleric, wisely, moves back. Unfortunately, he loses his footing and begins to tumble, sliding toward the precipice. Lunging, Biblo snags Shifty’s cloak with a desperate grab and sets the kobold back on his feet.
Incensed, Ratrick pounds upward toward the gate, turning abruptly to fling himself from the cliff outward into open air at the hovering vrock. The rogue lands on the surprised creature’s back, pulling his Dagger of Venom and bellowing in fury. Panicked, the vrock wheels away from the cliff to flee, but Ratrick seizes its leathery ears, yanking it back toward the gate as if driving it. He recalls the four long, vicious-looking rusty iron spikes atop the gate’s walls to prevent anyone from climbing over. Pulling at the vrock, he steers the creature toward these.
And suddenly the rogue and his unwilling mount are engulfed in a blaze of heat and searing pain.
From the back, Crystal has cast a Wall of Fire. She expertly positions the inferno as a barrier above the group at the gate and their antagonists. The flames engulfs both vrocks and Ratrick. A pair of birdlike shrieks of pain echo down the valley above the wind, joined by Ratrick’s whoop of victory, as the vrock he is riding impales itself atop all four of the enormous spikes.
The second vrock, panicked and alight, flees into the mists of the valley beyond the gate. The stench of burning creature hangs thick in the air.
Though they cannot see through the fiery wall, Nike aims her shortbow upward, tracking the sounds of pain from above. They release their arrow, which instantly ignites as it passes through Crystal’s powerful, conjured inferno. With satisfaction, the rogue can tell by the tenor of the vrock's screams that their arrow has flown true.
Shifty, fleeing from beneath the floating Wall of Fire, yet again loses his footing. He rockets toward the cliff’s edge, scrabbling to slow his barreling slide off into the icy abyss. As Shifty feels his feet cross into open air, Zilk stops the tiny rogue, and helps the kobold back onto his feet.
Crystal dismisses her spell, and as the sizzle of the inferno vanishes, only the howling of the frigid wind remains. The gate ahead of them is still stubbornly locked.
