08th August 2025 - The Descent into Whispering Shadows

The Great Hall of the Amber Temple yawned before them, amber walls glimmering faintly like the skin of something long-dead and preserved. Above, a forty-foot statue loomed. Cowled. Faceless. The void where its face should be wasn’t absence, it was presence, a darkness that drank the light instead of simply lacking it.

And then the whispers began.

Not a single voice, not two, hundreds, layered and writhing over one another in languages none of them knew but all somehow felt. The words tugged at the mind like fishhooks through fog.

Marcus halted, hand raised, his voice low and urgent.

“They’re up there, balconies, arrow slits. The skulls shoot fireballs. We do not want to be in their line of sight.”

Aeli tilted her head, unconcerned, her tone dry.

“We’re in the Amber Temple. Everything wants us dead. New day, same problem.”

The whispers grew sharper, digging under their thoughts, until one broke through, a single, deliberate voice. Close. Inside.

The hall splintered into corridors, each lined with sealed amber and locked doors.

The First Door, Athun pushed it open and a wave of flying books and candlesticks erupted from the dark. The books struck like thrown bricks, the candlesticks like flung daggers. Athun slammed it shut, muttering curses. Aeli leaned against the wall, unimpressed.

“Someone’s either very protective of their reading list… or they just really hate visitors.”

The Second Door, Marcus pressed his ear against it. This time the voice was direct, silky, coiling into his skull like smoke.

"Free me, and I will give you power."

He jerked back, eyes wide. Athun frowned.

“Trapped beings offering gifts. That’s the fastest road to damnation I know.”

The Third Door, Silence. Lars approached. Four creatures stood inside, one-eyed horrors with too many teeth, watching without moving. Lars shut the door with a snap.

They moved swiftly to the other side of the temple, finding witches hunched over another door, whispering in tones both plaintive and threatening. When confronted, they hissed and the air around them warped, brooms rose from the ground, bristles crackling like spearpoints.

Aeli’s sun blade flared gold, cutting a broom in half mid-swing. She grinned.

“Who’s sweeping now?”

Marcus, finally wielding a greatsword worthy of the title, struck with brutal precision, his blade catching the dim light as it bit through a hag’s neck. Lars finished the last one with a mace strike that left silence in its wake.

The whispers fled. For the first time since they entered, the Temple was quiet.

Silence didn’t last.

Up a stairwell, Marcus opened a door, and two flaming skulls turned toward him, green fire burning in hollow sockets. He closed the door.

The door exploded inward as fire washed over them. Marcus barely dodged, twisting fate itself with a portent’s whisper to deflect the blast.

Lars charged, Hunter’s Mark blazing across his mace as it connected with sickening finality. One skull shattered in a burst of sparks, then the other. The last fled through a wall, leaving behind a charred corpse of a long-dead wizard. In its skeletal grasp, a staff, still humming faintly with magic.

A side chamber revealed something stranger: a twelve-foot scale model of Castle Ravenloft, unnervingly precise. Dust coated its spires. On a nearby table sat a wooden chest containing a thick tome and a sealed map case.

Aeli stared at the model, brows furrowed.

“Someone was watching him. Planning. But for what?”

The Temple was far from done with them. Behind its locked doors, voices still promised power, Morganas, Yrgar, Tarachamedes. Flaming skulls still patrolled the shadows. And somewhere, hidden in these halls, were the words that could command the Temple’s secrets… or unleash its nightmares.

Marcus closed the chest, his voice heavy.

“We find what we came for. Then we leave. Before this place decides we belong to it.”

The Amber Temple had been silent once. Now it listened. And in the darkness behind the whispers, something waited.