Animosity Path - 16 Uktar 12:00
The party sets off under the light of Auril's flickering aurora. Your thick furs protect you from the cold, but the Frostmaiden's wind is like a stream of icy daggers searching for gaps in your defences. You start by following the path around the side of the iced Maer Dualdon that traps Targos's larger ships. To the north, you hear sailors singing their Triglio shanty as they drag their small boats over the icy lake so that they can start fishing.
♫ Trigl-ee-oh, lads, an' 'oist upon the line ♫
♫ Trigl-ee-oh, lads, an' bring yon fishers in ♫
The path is a jumble of broken stones, fist-sized icy rocks, and compacted snow. Every step threatens to turn an ankle, and every breath rasps your throat. You trudge for two hours in viciously spiteful winds - five lonely specks drifting along a path beneath soft over-diluted watercolour skies over the hard endless white expanse.
Anders' shack - 16 Uktar 14:00
Anders' shack is built into the heaped banks of the Maer halfway to Termalaine. The shack's construction is crude to the point of obscenity, a rope-lashed structure of bleached timbers and rocks.
As the others enter the shack for a little shelter, a little warmth, and a little rest, Anders reads the featureless white wilderness to the south. What to others looks like an inscrutable stark apocalypse speaks eloquently to the ranger of hazards and capricious weather.
The Frostmaiden is feisty today. Three long miles of razor-ice, snap-powder, and sucking hidden air pockets. With this inexperienced party? Six hours. It'll take six hours to get there, with switchbacks and detours to avoid the deadly shifting hazards. If you leave now, that'll mean travelling into the night - but you leave Oobok out there to fend for himself if you wait until morning.
The menacing wind snarls, daring you to take to the tundra.