Chapter 2: Out of the Frying Pan

Um.. 'scuse me... but i dont know what a Disos is..." Froak pipes up from behind Verrian. The look on his face reads as confusion.

"If its a secret thats okay though, cuz sometimes stuff is secret and you cant tell new friends. Cuz what if theyre Jug-lovers and mean boys like those crows." As he mentions the Jug lovers, he glances to Viani, and then to Ember.


After he finishes speaking, he looks to Verrian.

" You know, if we gotta get inside places, im really good at sneakin'"

Yelnar and Elora move from location to location as described in the letter from Yelnar's father to his mother. It's a remarkably comprehensive set of contingency plans for a disaster. In one case, the location is a secret cellar door in one of the barns, which contains an array of weapons: swords, polearms of various sorts, longbows, and so on. In another, there's a large piece of obsidian along one of the corral fences, and underneath is buried a locked metal box. All told, the two searchers are able to locate three locked chests, the locked metal box, and the cellar full of weapons.

One room is curious. It's one of the small outbuildings outside the keep wall, and Yelnar distinctly remembers that it was once used for cold storage: his brothers once trapped him inside when they were all younger as a cruel joke. The spell that once kept it chilled, however, has failed in strange ways. The room itself is no longer cold, merely vaguely cooler than the outside hallway, while lines of frost emanate out from the room along the floor, walls and ceiling. While Yelnar and Elora watch, the frost lines move and undulate. Where they meet, they quickly deviate their direction, almost as if they're running from one another. As Yelnar and Elora stand there, the lines of frost slow their movement, and all start turning in the direction of the two humans. One line on the floor suddenly sprouts vertically, forming a pillar of ice nearly head-height on Yelnar that starts growing toward him.

Both Verrian and Viani spot who they believe to be Elora and Yelnar entering a small outbuilding not far up the road toward the keep. It has the look of a storage shed or something similar. Nothing else is out of the ordinary or noteworthy.