The Wall That Walks

Magic Before the Gods Answered

Morning revealed how the four champions still worked miracles after Telchur’s death. They prayed according to an older practice, drawing upon power already present in the world rather than waiting for a distant deity to provide every spell. Karl had touched the same principle during the polar-bear battle: powdered snow blown in from the Elemental Plane of Ice carried enough essence to help close his wounds.

The sanctuary was a demiplane formed between planes, now roughly a century old and close to collapse. As its structure failed, the barriers around it became dangerously thin. Elemental and divine power lay close enough to seize—but so did the possibility of the whole refuge coming apart.

The Last Prayer of the Menhir

The champions taught the menhir ritual, then performed their own departure and faded away with their stones. One remained long enough to lead the party’s prayer to Telchur. The Frostfather was dead or gone, but his name and sacred structure still gave the rite its form.

Guided by the champions’ teaching and their own growing experience with divine workings, the party completed the invocation. They reappeared on the Prime Material Plane between the same two perished trees through which they had unknowingly crossed. Behind them, the exhausted menhir crumbled. Its stored power had been spent; this was a final passage rather than a doorway they could simply reopen.

Eight Pieces of the Black Wind

Three green fragments emerged from the disintegrating stone. Added to the five already recovered below the ice, they established a party total of eight. Asuran immediately claimed one of the new pieces.

Knowing that the essence belonged to Morgion, the Black Wind made the fragments easier to activate. A bearer could address Morgion and request an effect. This acknowledged a hostile god’s power without accepting his creed.

Each fragment could be invoked only once and shattered after releasing its remaining essence. A modest request—strength, flight or compelling truth—was more reliable than an extravagant demand. The power and duration depended upon the invocation, and the fragments were not restricted to copying known spells or magic items.

Toby initially refused one, judging the power too dangerous to place “in the hands of an idiot like me” and insisting his bow solved every problem worth solving. He was talked towards carrying one for an emergency, but he did not invoke it during the journey.

A Mark Carried from Sleep

The party returned to an unfinished question from the night before. Toby had slept among Telchur’s last champions after joining their observance. Once challenged, the lingering divine change was recognised: Toby carried a faint aura and the Mark of Telchur. Whatever the mark would eventually grant him, it proved that the ranger had not left the dying sanctuary untouched.

The Wall That Walked South

The party resumed its attempt to reach the north–south road, still at least another day to the east. The land held less loose snow and more hard-frozen earth. Ahead, the wilderness revealed something too vast to mistake for ordinary weather.

An immense face of blue-white ice stretched east and west across the horizon. It was advancing south like a glacier, pushing violent weather before it. The movement was glacial rather than charging—an approaching catastrophe measured in weeks rather than moments—but it transformed Sebastian’s warning into visible fact.

This was not simply a season that had failed to end. Something in the north was physically extending the frozen realm. The party considered alternate routes, including the swamp and its known portals, but continued east while time and shelter remained.

Tracks to Somewhere Hidden

By roughly three o’clock, the worsening conditions forced the party to stop thinking about distance and look for survival. Everyone assisted Toby’s search, but it was the ranger’s experience with tracks, terrain and concealed ground that uncovered a promising trail.

Toby picked up tracks that the others might have dismissed and followed them to a concealed, defensible shelter—a hidden bunker or refuge secure enough for him to declare, “This will do nicely.”

The nature of the refuge and whatever might wait inside remained unknown as the party gathered at its entrance.

A Prayer Shared Between Five

The concealed refuge offered only a pause. The glacier’s unnatural cloud did not follow the ordinary wind, and every route around the ice promised exposure to the killing weather. Karl and Tanner therefore turned again to the red gem and the old practice taught by Telchur’s champions.

Within the prayer circle, the gem revealed itself as a prepared vessel of Thardar’s essence: already shaped for clerical workings and attuned to Karl. Tanner learned the form of protection against the elements, and the invocation was extended across the company. The gem surrendered a little of its stored power, while Karl paid heavily in exhaustion.

Before the Ice Closed

A rocky rise gave the party its first true measure of the danger. More than thirty timber wolves had passed through and fled south. In the hours since the glacier was first sighted, one visible opening had already vanished beneath it. The ice was advancing quickly enough to swallow the remaining routes before another day had passed.

With the storm ahead and death by exposure behind, the party marched into the night. Toby led by remembered landmarks across snow-covered ice; Halen supported the failing Karl, while Tanner guarded the line and Asuran fought his own exhaustion. When the route briefly disappeared in the darkness, they backtracked, recovered their bearings and pushed towards the western opening as the grinding ice sounded through the ground.

The opening was not a true cave. It was an old pass already being enclosed: moisture frozen from the air had formed blue walls around a shrinking walkway of rock and compressed snow.

The Winter Ogrelons

The reflected lantern light briefly blinded Toby. At the rear of the company, Halen and Tanner became aware of a huge white figure watching from the snow, a severed timber-wolf head held in one of its four clawed hands. It was a winter ogrelon—an ape-like union of ogre, orc and yeti—and it was not alone.

The male hurled the wolf’s head at Halen and rushed Tanner. As Halen met it with his greatsword, its mate burst through a wall of soft snow farther inside, reaching for Toby with four arms and driving Karl back along the narrow passage. Toby recovered his sight, kept moving and filled the second creature with arrows. Halen killed the first; Toby’s final shot passed through the female’s neck and pinned her against solid ice.

Then a voice called outside in Giantish. Halen recognised a frost giant summoning its hunting pack after hearing the female’s cry. The party covered its lights and fell silent. Unable to find the concealed way, the giant moved on into the darkness.

The Winter Was a Miracle

Deeper inside, the party understood that the advancing ice was neither a natural glacier nor material simply spilling from the Elemental Plane of Ice. It was a divine event: a physical catastrophe driven by power on the scale of a god.

The effect froze water directly from the air, drove narrow fingers of ice into stone and fractured the land through a violently accelerated cycle of freezing and expansion. Some rock resisted, forcing meltwater into concealed channels and basins beneath the party’s feet. The same power had gathered predators, altered local life and produced an ecosystem that travelled with the ice.

At the Edge of the Black Expanse

The sound of moving water led across fractured ground. The party used its folding ladder and climbing rope as a bridge, passing above a hidden reservoir cold enough to kill. Beyond it, the air carried salt—the scent of a sea that appeared on none of the werefox’s maps.

Adad, a god of water, rain, storms and strength, was the first divine name that fitted the saltwater evidence. Yet he held no known authority over winter or glaciers. The party could only theorise that someone had redirected a fragment of his essence, just as power carried within the divine gems could be shaped towards purposes beyond a god’s original nature.

The way ended at a formation of glacier-resistant rock perforated like an immense termite mound. Thousands of tiny frost beetles moved through it. These were not ordinary insects but ooze-like mineral eaters, consuming stone, producing water and opening paths through rock that even the ice struggled to break. Their living mass intermittently blocked the air and the distant sound of waves.

Several openings were large enough to crawl through, but doing so meant entering the moving carpet of beetles without knowing what lay beyond. Exhausted and wounded, the party stopped at the threshold. Whether the Black Expanse offered escape, another buried realm or only deeper danger would wait until they chose who went through first.