Session 5

The party ventured back to Eldham and stopped by the Dead Goose Inn, but decided the price of rooms was too steep, so they slept outside the city walls for the night. They went back to the inn in the morning to speak with Merith about the Firebrand Goblins and saw her slumped over the table in annoyance at a young boy named Ronan who was badgering her to get her to let him enlist in the Emerald Company to avenge his parents who had been killed by Goblins in a recent raid. She dismissed him, and Tamas gave him some words of advice before he departed. Merith paid the party 600 gold for the information, for exterminating the Goblins, and to keep them on retainer because she would need them at a moment's notice to continue investigating the matter once she has decoded the letter they found.

The party went back to the Messy Cushion tavern to look at the job board and noticed bar patrons crowding around a table where a robed man was fiddling around with some trinket and headed over to the job board. They saw the job posting from a farmer asking the party to get rid of a "house spider" and decided that didn't sound too interesting, so they checked out the man at the table, whom they learned from a patron was Khatar Ravacan, a local Wizard of some renown who was known for magical research after he departed from the Sorcerer's Cabal. He claimed to have invented a device that would detect the presence of Goblins. The players went to get drinks and heard gasps as Khatar collapsed from his chair. Upon investigating they found that he was dead and had black lines in his veins. They noticed a dark-clothed man exiting the building and Mai gave chase, tackling the man, but he died of some unknown cause before they could question him. They found the notes on his and Khatar's bodies.

They decided to go to Myrtle's Bookshop to ask about the special vellum the notes were written on, which they had determined were identical. She determined it was the same vellum and handwriting as a proclamation sent to her by the local magistrate, Eldar, to notify her of increasing taxes. She informed the players that the one who wrote the notes was most likely either Eldar or one of his subordinates, and asked them not to involve her in this, but that they should not trust members of the local government.

Players decided to return to the haunted house from two sessions ago and upon returning to the little girl's room, they saw her sitting on the floor. They had a brief conversation where she implied they shouldn't be there and saw that her face was decayed. She then told the players that her father was behind them. They turned around to find the master bedroom door open. They went inside and found the standing mirror turned around. They turned it around and looked at it, only for Tamas, and then Anlon to vanish. After some investigation, Enoki carried the mirror around after noticing things different in the mirror that weren't there in his world. He found Anlon and Tamas wandering around in the little girl's room confused. They seemed to be trapped in a mirror world. Through investigating the other rooms, they found the dead bodies of the mother and daughter in the bathroom and study respectively, and experimented trying to determine the nature of the mirror world. They found notes in the study detailing some sort of necromantic process for keeping spirits from moving on and for raising mass amounts of undead. Dain figured out how the mirror worked and determined they could willingly choose to travel through the mirror and that their initial travel through it was an accident. They brought the bodies of the mother and daughter back to the real world where they quickly decayed despite being in pristine condition before they left. They determined that time must not flow in the mirror dimension, or rather, its effect on the body is diminished or halted, and that it is an extradimensional space / pocket dimension. They then found an amulet in the study which they determined had the ability to stop spirits in a certain radius from passing on. Anlon used Sacred Flame to destroy the gem in the amulet, freeing the trapped spirits of the mother and daughter, which appeared before the group and silently mouthed "Thank you" before being led away by the apparition of an unknown entity.