Shadows of the Mountaintop

Nightfall was summoned by a strange boardpost. The post itself was old and long past, but appearing on the board on its own, her name was written with something much more foul than ink. Gleaning what clues she could from the old scratchings, she headed for Ozrilyn to meet with the descendants of the person who'd requested this mission. Finding out he had gone off on some quest to explore the possible trail of a cult with the Deathbringers. Thankfully, she had a lot of his old notes on hand, including a detailed enough map of where he believed the hideout to be for Nightfall and her companions to search it out. Finding the most promising cave, they stepped inside, delayed for a moment by a swarm of massive bugs that had made the place their home, arriving from a hunt after them. Dispatching them, they continued further inside, finding a ladder hidden behind a magical wall, which descended down into a clearly man-made underground structure.

Deep into the earth now, they explored the facility. Finding golems standing guard over otherwise uninhabited rooms. A room filled with beds and chains attached to them had a mixture of sleeping celestial creatures. After ascertaining their sleep seemed to be magical in nature, the party chose to leave them be. Nightfall found a plethora of journals in a roundabout way from the researcher who worked out of the secret hideaway, gleaning useful hints from the texts. But most useful of all was a text held guard by a group of adventurers seemingly frozen in time by some powerful spell. A bit of magic unfroze them, and soon a pitched battle began, or seemingly for the frozen adventurers, resumed. When it became clear to Nightfall's companions that this was a case of mistaken identity, they attempted to calm things down and explain to the unfrozen party. But with Nightfall not cooperating and the other party seemingly reluctant at best to listen, the rest of Nightfall's gathering chose to retreat, leaving Nightfall on her own. Though the battle was already shifting in her favor, and with a myriad of considerable control spells, she managed to defeat the party, claiming her prize of the exceedingly powerful magical bookmark that led to her first breakthrough in the path she was forging for herself. Leaving the lair at that, she was stopped by Shar, who questioned Nightfall's sparing of the sleeping celestials. Nightfall promised to kill the celestials another time with more allies at her side, to which Shar relented... for the time being...