Chapter 2: Into the Mists

You leave the haunted house and make your way down the road, hoping to find your way back to Phandalin and your homes. You walk for what seems like forever, and eventually the terrain begins to change.

Black pools of water stand like dark mirrors in and around the muddy roadway. Giant trees loom on both sides of the road, their branches clawing at the mist.

The fog spills out of the forest to swallow up the road behind you. Ahead, jutting from the impenetrable woods on both sides of the road, are high stone buttresses looming gray in the fog. Huge iron gates hang on the stonework, open wide enough to allow passage through. Dew clings with cold tenacity to the rusted bars. Two headless statues of armed guardians flank the gate, their heads now lying among the weeds at their feet. They greet you only with silence.

Peering up through the Mists, it's difficult to see the top well, but it doesn't appear that there are any sentries posted. Peering through the gate, it clearly doesn't lead into a town or anything. The border wall of a lord's lands perhaps?

You pass cautiously through the gate and deeper into this strange place. Towering trees, whose tops are lost in heavy gray mist, block out all but a death-gray light. The tree trunks are unnaturally close to one another, and the woods have the silence of a forgotten grave, yet exude the feeling of an unvoiced scream.

Davin catches the scent of something else. Something barely detectable, but definitely present. He catches the scent of death on the air.

You continue on the path through the forest, the mist thick about you. It's quiet in the woods until the sound of a wolf howling breaks the silence and it sounds close. You quicken your pace, but the next howls sound even closer and you hear crunching in the woods nearby as if something is following you.

Knobby makes his way to the nearest tree and climbs his way quickly up a safe distance before tying off a rope for the others to climb.

The sounds of approach through the woods is very near at this point.