Session 68

Lavanda decides to seek more information about the Tower of Frost in Malacanan. She asks the innkeeper who may know such a thing, and is told to seek out Imryll at the Elderwind Bookshop. So the party sets off to the bookshop, and along the way, they notice an Elven woman berating what appears to be a man in a suit of armor, while two confused onlookers scratch their heads. As they pass the group, Dain notices that it's not simply a man in a suit of armor, but a Steel Defender. Wondering if perhaps there is another Dwarf in the area, he approaches the group, and as he gets closer, he notices that the Steel Defender is very obviously one of Gloin's knockoffs. He asks the woman what the problem is and she explains that "this stupid thing" won't obey her commands. Dain questions the woman as to where they got the Defender and is told that the magistrate of Vardanorr purchased a number of them and distributed them to neighboring towns and villages with the hopes that they could one day supplement or even replace the local Enforcers. Dain explains that the Steel Defenders are a Dwarven military creation and that they do not act without command, but that they will only accept commands from a Dwarf. This upsets the woman who wants to know if Dain could make one that would obey her commands, to which Dain says it's a possibility, and leaves the question in the air about whether or not he would take the woman up on her offer, and then the party continues to the bookshop.

Arriving at the bookshop, the party startles the old Elven woman Imryll, who is well into her third millennia, before asking her if she knows anything about the tower. It takes some time for her to recall the history of the tower, but she remembers that it was once inhabited by a Wizard (who the party takes to calling 'Elfie' due to her not remembering his name) who was hired by the village to protect them from Goblins long before the Emerald Company was founded. The village erected a wall and the Wizard constructed a tower to serve as a lookout so he would see the Goblins approaching and also to serve his own needs. One day, the villagers heard a loud noise from the tower and looked to see that the top was completely frozen over, and soon after, a party of Goblins raided the town, killing many. Afterwards, the villagers angrily marched up to the tower to confront the Wizard to find that he was nowhere to be found. They assumed he had abandoned them. After discussing the wild theories of some passing traders and some keen insight from Lavanda, the consensus was reached that perhaps one of the Wizard's spells failed or went horribly wrong, and he was trapped in the ice on top of the tower, and had not abandoned the village as they thought.

The party then questioned Imryll about the attacks on the road and the "emaciated people" and suggested to her that perhaps the "emaciated people" were undead. This caught Imryll's attention, and she made the connection to a region of the Axalrea Hinterlands where there is a large swath of dead trees that Thenaphor's hunters avoid. She suggested that this could potentially be where Aubron is located, and said that the party could speak to the town's hunters to seek further information.

Taking Imryll's suggestion, the party went in search of a hunting lodge, but were attracted by the anxious conversation they came across between a group of worried looking people. They learned that one of them, an Elven woman, was worried about her husband, who had gone hunting with his partner Norvin in the hinterlands, but they were several weeks overdue to return. With all the information they had learned in town, the party took this as final confirmation that they should investigate the hinterlands and gathered up their things and set out for the mountain pass that would take them to the Axalrea Hinterlands.

Along the party's journey through the mountain pass, they saw smoke from a fire around the bend in the pass and Summer snuck up and saw through the smoke that a man was lying bloodied on the ground. She quickly tended to his wounds and called over the party, where Dain healed him back to health. The confused and terrified Human man explained that he was Norvin Bostel and that he had been hunting with his partner Aerendyl Immeril, tracking a deer, when they got too close to the dead zone region and were attacked by a group of undead. He described how one of them hit Aerendyl so hard in the head that he heard it crack, and he barely managed to escape, with a hideous gash in his side. He told the party to stay away from the dead zone, but they persisted and asked for more information. He hesitantly told them that they could find it to the southeast as they exited the mountain pass if they follow closely to the mountains. Before they set out, he requested that they look for his partner Aerendyl's body, and to please return it to Thenaphor, as his wife was with child and deserved to know what happened to her husband. The party said they would do what they could and set out.

After travelling along the mountain for a day or so, the party happened upon the "abandoned camp" that Norvin described as he recounted his experience, which turned out to be an abandoned Druid grove. The party investigated, finding evidence that it had been abandoned at a moment's notice, though evidence pointed more to it being a forcible eviction. Lavanda then found a journal in a pack that detailed that the camp once belonged to a chapter of the Circle of Spores who cultivated mushrooms and created medicines to provide to the poorer villages in the area. They described a strange Elf who took up residence in the forest near the mountains and began constructing a tower, and soon thereafter, the wildlife in his region began to disappear and the trees began to die. The druids went to confront the Elf and were told to piss off. The last entry in the log seemed to indicate that the druids had plans to confront him one final time, but the entries cut off after that.

Continuing on, the party stopped to rest as the sun was going down, but were unsettled by the eerie wind's sudden change to a sound of agonized moaning as they saw the haunting glow of several forms approaching from within the dead woods. As Summer and Icarus went to investigate, they identified the moaning as coming from several Restless Spirits.

They relayed this to the party and attacked. The party managed to successfully dispatch all the spirits -- however, after only a few moments, the spirits reappeared and renewed their assault. The party tried everything in their arsenal, including the Bow of Sunlight, but none of it seemed to bother the spirits. In a moment of desperation, Merrick searched through his Book of Shadows searching for some clue as to what might stop these spirits, and recalled that this type of spirit is typically bound to some object and cannot wander beyond a certain distance from that object, and that they would need to find and destroy the objects to free the spirits and end their assault.