Sunday, 2nd of Ready’reat
Kizz was resurrected the next day. The group had gone south a bit to avoid the predators that had been drawn to the area. They ate a cold breakfast of field rations and mounted up to head further north.
Shade asked “What’s our plan, Vek?”
“What do you mean?”
“For fightin’ the dragon. How’re we going to do it? I know ye’ve got a plan…”
“Not now. He’s watching.”
A chill ran through Shade that had nothing to do with the fact that he was freezing. “What??”
“Right now. He’s scrying on us. He knows we’re coming, and watches us from time to time. This moment is one of those times.”
“So- how do you know he’s watching? And if he knows we’re coming, why isn’t he attacking us now?”
“It’s easy to detect, if you know what to look for- and I don’t know. Quiet, we’ll talk later.” Shade hushed and they rode on in silence.
They came to Finch again, but this time something was different. There was debris from the town’s ruins strewn before them. Pieces of planks were laid end to end in an almost orderly way. “What’s this?” Grumbar asked. “Trap?”
“I don’t think so… Tsunami, up.” Vek cast a spell on his undead horse and it ran upward, spiraling into the sky. Vek looked down. “It’s a message.”
Kizz looked confused. “A message?”
“Yes: I’M WAITING.” Vek rode down. “Let’s keep riding. He’s trying to unnerve us.”
They rode past Finch and over the mountains to the north.
Moonday, 10th of Ready’reat
The bitter, frozen Knights rode upon the plain of ice. The last eight days had been hard. They’d been ambushed by a pack of enormous winter wolves, they’d had to deal with a pair of trolls demanding a toll on the road they walked, they’d met a giant that fell from the sky. Nothing was as difficult as dealing with the constant cold, and keeping the horses fed and alive. Vek and Tsunami were quite alright, of course… but Goldie and Sunshine were miserable, and Ashes would have died if not for Jamison’s clever use of heat-based spells.
Then, another city on the horizon. “Where are we now, Vek?” Grumbar asked.
“I don’t know. When I came up with the Knights of the Silver Quill, we passed all this by in teleporting straight to the lair. I think it’s Latona. I remember Taigiel saying something about it. It’s the last human outpost before Eru Tovar.”
They were traveling across the Ice Island, as it was called. A thousand years ago this had been a part of the vast Vesve forest. No one is sure why the temperatures dropped suddently and an eight hundred mile wide patch of wintry lands grew in a lush area of Greyhawk. Some posited that Acessiwal created it somehow, when he moved into the realm… he “marked his territory” so to speak. Others theorized that an ancient winter wizard was killed in combat here, and his death resulted in the climate changes as revenge from beyond the grave. It would maybe never be truly known. There were secrets here beneath the ice that no one would ever learn, and some that no one would want to.
They approached Latona, and it became clear that it had met the same fate as Finch. It was destroyed. However, seeing as it was an outpost built of stone and mortar, the dragon had not torn it down as easily as he had Finch. They rode past and found another “message” from Acessiwal. This one was written using the entrails of a corpse in the snow. The corpse looked to be a bard. He had a broken lute and a sheet of music paper rolled in his sack with a song called “Acessiwal the Yellow”. The singer had paid for his bravery with his life, and his viscera had been used as writing tools.
“Not much farther,” Vek read to the others from above. He floated down and rejoined them. “I rather like this fool who dared to mock the dragon in his own lands,” he said as he took a finger bone from the corpse and put it in a compartment on his belt. “If we need, we can resurrect him and ask what he knows about the beast.”
They kept moving north.
Waterday, 12th of Ready’reat
“Coldheart.” A cliff spread before them. From the horizon to their left to the horizon to their right, the immense Mect ice cliff stretched. Vek said “Somewhere nearby is the entrance to the dragon’s ice dungeon. We’re almost inside… and once there, we needn’t worry about being attacked from above… or, at the very least, wind chill.”
Grumbar nodded. “Th-that’s g-g-g-oo-d.” They rode closer.
Shade looked around from beneath his fur cloak. “Wh-where are we headed? Where’s the entrance?” His lips were bluish.
“There,” Grumbar replied. He was pointing to a door covered with a white pelt. A thin walkway carved in the ice led up to it. “There’s fur flappin’ in the wind.”
“Well, let’s get up there… what is that noise?” Above the wind, they could all hear it… it sounded like a high-pitched screaming, getting louder. Small winged creatures were flying down from the top of the cliff toward them. “ATTACK FROM ABOVE! GET READY!”
The snow around them exploded as three frost-covered figures stood up from the drifts and attacked from below. Vek cursed. “Ice golems! I remember these- They’re extremely tough. Be on your best guard!”
Kizzlorn shot a single lightning bolt up into the air and cooked all of the incoming winged creatures with one shot. They plummeted to the ground, blackened and dead.
Jamison cast a spell on one of the nine foot tall ice golems. The spell didn’t have any effect at all. “What?! That’s impossible!” The golem trudged towards him.
Vek was having a hard time of it. He hammered away at one golem with spells of different sorts. The only one that even put a crack into the one he was fighting was a spell that caused vibrations in the air… and the crack then healed up as the golem pulled in moisture from the snow around them, freezing it to its skeletal frame. “Someone try a fire spell!” he shouted as he pulled out his sword and began cutting at the creature.
Grumbar was chipping away at his own golem, but the damage it was doing to him greatly exceeded the damage he was doing to it. Kizzlorn cast a fireball at one, and it burst around it. The golem melted immediately… water sheeted off its body in waves, leaving only a thin sticklike figure of ice standing there. Vek finished it off with a chop of his sword, then ran to help Grumbar. The golem crumbled into a pile of rotted ice.
Kizzlorn saw one of the Golems attacking the empty air, and heard grunts of pain. Phantom bloodspots appeared in the snow. “Shade?” she called out. “Shade!”
“Here, luv,” he growled. He sounded very badly hurt.
“Shade, back away, I’ll hit it with a fireball! I can’t see you, so I can’t aim…”
“I can’t, one o’ my suit’s tentacles is stuck to it… I’ll try to cut-“ he was interrupted by a loud THWATCH noise when the golem swiped its claws through the air. Shade’s voice silenced and a long gout of blood appeared in the snow.
“SHADE!!” Kizzlorn cast a fireball at the golem, and it melted almost completely away… then she hit it with another. She knelt in the snow beside the Shade shaped impression there. She found his wrist and felt it. There was no pulse. “Damn it…” This was his fourth death in the Knights. “Damn it,” she said again, starting to cry. She removed his ring of invisibility and he came back into view.
Vek plunged his sword into the snow and kept his hands on the pommel. He receded into his head and traveled on crimson ribbons through the deadspace. Shade, he asked. Are you coming back?
Not this time, friend. Shade’s spirit was moving to the afterworld. He’d had enough of living and dying on Oerth.
“He’ll not return if we resurrect him,” Vek said quietly. “He’s gone.”
Kizzlorn laid her head on his chest and wept. Grumbar, nearby, began to weep as well.
They camped there that night and honored their fallen friend. They burned him in a blazing pyre, for two reasons. The first was so that there wouldn’t be a corpse for the dragon to bring to undeath and send after them. The second was that it seemed a fitting tribute to let his worldly body leave this cold, cold part of the world in some warmth. It was a comfort to them.
Shade would have wanted the others to have his items, so they divided them amongst themselves. Vek found himself with the greatest share of the goods. He clipped the dead rogue’s vorpal longsword to his belt and flexed his fingers in the rubbery Ioun armor Shade had taken from Kolume not long ago. The black, skintight rubbery suit clung to Vek’s emaciated form, and it offered him more protection than the strongest suit of full plate armor in Greyhawk. Vek had sewn a piece over the nose and mouth hole, to preserve his undead dignity. The ruby eyepieces added to the skeletal appearance of the lich. Now, in the chitinous Ioun armor and bearing Shade’s powerful sword, Sir Vek Mormont was far deadlier than he had ever been in his life, or the time after it.
“Yes,” he said, mostly to himself as he tossed the last piece of Hedrack’s armor into the bag of holding. “This will do nicely.”
NEXT: INTO COLDHEART
