Chapter 2: Out of the Frying Pan

Given enough time and help, you’re able to push the door open. Where you touch the door with any exposed skin, there’s a moment of intense cold, but as you push against it, the ice recedes. The room beyond is not large, wide enough for two of you to walk side by side between floor-to-ceiling shelves on the sides. The wall at the back, where Ephwrath sensed the more powerful magical aura, is blank. The entire room is covered in a thin layer of frost.

As you stand in the doorway, the frost starts to move slowly toward you.

The aura Ephwrath senses forms a rectangular shape on the back wall, shaped like a floor-to-ceiling door, about 8 feet tall and about 4 feet wide. Now that you look at it more closely, you’re fairly certain the wall is an illusion, as you can just sense a weaker aura that had been masked by the stronger while you were outside the room.

The rock sails through the illusory wall, and lands with a soft thump, as if it's landed on grass rather than the flagstones that make up the floor of the storage room. The illusion remains active, so you can't see where the rock landed.

You do remember that the back wall of storage room is likely the back wall of the outbuilding itself... but why would someone make the effort to transmute the wall with such strong magic and hide it with an illusion if it was just a portal to the outside?

For Yelnar, Elora and Ephwrath

Krav nimbly moves across the frosty floor. As his feet touch the floor, the frost flinches back from the pressure of footfalls, leaving the floor bare and making it relatively easy to walk. But as he passes, the frost on walls and shelves and floor is almost... pulled along in his wake, as if the warmth of his body exerts a magnetic pull. There's a moment of tension as he approaches the expected illusion and then he disappears through the wall.