The Wolf in the White

Back Into the Frozen Country

Asuran, Halen, Karl, Toby and Tanner continued north with Spank. Tanner had travelled with them since the beginning; this was simply the first surviving account to place his northern experience at the centre of events. The human warrior-priest wore hardened mammoth-hide plate beneath heavy furs and carried a one-handed axe and round shield. His long blond hair and plaited Nordic beard marked him as clearly as the practical knowledge that helped the party endure the freezing wilderness.

The Driven Tiger

A wounded sabre-toothed tiger came down the track while wolves howled unseen around it. The cat was enormous, bloodied and missing fur; the pack was steering it rather than merely chasing it. Visibility contracted beneath unnatural freezing fog.

Karl prayed specifically to Thardar through the red gem and called divine light onto his weapon. His faith was strong enough that the spell succeeded without consuming the charge it normally required.

The light exposed areas of deeper snow. The wolves had dug pits, scattered the spoil, concealed the openings and frozen the walls with water. They knew the safe routes and drove the tiger into one chosen trap, where it could not climb the ice-lined sides.

Strength Before the Pack

Once the tiger fell, the wolves stopped together and turned on the party. They circled their own traps, attacked from opposing sides, tripped isolated enemies and protected wounded packmates. Tanner was brought down, Halen became the centre of the fighting, Toby fired into the press, and Karl and Asuran kept the pack from overwhelming them.

An immense winter wolf watched beyond them. Raw green crystal projected from its body and injured forepaw. Halen felt the creature enter his mind and briefly experienced the rage and belonging of the pack, but resisted losing himself. Toby shot one wolf and later killed it while it was badly wounded and withdrawing, meaning the party could not truthfully describe every blow as self-defence.

After the party proved its strength, the wolves withdrew in an organised fashion, covering the removal of their injured. A battle against roughly thirty wolves was avoided. Halen then followed them alone into the freezing fog, relying on his cold-protective cloak.

In a clearing he met the winter wolf face to face. The creature limped in obvious pain, with raw green ore projecting from several wounds and a large shard passing through its right forepaw. It addressed Halen as “Wolfbrother” and demanded to know why he had denied the pack its food. Halen offered the trapped tiger, but the wolf refused to take as a scavenger what the pack believed had been stolen from its hunt. Halen therefore promised a formal offering to the Wolf Lord that night.

When Halen failed to return, Toby followed the wolves’ safe tracks until the cold forced him back. He tied a rope to an arrow and fired it towards the hill Halen had crossed so Tanner could follow the line through the fog. Before Tanner reached him, Halen emerged frost-covered and returned to the group.

The Wolf Lord’s Due

The supernatural cold killed the sabre-toothed tiger in the pit; its last sound was a weakening cry before it froze. To fulfil Halen’s promise without conceding the pack’s claim through simple surrender, the party recovered the corpse and prepared a formal winter offering to the Wolf Lord. Such rites left one animal at the forest edge so wolves would spare the rest.

Karl and Toby assisted, but Tanner reached beneath the formal ceremony into a much older faith. Standing upon the offering, the blond warrior-priest howled and embodied the predator worshipped before gods possessed names. He accepted the sacrifice on the Wolf Lord’s behalf. When Tanner returned to himself, the supernatural fog sank into the ground. The wolves waited at the edge of sight for the party to depart and leave their kill.

The experience opened the possibility of a deeper Animal-domain calling for Tanner, but no choice was made.

The Phenomenon Portal

No trail led away from the winter wolf. Dead vegetation and impossible cold instead marked a weakened planar boundary. The wolf had used the cold itself as a crossing into a demiplane between the Prime Material Plane and elemental ice.

The party recognised a phenomenon portal: not a visible doorway, but an environmental condition strong enough to carry travellers across. A sustained breach could create an intermediate demiplane, and an eruption of divine essence may have torn this boundary.

They recalled Telchur—spelled T-E-L-C-H-U-R—the neutral or chaotic-neutral god of winter and cold. Farmers and those seeking relief from winter’s chill worshipped him. His symbol was a leafless tree in a field of snow, and he was depicted as a gaunt man with dark eyes and an icicle beard. He preferred the calm tranquillity of frozen forests to screaming mountain winds. The evidence still did not prove that Telchur created the demiplane or supplied the green shards.

The party withdrew and prepared approximately two hundred points of cold protection from snow, ice and their remaining reagents. They proposed an unequal division—roughly 80, 40, 40, 20 and 20 points—according to each traveller’s natural resilience and existing protection. Everyone was healed. Spank stayed behind. The five men walked into the supernatural cold together and ceased resisting it.

The mortal landscape vanished. They emerged in a roaring blizzard with visibility limited to thirty feet. The cold was less immediately deadly than expected; wind, snow and the absence of landmarks were the greater danger.

The Hunter Above

Something winged circled unseen in the storm. Toby caught sight of an unusually large ice mephit: a spindly planar creature carrying a blowpipe packed with ice. Its kind could freeze victims into paralysis, resisted ordinary weapons and was vulnerable to fire, but the whiteout repeatedly swallowed it from view.

The creature attacked from above and vanished back into the snow. Halen listened for its wings and hurled a javelin into the blizzard. The cast struck home, pierced one wing and sent the mephit spinning to the ground. Toby held the party’s position and the visible tracks while Karl and Tanner followed a rope to the crash site.

The wounded mephit released a piercing, resonant cry—a call to others of its kind. Tanner struck it on the ground and Karl finished it. Its corpse initially remained long enough for the party to recover Halen’s javelin, but it then melted away and returned to its own plane. The damaged demiplane could not hold the dead outsider, so no material was harvested.

The World That Folded Back

The tracks made no sense. They departed in different directions only to return to the same point, and Karl and Tanner could see their companions both ahead and behind while holding the opposite end of the same rope. The frozen surface folded around itself like a tiny closed world. There was no doorway behind them: they had crossed a break between planes and could not escape simply by retracing their steps.

Halen’s instincts continued to warn that the ground was unsafe. As the party investigated and dug through the snow, the surface collapsed. Powdered snow poured away like sand through an hourglass and carried them into a vast chamber beneath the ice, roughly one hundred feet long and fifty to sixty feet wide.

The chamber sheltered them from the worst wind but not the supernatural cold. For a fleeting moment, frost gathered across every face and beard until each companion resembled Telchur’s gaunt, ice-bearded image. The vision strengthened the connection between the winter god and this demiplane without proving that he created it.

The Bear That Would Not Die

While the party searched the buried chamber, an enormous and visibly sick polar bear smashed through a translucent wall of ice. Toby identified it as a dire polar bear. Fur had fallen from suppurating sores and boils, one eye streamed with infection, and a fleck of the same raw green essence seen in the winter wolf was lodged beside it. The creature was not hunting normally; pain and corruption had driven it into a frenzy.

Karl and Halen met it at the broken wall while Tanner forced his way across the treacherous floor. Asuran moved around the flank and Toby fired from range. The bear charged Toby after his arrows hurt it, caught him in its jaws and tried to lift him, but Toby twisted free by the narrowest margin.

Even after receiving mortal wounds, the corrupted beast continued fighting with impossible endurance. Karl was torn open and began bleeding to death. He invoked healing through his faith: one portion came from a charge in his gem, while another was drawn from the demiplane itself. Loose snow flew towards him, gathered over his armour and closed the wound.

As the fight moved across the chamber, Toby broke through a concealed opening and found himself clinging inside a narrow snow shaft. Far below lay another chamber, noticeably warmer than the one above. Halen struck the bear with a thrown javelin to draw it away from Toby, and Tanner, Karl and Asuran attacked as it passed.

The bear finally reared to twice a man’s height, knocked Karl and Tanner backwards, and prepared to fall upon them again. Then its stolen endurance failed. The immense body toppled into the snow.

The Eye of Disease

The party immediately hauled Toby from the icy shaft with knotted rope. Halen then cut the luminous green fragment from the bear’s diseased eye. The shard was retained as evidence: raw divine power that had prolonged the animal’s life while spreading infection, pain and madness through its body.

Careful harvesting recovered approximately five hundred gold pieces’ worth of corrupted alchemical material. The diseased hide was unsafe, but glands, fluids and affected tissue might serve in offensive or disease-based preparations.

The storm above weakened and the demiplane grew quieter. This was not proof that the bear controlled the realm. Instead, the evidence suggested a damaged world that no longer possessed its proper ruler or stable elemental balance.

Penguins Beneath the World

Beyond the bear’s lair, blue water ran beneath the ice with extraordinary purity. The party refilled containers before descending a curved chute by rope. Below waited a colony of penguins, including several unusually large birds. They were curious rather than hostile, and Toby fed them instead of provoking another fight.

The cavern held a mammoth frozen upright in ancient ice. Around it stood warriors from different lands, preserved like statues. Razor-edged green fragments pierced their necks, hands and weapons. One had lashed a shard to a sword hilt only for it to splinter through his hand. The same power that strengthened beasts had paralysed and preserved these people.

Asuran’s Pliers

Asuran took charge of extracting the first fragment from a frozen warrior. The attempt went badly: once wrenched free and dropped onto the ice, the needle-like shard did not lie still. It shot across the cavern like a crossbow bolt, deliberately racing towards the silent sanctuary.

Karl stood in its path. The fragment entered his plate and began forcing its way through the armour towards his body. Karl resisted both its diseased influence and the freezing power gathering around him, but the shard continued to burrow. Asuran rushed forward with the same pliers, caught its far end with a perfectly timed grip and tore it clear before it pierced Karl. Even clamped in the tool, the fragment twisted towards Asuran as though choosing a new target.

By the end of Day 25 the party held five green fragments: the shard removed from the polar bear’s eye, the first fragment Asuran restrained, and three more carefully removed while the surviving champions were revived. Early on Day 26, the spent menhir crumbled and yielded three additional pieces, raising the party’s eventual total to eight.

The Mammoth-Hide Lodge

A seamless shelter made from mammoth hide and tusks proved vastly larger within than without. Warm rooms opened into separate dimensional spaces, food and drink appeared at command, and a concealed viewing surface looked onto the cavern while remaining invisible from outside.

A carved control displayed functions for opening and closing the lodge, food and drink, creating or linking portals, teleportation, windows, ordinary and planar viewing, and locating. Several of its greatest functions retained only a single charge. A gem socket appeared capable of accepting a power source, although the party did not establish what should safely be placed within it.

During the meal the lodge suddenly awakened and altered itself as though responding to its owner. The transcript does not establish who that owner was. The party therefore treated the lodge as a dormant neutral artefact-like refuge rather than claiming it as personal property.

The Silent Menhirs

In the last unexplored reach stood an enclosure filled with Telchur’s menhirs. A settlement would normally possess one such stone; here, champions and priests from many lands had gathered scores of them. Sound died between the stones, leaving an unnatural, almost complete silence.

More than a hundred green fragments scarred the menhirs. The pattern was not random contamination. Something divine had burst apart in this chamber, and the sacred stones had either drawn the fragments or borne the force of the explosion.

The discovery confirmed that Telchur—the Frostfather—had ruled or dwelt within this demiplane. His loss left it without the power that had once held it together.

The Four Champions of Frost

The party carefully warmed four surviving warriors, removed the embedded fragments and closed their wounds. They awoke in order of physical resilience and spoke different languages, but the party’s remaining language berries allowed conversation. Their names were Arctura, Gelid, Rimea and Dendra.

They were champions and senior followers of the Frostfather, summoned from different lands with their community menhirs. Their last memory was the defeat of Morgion, the Black Wind—the neutral-evil power of plague, pestilence, decay, rust and madness. Part of Morgion’s being had been struck down and exploded across the sanctuary. The green crystals were fragments of that diseased divine essence.

The champions explained that Morgion would have retreated after such a defeat and that the abandoned demiplane then decayed over time. The infected winter wolf and polar bear were not Morgion’s servants; they were Telchur’s creatures twisted by fragments left from the battle.

Before resting, the champions gave the party a Headband of Conscious Effort, protected in a special preservation tube. Its three tiger-eye stones glowed with inner fire. The headband could substitute concentration for bodily endurance, but every day it was used in the magic-starved world would increase the cumulative chance of its permanent failure. Returning it to the tube halted further decay without resetting that risk.

The party and the four champions camped in the dead-end cavern. Day 25 ended with the promise of morning prayer and a menhir ritual. Those prayers—and whatever the gathered stones might open—belong to Day 26.